tions. And this I infer, not only from a general consideration of the nature of the gospel doctrine, and the cast of the Scripture language, which is admirably accom→ modated to vulgar apprehensions, but from a fact which has happened to fall much within my own observation, the proficiency, I mean, that we often find, in some single science, of men who have never had a liberal education, and who, except in that particular subject on which they have bestowed pains and attention, remain ignorant and illiterate to the end of their lives. The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have that mutual connexion, that any one of them may be the better understood for an insight into the rest: And there is, perhaps, no branch of knowledge which receives more illustration from all the rest than the science of religion;- yet it hath, like every other, its own internal principles, on which it rests; with the knowledge of which, without any other, a great progress may be made. And these lie much more open to the apprehension of an uncultivated understanding than the principles of certain abstruse sciences, such as geometry, for instance, or astronomy; in which I have known plain men, who could set up no pretensions to general learning, make distinguished attainments. Under these persuasions, I shall not scruple to attempt a disquisition, which, on the first view of it, might seem adapted only to a learned auditory: And I trust that I shall speak to your understandings. I propose to consider what may be the most frequent import of the phrase of "our Lord's coming." And it will, if I mistake not, appear, that the figurative use of it, to denote the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, is very rare, if not altogether unexampled, in the Scriptures of the New Testament; except, perhaps, in some passages of the book of Revelations: That, on the other hand, the use of it in the literal sense is frequent; warning the Christian world of an event to be wished by the faithful and dreaded by the impenitent, a visible descent of our Lord from heaven, as visible to all the world as his ascension was to the apostles, -a coming of our Lord in all the majesty of the Godhead, to judge the quick and dead, to receive his servants into glory, and send the wicked into outer darkness. In the epistles of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. James, we find frequent mention of the coming of our Lord, in terms which, like those of the text, may at first seem to imply an expectation in those writers of his speedy arrival. There can be no question that the coming of our Lord literally signifies his coming in person to the general judgment; and that it was sometimes used in this literal sense by our Lord himself, — as in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, where the Son of Man is described as coming in his glory as sitting on the throne of his glory - as separating the just and the wicked, and pronouncing the final sentence. But, as it would be very unreasonable to suppose that the inspired writers, though ignorant of the times and seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power, could be under so great a delusion as to look for the end of the world in their own days, for this reason it has been imagined, that wherever, in the epistles of the apostles, such assertions occur as those I have mentioned, the coming of our Lord is not to be taken in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that we are to look for something which was really at hand when these epistles were written, and which, in some figurative sense, might be called his coming. And such an event the learned think they find in the destruction of Jerusalem; which may seem, indeed, no insignificant type of the final destruction of the enemies of God and Christ; but if we recur to the passages wherein the approach of Christ's kingdom is mentioned, we shall find that in most of them, I believe it might be said in all, the mention of the final judgment might be of much importance to the writer's argument, while that of the destruction of Jerusalem could be of none. The coming of our Lord is a topic which the holy penmen employ, when they find occasion to exhort the brethren to a steady perseverance in the profession of the gospel, and a patient endurance of those trying afflictions with which the providence of God, in the first ages of the church, was pleased to exercise his servants. -- Upon these occasions, to confirm the persecuted Christian's wavering faith to revive his weary hope to invigorate his drooping zeal - nothing could be more effectual than to set before him the prospect of that happy consummation, when his Lord should come to take him to himself, and change his short-lived sorrows into endless joy. On the other hand, nothing, upon these occasions, could be more out of season, than to bring in view an approaching period of increased affliction, for such was the season of the Jewish war to be. The believing Jews, favoured as they were in many instances, were still sharers in no small degree, in the common calamity of their country. They had been trained by our Lord himself to no other expectation. He had spoken explicitly of the siege of Jerusalem as a time of distress and danger to the very elect of God. Again, if the careless, and indifferent were at any time to be awakened to a sense of danger, the last judgment was likely to afford a more prevailing argument than the prospect of the temporal ruin impending over the Jewish nation, or indeed than any |