lightning, or the image of the eagles gathered round the carcass, limits the phrase of "our Lord's coming," in the twentyseventh verse of this twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew, to the figurative sense of his coming to destroy Jerusalem.

His coming is announced again in the thirtieth verse, and in subsequent parts of these same prophecies; where it is of great importance to rescue the phrase from the refinements of modern expositors, and to clear some considerable difficulties, which, it must be confessed, attend the literal interpretation. And to this purpose I shall devote a separate discourse.

SERMON III.

MATTHEW, xxiv. 3.

Tell us when shall these things be; and what shall be the signs of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

Ir was upon the Wednesday in the Passion-week, that our Lord, for the last time retiring from the temple, where he had closed his public teaching with a severe invective against the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees, uttered to the apostles, remarking with admiration as they passed the strength and beauty of that stately fabric, that prediction of its ap proaching demolition which gave occasion to the question which is related in my text. When they reached the Mount of Olives, and Jesus was seated on a part of the hill

where the city and the temple lay in prospect before him, four of the apostles took advantage of that retirement to obtain, as they hoped, from our Lord's mouth, full satisfaction of the curiosity which his prediction of the temple's ruin had excited. Peter, James, John, and Andrew, came to him, and asked him privately-"Tell us when shall these things be; and what shall be the signs of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" To this inquiry our Lord was pleased to reply in a prophetical discourse of some considerable length, which takes up two entire chapters, the twentyfourth and the twenty-fifth, of St. Matthew's Gospel; and yet is brief, if the discourse be measured by the subject, if the length of speech be compared with the period of time which the prophecy embraces, commencing within a few years after our Lord's ascension, and ending only with the general judgment. This discourse consists of two principal branches. The first is the answer to the first part of the question, "When shall these things be?"- that is, When shall this demolition of the temple be, which thou hast now foretold? And the second

branch of the discourse is the answer to the the second part of the question, “What shall be the signs of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" You will find, indeed, in some modern expositions, such a turn given to the expressions in which the apostles put their questions, as makes the two branches of the sentence, not two distinct questions, as they really are, but the same question differently expressed. You are told by these expositors, that by the end of the world, the apostles meant the end of that particular age during which the Jewish church and state were destined to endure. Such puerile refinements of verbal criticism might better become those blind leaders of the blind against whose bad teaching our Saviour warned the Jewish people, than the preachers of the gospel. Ask these expositors by what means they were themselves led to the discovery of a meaning so little obvious in the words, you will find that they have nothing to allege but what they call the idioms of the Jewish language; which, however, are no idioms of the language of the inspired penmen, but the idioms of the Rabbinical divines, -a set of despicable

writers, who strive to cover their poverty of meaning by the affected obscurity of a mystic style. The apostles were no Rabbins; they were plain artless men, commissioned to instruct men like themselves in the mysteries of God's kingdom. It is not to be believed that such men, writing for such a purpose, and charged with the publication of a general revelation, should employ phrases intelligible to none but Jews, and among the Jews themselves intelligible only to the learned. The word "end," by itself, indeed, may be the end of any thing; and may perhaps be used in this very part of Scripture, with some ambiguity, either for the end of all things, or the end of the Jewish state, or the end of any period which may be the immediate subject of discourse. But it is not to be believed that the end of the world, in the language of the apostles, may signify the end of any thing else, or carry any other meaning than what the words must naturally convey to every one who believes that the world shall have an end, and has never bewildered his understanding in the schools of the Rabbins. The apostles, therefore, in the text clearly ask