for which the expression parousia (that is, simply advent) seems to have been coined even in the apostolic circles (Matt. xxiv. 3; 2 Thess. ii. 8; 1 John ii. 28), appears in more and more detail throughout the prophetic sayings and parables. It is described as an event taking place with accompaniments of great power and glory, the glory of His Father in the midst of His holy angels (Matt. xvi. 27), especially in the clouds of heaven (Matt. xxiv. 30, xxvi. 64; cf. Acts i. 11; Rev. i. 7). The latter reminds us of the repeated Old Testament delineations of Jehovah riding on the storm-clouds of judgment (cf. Ps. xviii. 8 f., 1. 3, xcvii. 2), still more of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven (Dan. vii. 13). The expressions in Matt. xxiv. 30, xxvi. 64, especially make manifest the supreme importance of that passage in Daniel for producing the whole imagery of Jesus. This picture of victory and triumph must have arisen in the soul of Jesus as soon as the frightful and ignominious issue of His historical mission appeared before Him, while He yet remained certain of His God and God-given commission. He will seem to be overcome, and yet He will, in fact, obtain the victory. He will again enter in triumph into the world which expels Him as an evil-doer; Him whom it rejected as Saviour, it will once more see as its Judge. In presence of His death upon the cross He declares to His earthly judges: "Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Matt. xxvi. 64).

§ 4. THE FINAL PICTURE OF THE JUDGMENT OF THE WORLD

A gloomy picture of the history of the world in its closing stage forms the foreground to this promise of the parousia. A distress unequalled will immediately precede the second coming of Messiah (Matt. xxiv. 21). The disciples of Jesus will be hated by all the world for His name's sake; the unrighteousness of the world and the oppression of believers will reach their climax (Matt. xxiv. 9, 12). The love of many disciples will wax cold; they will go astray, and hate and betray one another (Matt. xxiv. 10, 12). Others will fall into fanatical errors; false prophets and saviours will appear, seeking to win faith for themselves by signs and wonders, and 13

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will declare the return of Christ the end of time, so that if it were possible even the elect must be deceived. But they are not to believe these fanatical assurances, not even regard as signs of the end of the world the universal convulsions in the history of the world, wars, earthquakes, and pestilence. One sign alone is sure, that the gospel must be preached in the whole world for a witness to all nations, that the message of salvation must do its work in the world of history (Matt. xxiv. 4, 7, 14). In those days will God's attitude towards His Church appear like that of an unrighteous judge who refuses to do justice to a poor, shamefully persecuted widow. But the Church, like that widow, should not desist from importuning the eternal Judge, who will at last be moved to procure her help suddenly (Luke xviii. 1-8). So will the day of the Lord be delayed for the waiting and persecuted; but at length it will come suddenly, for the days of the great affliction will suddenly be shortened for the elect's sake (Matt. xxiv. 22). It will come when it is least looked for, as a thief in the night (Matt. xxiv. 29, 43; Luke xii. 39, 40). It will break upon the Jewish people while they are in the hottest persecution of the disciples of Jesus (Matt. x. 23). All at once, the abomination of desolation will appear in the holy city, as predicted in the Book of Daniel (Matt. xxiv. 15), and will announce the fall of the desecrated Jerusalem; for "wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together," the vultures who tear it to pieces (Matt. xxiv. 15, 28).1 It will break upon the world at the very moment when it feels most secure, as the Flood came in the days of Noah, and as the rain of fire in the days of Lot. Men will be planting and building, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, when all at once the judgment will fall on them (Matt. xxiv. 37, 39; Luke xvii. 26 f.). And so the second coming of the Lord appears as a sudden catastrophe in the world and in history, which redeems those who are ready but devours those who are not ready, even though they belong

1 We are reminded of the events in Palestine which followed one another in the years between sixty and seventy, the persecution in which James the Just and others fell a sacrifice, the scenes of uproar and party slaughter in Jerusalem and the temple, and the Roman eagles which completed the judgment on the nation which had morally become a corpse.

The

to the Church (Luke xvii. 32 f.; Matt. xxiv. 40-42),—a catastrophe in which those only stand who with singleness of heart seek for the salvation of their souls, and who do not look back like Lot's wife on the earthly things which they have to leave (Luke xvii. 31, 33; cf. Matt. xxiv. 16). But however sudden this catastrophe may be, it will be quite manifest and unmistakable. The Church should not therefore put any faith in fanatical assurances that Christ is here or there, in the desert or in an inner chamber (that is, in a corner), because His actual coming to judgment will be as powerful and startling as when "the lightning flashes from one end of heaven to the other" (Matt. xxiv. 25-27). sun and moon will pale before "the sign of the Son of Man" appearing in the heavens; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken (Matt. xxiv. 29, 30); the sea and the waves will roar, and an unspeakable suspense will seize men regarding the things that are coming (Luke xxi. 25, 26). And then will they all see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, attended by His holy angels, in His power and glory, and will beat their breasts in the consciousness of their guilt as they recognise in Him their Judge (Matt. xxiv. 30; Mark xiii. 26; Luke xxi. 27). But He will send forth His angels with loud sounding trumpets to gather His elect from the four winds, not merely the living, butas the trumpet with its awakening call signifies those also who sleep in the bosom of the earth (cf. 1 Thess. iv. 16); for then shall be gathered the whole Church of the elect to share in His kingly glory, and be united with Him in judging the world (cf. Matt. xix. 28; Luke xxii. 30; 1 Cor. vi. 2, 3).

§ 5. THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM

The thoroughly poetical character of this picture of the end of the world is clear as day. It is not history such as ever has or will take place in bare fact; it is ideal history evolved from the idea that the contrasts of good and evil,

1 The exhortations which Matthew interprets literally, and refers to the flight of the Christians in the siege of Jerusalem, were probably at first meant in the symbolic sense in which Luke xvii. has strikingly repeated them.

wheat and tares, must ripen in the world, and that when the opposition to God in the world has reached its climax, the judgment of God must break out over it. And yet this conception, which alone is true to the nature of all genuine prophecy, gives rise to doubt, for in Christ's discourses the epic of ideal prophecy is mixed up with the Jewish wars and the destruction of Jerusalem. Have we not here the predic

tion of a definite historical event, and must we not regard the whole as a foretelling of actual history? And if we are compelled to take it thus, is not the whole prediction false, as the destruction of Jerusalem took place without involving such a universal disturbance of the history of the world, and especially without bringing with it the judgment of the world? It cannot honestly be denied that the first evangelist has identified the catastrophe breaking upon Israel in the years between sixty and seventy, with the last affliction and the crisis of the crisis of the history of the world, and has attached the immediate signs of Christ's return to judge the world with a evléws μeтá to the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt. xxiv. 16, 21, 29); and if Mark and Luke strive to relax somewhat this connection, they only show how embarrassed they were by the picture furnished in their common source. Moreover, Jesus also (Matt. x. 23) incontestably makes the return of the Son of Man coincide with the historical catastrophe of the Jewish nation; in Matt. xvi. 28 there is likewise given a saying of Jesus, which in its natural sense directly assures some of the listening disciples that they will live to see His coming again to judgment (ver. 27);1 and, finally, in the three repetitions of that great eschatological discourse, the words appear: ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, οὐ μὴ παρέλθη ἡ γενεὰ αὕτη, ἕως ἂν πάντα ταῦτα γένηται (Matt. xxiv. 34; Mark xiii. 30; Luke xxi. 32). In accordance with this, as we may see from the whole New Testament, the early Church expected. the Lord's return within a generation, and even hoped themselves to see it (cf. Jas. v. 3, 9; 1 Pet. iv. 7; Rom. xiii. 11; 1 Cor. vii. 29 f., xv. 51, 52; Rev. i. 1, xxii. 12, etc.). At this point, then, the seemingly invincible difficulties of the eschatological

1 Mark has indeed (ix. 1) changed the words-offence manifestly being given by them; but even John xxi. 22, 23 must be taken as an echo of them.

discourses of Jesus become acute, and appearances strongly favour the view that Jesus, seeing the judgment of God coming upon Israel and Jerusalem, and having reason to expect it within a generation, conformed to the Jewish view of the world, and contemplated the catastrophe of Judaism in immediate connection with the catastrophe of the world. But though such a view would be conceivable in a national Jewish prophet who considered Israel and Jerusalem the pivot of the history of the world, there are very weighty reasons against it in the case of Jesus, apart from dogmatic considerations. First, that well-attested saying, which as a confession of Messianic ignorance is proof against suspicion of later falsification: "The day and the hour knoweth no man, not even the Son" (Mark xiii. 32 and parallels). This saying cannot be reconciled with the other which stands naively beside it, "This generation shall not pass away till all these things shall be fulfilled," by making it mean that Jesus disclaimed only the power of fixing the year or the day, but approximately placed it within a generation. Though the editor of the prophetic sayings in Matt. xxiv., Mark xiii., may have in this way quieted himself about the contradiction, an interpretation of day and hour so insipid and so alien to the prophetic style is inconceivable in the mind of Jesus. The conjecture rather forces itself upon us that the two declarations, which exclude each other, referred originally to two different objects of prophecy, the words, "day and hour knoweth no man" to the time of the judgment of the world, the words "this generation will not pass away" to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus elsewhere deals very differently with the two future events. He says most decidedly of the judgment of God on Jerusalem, "it will come upon this generation (Matt. xxiii. 36). It is to Him essential that the generation which will fill up the measure of the sins of the fathers, will also have to taste the full measure of the divine wrath (cf. Matt. xxiii. 34-39; Luke xi. 50, 51, xiii. 1-9, xxiii. 28-31). But He Himself speaks quite differently of the end of the world in Matt. xxiv. He warns against hasty expectations; He insists that wars and rumours of wars, and the rising of one people against another, by no means signify that the end is near, and He only allows one fact to be