Christian world, for without it we might not have had, in the pages of the New Testament, so clear and full a statement of the doctrine of the Apostles on this important subject of the revelation of Antichrist and of the state of the world before that revelation, or at least at the time when it shall be made. And although some lines of the picture of the last days, as it is drawn in the sacred writings, are not to be found in this short passage of St. Paul, it is still sufficiently full for our purpose to-day, and I shall therefore use it as a text from which I may state to you the chief features of that general picture, on which we shall have to dwell more particularly one by one, before we can part from this wonderful subject.

I must begin by reminding you that, as I said just now, the Thessalonians may have mistaken some former words of the Apostle to them, and this may have been the occasion of the necessity under which he found himself of correcting their error. It seems that they had been so impressed by what he had told them about the second įcoming of our Lord, as to think of it as imminent, to have been so persuaded that it would happen very soon, as to be surprised at the death of some of their own brethren before it came about, and to have been perplexed at the thought that these, who had died. prematurely, as they imagined, might have missed their share with the rest in the glories and triumphs of that second coming of our Lord. The great Gospel document on this subject, with which they were perhaps familiar, seems to be that which is

-

contained in the Gospel of St. Matthew, the only Gospel, probably, which was within their reach at that time. And, if you will study that account of the words of our Lord on this subject in His last prophecy on the Mount of Olives, you will see that He says nothing at all about those of the elect who may have died before the second Advent. So the Thessalonians had the reason for their difficulty that is to be found in this silence of Scripture in the great passage to which they would naturally have turned in their researches on this matter, and it is very likely that St. Paul, and the teachers whom he had left behind, or sent to complete his work among them, had not thought it necessary to touch on the question concerning the dead in Christ at the time of the second Advent. Thus there was a gap to be supplied in the information of the Thessalonians on this subject, and it was supplied by St. Paul in his first Epistle to them. "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them who have slept through Jesus will God bring with Him. For this we say unto you in the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who remain, unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them who have slept. For the Lord Himself shall come down from Heaven with a commandment, and with the voice of an Archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead who are in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air, and so shall we be always with the Lord."

In this passage, as you see, St. Paul dwells.

mainly on the answer which was required in order to set at rest the troubles of the Thessalonians. He tells them how it shall be at the Last Day with the dead in Christ. He forbears to mention many things which we know will take place at that time of which he speaks, notably the Judgment itself, and the separation of the good and the bad which is to last for all eternity. On the other hand, it is characteristic of him that he gives us quite a picture, so to say, of the coming of our Lord, the commandment, or shout of command, the voice of the Archangel, the trumpet of God, and the catching up into the air of the saints. Now, in the passaeg from which the text before us is taken, St. Paul takes quite another feature of the latter days, for the purpose of removing from the minds of the Thessalonians another false conception which may have arisen from a misunderstanding of his former words. He had spoken of the elect who were to be found alive at the second Advent, and as he and those to whom he was writing were, of course, among the living, he spoke of them as included in that number. He had said nothing of what he knew very well, that an untold number of generations of Christians might pass away one after the other before the coming of that great day. Thus the Thessalonians, in their literal manner of understanding all that he said or wrote, appear to have taken it for granted that, at all events, the end of all things for which they were taught to long, and the prospect of which was to be their sufficient reason for abandoning all the good and pleasant

things of this world which they had before enjoyed and loved, was to take place in such a space of time as would be covered by their own lives. A false conception of this kind might be mischievous, both as encouraging a tendency to recklessness and idleness and neglect of duties, to which they were somewhat prone, and also, when its falsehood was discovered and proved by lapse of time, it might tend to cast discredit on the teaching of which it was supposed to have formed a part.

For this reason St. Paul, in the passage before us, takes the pains to disabuse them of their mistake. And he does this in the same way in which he had removed their former mistake. He insists mainly on the one great point which was important, that certain things were to happen before the manifestation of Antichrist, which was to be, so to say, the last scene in the great drama of humanity, the scene which was to be immediately succeeded by the coming of our Lord. And as, in the other passage, he had dwelt on the particular features of the picture which he had sketched, of the coming of our Lord, so in this passage he enlarges on certain particulars as to the person and actions of Antichrist, which are not absolutely necessary for the information of the Thessalonians, and on certain features also of the generation which shall be ready to welcome Antichrist, when he comes in all the power of delusion possessed by his master Satan. For Antichrist will be what he is and be as successful as he is to be, mainly on account of the disposition of the generation to which he will

address himself. He will be the child of the time, the man of the age, the personal expression and outcome and summary of the ruling characteristics and propensities and tastes and ideas of that generation. If we may so use the Divine words, he will come unto his own, and his own will gladly receive him.

II.

The passage under consideration enables us to set before ourselves the chief features of the great Scriptural prophecies of the last time. It is our business to-day to consider them in general, later on one by one. In the first place-I do not mean first in point of time, but most conspicuous-we may place the revelation, as St. Paul calls it, of the Man of Sin. Before the second coming of our Lord, that one great enemy of God, who is called in Scripture Antichrist, is to appear, and for a short time to reign and cause himself to be worshipped. When St. Paul warns the Thessalonians that the day of the Lord is not to come at once, he says it will not come 66 unless there come a revolt first, and the Man of Sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, so that he sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God." Another day I hope to explain what the Scripture tells us concerning him; for the present it is enough to have named him as one of the prominent figures in the prophecies of the latter days. Now you may remember that both St. Paul

1 2 Thess. ii. 4.