intended that the full meaning should appear at the time when they were uttered. But when Christians had once seen Jerusalem with its temple and all its towers destroyed, the nation of the Jews dispersed, and our Lord, in a literal meaning, not yet come, it is strange that they did not then discern, that if there be any thing explicit and clear in the whole of this prophetical discourse, it is this particular prediction, that during the distresses of the Jewish war the expectation of our Lord's immediate coming would be the reigning delusion of the times. The discourse is opened with this caution -"Take heed that no man deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying I am Christ; and shall deceive many." And the same caution is repeated in various parts of the prophecy, till he comes at last to speak (as I shall hereafter show) of his real coming as a thing to take place after the destined period should be run out of the desolation of the holy city. "If any man shall say unto you-Lo here is Christ, or there, - believe it not. If they shall say unto you Behold he is in the desert, go not forth;

Behold he is in the secret chambers, believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be. "For," as it is added in St. Matthew, "wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together." Give no credit, says our Lord, to any reports that may be spread that the Messiah is come, that he is in this place, or in that: My coming will be attended with circumstances which will make it public at once to all the world; and there will be no need that one man should carry the tidings to another. This sudden and universal notoriety that there will be of our Saviour's last glorious advent, is signified by the image of the lightning, which, in the same instant, flashes upon the eyes of spectators in remote and opposite stations. And this is all that this comparison seems intended or indeed fitted to express. It hath been imagined that it denotes the particular route of the Roman armies, which entered Judea on the eastern side, and extended their conquests westward. But had this been intended, the image should rather have been taken from

something which hath its natural and necessary course in that direction. The lightning may break out indifferently in any quarter of the sky; and east and west seem to be mentioned only as extremes and opposites. And accordingly, in the parallel passage of St. Luke's Gospel, we read neither of east nor west, but indefinitely of opposite parts of the heavens : "For as the lightning that lighteneth out of the one part under the heaven shineth unto the other part under heaven, so shall also the Son of Man be in his day." The expression "his day" is remarkable. The original might be more exactly rendered " "his own day;" intimating, as I conceive, that the day, i. e. the time of the Son of Man, is to be exclusively his own,- quite another from the day of those deceivers whom he had mentioned, and therefore quite another from the day of the Jewish war, in which those deceivers were to arise. ·

Nevertheless, if it were certain that the eagles, in the next verse, denote the Roman armies, bearing the figure of an eagle on their standards,

if the carcass, round

which the eagles were to be gathered, be the Jewish nation, which was morally and judicially dead, and whose destruction was pronounced in the decrees of heaven, if this were certain, it might then seem necessary to understand the coming of the Son of Man, in the comparison of the lightning, of his coming figuratively to destroy Jerusalem. But this interpretation of the eagles and the carcass I take to be a very uncertain though a specious conjecture.

As the sacred historians have recorded the several occurrences of our Saviour's life without a scrupulous attention to the exact order of time in which they happened, so they seem to have registered his sayings with wonderful fidelity, but not always in the order in which they came from him. Hence it has come to pass, that the heads of a continued discourse have, perhaps, in some instances, come down to us in the form of unconnected apothegms. Hence, also, we sometimes find the same discourse differently represented, in some minute circumstances, by different evangelists; and maxims the same in purport somewhat

differently expressed, or expressed in the same words, but set down in a different order; circumstances in which the captious infidel finds occasion of perpetual cavil, and from which the believer derives a strong argument of the integrity and veracity of the writers on whose testimony his faith is founded. Now, wherever these varieties appear, the rule should be to expound each writer's narrative by a careful comparison with the rest.

To apply this to the matter in question. These prophecies of our Lord, which St. Matthew and St. Mark relate as a continued discourse, stand in St. Luke's narrative in two different parts, as if they had been delivered upon different though somewhat similar occasions. The first of these parts in order of time is made the latter part of the whole discourse in St. Matthew's narrative. The first occasion of its delivery was a question put by some of the Pharisees concerning the time of the coming of the kingdom of God. Our Lord having given a very general answer to the Pharisees, addresses a more particular discourse to his