their contemporaries came from the impression which they produced and shared, that the Day of Judgment was at hand. And well indeed might the saints of the time of the great Western Schism see, in the wickedness and scandals around them on every side, as good a reason for their conclusion as that which made St. Gregory speak as he did, or St. Chrysostom speak as he did. The world is always provoking the judgments of God, and when the scandals by which saints are terrified are found in the sanctuary itself, as well as in the world outside the Church, it may well indeed be thought that the end is nigh.

V.

I gather two conclusions from what we have been considering, and with them I will end to-day, though the truths on which they are based will be constantly before us in the course of these sermons. The first of these is that we can seldom find an age, in the life of the Church, in which she has not to contend with the evils which will rise to their highest expression in the last days. The last times have really been upon us from the beginning of the history of the Church, as St. John says in his Epistle. They have been upon us from the beginning, for this reason, that the principles which, in their full and final development, will produce the state of things on which the last Judgment will fall, have been always at work in the world and always countermining the holy and saving influences of the Church of God. The last struggle is already begun,

and will continue until the end on the same lines. and with the same conflicting forces. Each generation of Christians thus has its part to play in this holy warfare, for it has to fight in its own day against the principles which will assail the Church with the greatest fury in the days of the end. And each generation, according to its faithfulness and watchfulness, or its slothfulness and laxity, will either help on the Church in the years which are to succeed its own tenure of life to stand firm against the final assaults, or it will make her weaker in her resistance to those final assaults. Thus it is that the descriptions and characteristics of the last days are always full of interest and instruction, and it is always well that men should be reminded of the truth, on which our Lord and His Apostles insist, that if we are not watchful and sober, our loins girded, and our lamps burning, the day will take us unawares, and we may have to bewail our folly as long as eternity lasts. No mistake can be more pernicious to ourselves, or render our influence on those who come after us more pernicious, than that false persuasion in which we are so often inclined to fold ourselves to sleep, that we have nothing to do with the perils of the last time.

There is another reason also which may account for the urgent vigilance and ever wistful expectation in which the lives of the saints have always been passed. This reason is contained in that true. view concerning the end which underlies all the thoughts and language of the saints on this subject. We can see almost at once why it was that, at so

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early a period, and again later on, the disciples of the Apostles, and, indeed, the generality of Christians, were literally, as our Lord bade them be, like men waiting for Him. With them, the last time was not so much the end of the world, the close of the long conflict of the Church, the great day of account, as the coming of the Lord. Their eyes and hearts strained forward to see Him Whom some of them had seen and known, and Whom all had heard of and loved. Now, as to this, we are all on a level, because, to each one of us, the coming of our Lord, the end of the world, the day of account, is the day of his own death. I do not mean to say that the Particular Judgment, by which each man is judged at the moment at which he dies, is the same as the Judgment of which we are speaking. But still, after the moment of death the world closes to us, with all its interests, all its events, and all its history, and we have no more to do with it until we are summoned to stand before our Lord at the Day of Judgment. Our part is played, the latter days are come to us, the Judge is at the door, we meet Him at our death. The stream of human life may be flowing on for many centuries yet, or for few, and as long as it flows on, the life of the Church on earth will last. But to each drop of that seemingly endless stream the last moment comes, whenever it passes from between the river's banks into the mighty ocean of eternity.

SERMON II.

PROPHECIES OF THE END OF THE WORLD.

Nisi venerit discessio primum, et revelatus fuerit homo peccati, filius perditionis.

Unless there come a revolt first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.

(Words taken from the 3rd verse of the 2nd chapter of the Second Epistle
to the Thessalonians.)

I.

It must often strike you, my brethren in our Lord, as you study the writings of St. Paul and the other Apostles, how much we owe to the occasional, and as it seems to us, to the accidental character of the questions or difficulties which were put to them, or with which they had to deal. These Thessalonian Christians, who had not been very long admitted to the privileges of the Church, happened, as we should say, to have misunderstood some words of the Apostle, or of some other Christian teacher, concerning the end of all things for which they were told to be always ready, to which they were bidden always to look forward. In consequence of their mistake the blessed St. Paul had to write to them a second Epistle, mainly with the object of setting them right on the subject of the time of the

approach of the end of the world. The more we study this great Apostle, the more do we become aware of the truth that, even by his own natural disposition and character, and apart from the spiritual charity and zeal of which he was so filled by Divine grace, he was one of those who are always ready, on every subject on which they are interested, to pour out a great stream of information and thought, even when less would be enough. for the occasion before them. And it was in the providence of God, Who guided his hand and his. mind in the composition of this and other epistles, that short as is the passage from which these words of the text are taken, it should contain, at least in germ or in sum, the chief features of what is the subject of many prophecies both in the Old Testament and in the New, the subject on which our thoughts are engaged for the present, the end of the world, and what shall take place before that comes about.

St. Augustine tells us that the hesitation of St. Thomas about the truth of the Resurrection of our Lord has been of more benefit to us than the ready belief of others of the disciples, because it was in consequence of that hesitation that we have the beautiful incident of the manifestation to that great Apostle of the proofs of the Resurrection, with a fulness and completeness of evidence which might otherwise have been wanting in the Gospel narrative. And so we may say of this mistake of the Thessalonian Christians, that it has turned out to our benefit and to the benefit of the whole