quainted with their style, to imagine that something was intended very far beyond even the most stupendous occurrences of life. Christ, in the text, has conformed to this usage of his countrymen, which circumstance has led thousands (including many of piety and learning) to suppose that it looks forward to events beyond the precincts of time.

Now for the proof of my positions, I will first quote from Luke, xxi. as these matters are more distinctly set forth by him than by the other evangelists. "And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But wo unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh. And he spake unto them a parable; Behold the fig-tree, and all the trees; When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled." (20-32.) I only ask of you, my friends, that you will closely scrutinise this language; many an erudite scholiast, with mind preoccupied with the fantasms of his creed, has been sadly puzzled here: puzzled, because he was predetermined to find that the language respects a coming of Christ to judge men at the close of time; and as nothing of the kind is even intimated, he has

thrown himself back in his easy-chair, stroked his gray wig, and consoled himself with the conclusion "Ha, ha! I see now, the passage has a two-fold meaning; the one expressed, the other understood; the destruction of the Jewish city and temple is the former, the great judgment at the conclusion of time is the latter. Yes, yes; the one is made the antetype of the other. I see it now; well, I will so put it down." And accordingly, we have been over and over again favored with this assumption, in behalf of which we cannot be pointed to one particle of evidence!

Daniel the prophet had predicted the very events to which our text refers. (ix. 26, 27.) “And after threescore and two weeks shall Mesiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city, and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate." And again in chapter xii. he represents Mesiah under the name of Michael, "And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people; and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book :" (1.) and the prophet designates (in enigmatical terms) the precise time of these momentous transactions, "And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days." (11.) Christ, in his description of these coming calamities, alluded to, and confirms what Daniel had said about 500 years before. See Mat. xxiv. "When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth let him understand,) Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the house-top not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes. And wo unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days!

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath-day: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be." (15-21.) And as if still more clearly to point out the identity of the time of his coming, with that of Jerusalem's overthrow by the Roman armies, he immediately blends with his account of the former, an allusion to the national ensign of the latter, i. e. the figure of an eagle upon their standards. "For as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together." (27, 28.) And he then emphatically adds, "Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." (29, 30.) IMMEDIATELY, &c.

It must be borne in mind, that the Jews were in those days regarded as God's peculiar people; they had, for nearly twenty centuries, maintained a peculiar politico-ecclesiastical establishment, which claimed Jehovah himself as its institutor. This, in the new testament, is sometimes alluded to under the appellation of the "kingdom of God," and the Jews are termed the "children of the kingdom," being by their peculiar religion isolated from the other nations of the earth, they held them in contempt, termed them" Gentiles," and deemed themselves defiled in case of personal communion with them. (John xviii. 28. Acts xi. 3.) To this favored people, Christ for a time confined his ministry; he even enjoined his disciples, "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any of the cities of the Samaritans enter ye not, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." (Mat. x. 5, 6.) The Jews were considered as exclusively entitled to the divine favor, the extending any share thereof to the Gentiles was regarded as the taking the children's bread and casting it to the dogs. (Mark vii. 27.) Such was the order of things in Christ's day, but the time was nearly arrived which was to witness its reversal, the Jews were on the eve of being ejected from the

kingdom, and the Gentiles of being inducted into it in their stead. "I will call them my people which were not my people, and her beloved which was not beloved; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, ye are not my people, there shall they be called the children of the living God." (Rom. ix. 25, 26.) This very prophecy was on the verge of fulfilment; hence, when a Roman centurion, (captain of a hundred men,) applied to Christ, and expressed strong confidence in his ability to heal his servant, the saviour seemed surprised at the degree of faith manifested by a mere heathen, and he took occasion to intimate the fact, that the Gentiles should soon be seen coming from the north and the south, the east and the west, and sitting down in the kingdom, or church of God, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whilst they themselves, "the children of the kingdom," (as he elsewhere says,) should be thrust out. (Mat. viii. 11, 12. Luke xiii. 28, 29.) The patriarchs and prophets, it seems, were considered as having exercised an evangelical faith in Christ's mesiahship, and were therefore accounted members of his church or kingdom, and all who in a true sense become his disciples are regarded as coheritors with them of the same gospel blessing: as saith Paul, "So then, they that be of faith ARE blessed with faithful Abraham." (Gal. iii. 9.)

This is the Abraham's bosom, to which the poor man in the parable (by whom are personated the gentile nations)" was carried by angels." The Greek word angelos signifies messengers, or agents, and as often human messengers as spiritual ;* to be "car

*The angels of the seven churches in Asia Minor, referred to in the 2nd and 3rd chapters of Revelations, were the ministers of those churches. The three angels who appeared to Abraham (Gen. xvii.) are called men, and such they undoubtedly were, for they ate and drank with the patriarch, and washed their feet, agreeably to the custom of the times. The "angel of the Lord" that appeared to Cornelius, is also called "a man." (Acts x.) We must not take for granted, therefore, when the word angels occurs in the scriptures, that spiritual beings are always meant, although they doubtless often are. "The angels which kept not their first estate," (Jude ver. 6.) are usually (though without scriptural warrant) understood as being celestial beings who fell from the realms of blessedness, all which is sheer fiction. We are not justified in assuming that any such event ever took place; the bible nowhere declares it. The account in Revelations (xii.) of a "war in heaven," must not be understood of the world of bliss; heaven, there, means the church, (as it often elsewhere does.) In the same chapter we are told of a dragon in heaven, and of a pregnant woman, and of her flight into the wilderness, and of a serpent spouting out a flood of water after her, and of the earth taking part with her against the serpent, &c. Surely they must have a marvelous love for the ridiculous, who fancy these facts to have transpired above! and yet this is prominent amongst the texts adduced to support the doctrine concerning fallen angels; because it happens to be said that the tail of the dragon drew down a third part of the stars of heaven to the earth, (but not to hell, observe.) Truth is, as before shown, all these things pertain to the conflicts which the church had to sustain with its enemies, in the early days of its

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ried by angels to Abraham's bosom," may therefore mean, to be conducted by the ministry of Christ's apostles or ministers into the true faith of Christ. The gentiles might well be likened to a poor man, covered with sores, for spiritually considered, their condition was deplorable enough. By the "rich man" is meant the Jewish nation, which for centuries had abounded in all spiritual privileges, in this sense they fared sumptuously every day," and, in the persons of their priesthood, were literally clad "in purple and fine linen." But this people were doomed soon to die to all these distinctive privileges, and to lift up their eyes in hades, (which literally means the grave, or the unseen state, but figuratively, moral or civil degradation,) in this degraded and condemned state they were to see the gentiles elevated to the high distinction and privileges from which they themselves had fallen, and from this happy and privileged state they were to find themselves separated by an impassable gulf. What constituted this great gulf we are more than once informed: viz., the blindness of mind, and the obstinate unbelief, to which that people were judicially given over. "Therefore they could not believe, because that Esaias said again, He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them." (John xii. 39, 40.) Paul also testifies to the same fact. "What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded (According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear) unto this day." (Rom. xi. 7, 8.) Christ represents Abraham as saying in regard to them, "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead," which was literally true, for Christ had actually raised one Lazarus to life, and they yet remained as unbelieving as before, and they so continued even after Christ himself had risen. Eighteen centuries have since elapsed, and the gulf seems as impassable as ever: the gospel is progressively subduing to itself the subjects of all other religions, the gentiles from the ends of the earth are flocking into Christ's kingdom, establishment; and also to the overthrow of the Jewish ecclesiastical polity about the same time. The popular misconception of those texts may be mainly ascribed to the epic of Milton, who was a great admirer of mythological lore.