chapter of Matthew, is but a condensed view of what Ezekiel gives us, in his thirty-fourth chapter, where the prophet describes the judgment of God upon the Gentile nations, for having scattered his people abroad, which people embrace, according to the Abrahamic covenant, the natural descendants of Abraham, and the Gentile believers, or churches, which have like precious faith with Abraham. It is not necessary, here, minutely to trace the resemblance between Christ's and Ezekiel's account of this judgment. But the following facts may be stated:-The sheep are the people of Christ. They comprehensively include the Jews first, and afterwards the church of God, who take their place. The retributions of Heaven will be awarded to the nations for their treatment of his people. Those that have persecuted the Jews and the church of God, will be regarded as having persecuted the Saviour himself, and shall partake in the destruction and overthrow, by his avenging fire, which shall destroy Popery and the anti-Christian nations. Those that have nourished and cherished them, shall be admitted as constituent members and parts of that great kingdom which shall be established, "in that day when, saith the Lord, I will assemble her that halteth, and I will gather her that is driven out, and her that I have afflicted. And I will make her that halted a remnant, and her that was cast off a strong nation, and Jehovah shall reign over them in Mount Zion, from henceforth even for ever. And thou, O tower of the flock, the stronghold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem." * This is the kingdom that shall be awarded

*Micah, 4. 6-8.

to the sheep-the remnant of Israel, according to the election of grace, saved and gathered out of the nations, and into which those tribes and nations of the earth shall be admitted as constituent parts, who shall be found not to have persecuted, but nourished and cherished the people of God; but from which, by their utter and everlasting overthrow, they shall be excluded; who shall be consumed "by the spirit of his mouth, and the brightness of his coming," along with the beast and the false prophet-the secular and spiritual Rome-for having persecuted the people of God, and shed the blood of the saints. Thus, then, it appears that the judgment of Christ, set forth in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, is the same with that of Daniel and Paul, already examined, and different in every essential particular from the general floating notion, founded on it, of a universal, simultaneous, and promiscuous resurrection of the righteous and the wicked, at some very remote day after one thousand years' prosperity of the church of God: and essentially different, too, from that described by John.

To sum up, then, what has been brought into view: The twenty-fifth chapter is in perfect consonance with the fact of Christ's pre-millenial coming; and interpreted, in connection with the twenty-fourth, and the predictions of the prophets referring to the same events, the following are the grand and wonderful results we obtain. We speak with diffidence, and presume not to say that we may not have made some mistakes. The scenes are too wonderful, and complicated, and extended, to harmonize fully before the events occur. We wait, with ardent expectation, for the wondrous scenes, and pray, that we may be accounted worthy to escape the desolations of that day, and to stand before the Son of Man, nor be ashamed at his coming.

The general result of a pre-millenial coming of Christ to judgment, is enough to excite our intensest interest, even if we err in some of the minute details of that wonderful procedure.

That this day of judgment is not strictly and exclusively a short season of judicial investigations or trial; but itself a dispensation, running through centuries, and embracing the whole millenial reign of Christ and his saints ;—that this dispensation is to be introduced by the visible, personal coming of Jesus Christ ;-that at his coming he will bring with him the myriads of his saints who had died in faith, and who will then receive their bodies, raised from the dead in the likeness of Christ's glorious body;-that the saints then living on the earth will also be changed, and caught up together with Christ in the air;-that this coming of Christ will occur most suddenly, and, as it were, by stealth, like a thief in the night ;-that the one half, at least, of professing Christians being profoundly asleep, and totally unprepared, will never awake to the sense of their duty to look and watch for his coming, till the wonderful scenes of the coming of Christ, the first resurrection, and the rapture of the living saints, shall overwhelm them with horror and dismay ;-that then the church will be judged, and while honors will be awarded to the raised and rapt saints, according to their works, the unprofitable, formal professors shall be utterly and eternally rejected, and perish in the overthrow of the Man of sin and of his adherents, and in the destruction of the anti-Christian nations ;—that an end shall be made of all the nations that persecuted the Jews, and shed the blood of the saints;—that in the midst of these scenes of destruction, as they shall be going on within the territorial limits of the four great empires that swayed the world, the raised saints will be sent to

collect the scattered Jews who shall have repented and believed, at that time, that Jesus is their Messiah ;--that the conversion of the Jews will be the occasion of the conversion of whole nations among the Gentiles— the remote heathen nations and others, among whom the Jews were scattered, and the gospel was preached for a witness, and that neither persecuted the Jews nor shed the blood of the saints, but had not, nevertheless, been Christianized;-that the Jews will be re-established in their own land, the theocracy restored, Christ and his saints reign over them, and through them, over all the nations of the earth ;-that Satan will be cast into prison for one thousand years ;-that thus the dominion of Heaven shall be established on the earth, and the millenial bliss and glory succeed ;and that the final judgment of Satan, and the promiscuous throng of the wicked dead, who shall be raised at the end of the thousand years, shall prepare the way to usher in the glorious and eternal state when the kingdom shall be delivered up into the hands of the Father, and God shall be all in all.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SEASON AND SIGNS OF CHRIST'S COMING.

The

"THEY asked him saying, Master, but when shall these things be? And what SIGN shall there be, when these things shall come to pass. question seems to have been suggested by the remarks, which the Saviour had made relative to the destruction of the temple and city of Jerusalem. It is obvious, from the terms in which Matthew proposes it, that it had an ulterior reference. The disciples inquired, not only with regard to the fate of their city, but also with regard to the period of the Saviour's second coming, and of the end of the dispensation. In this extended sense we understand the inquiry, and propose to collate, from the prophetical Scriptures, some of the more important and striking signs of the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We shall thus be furnished with an additional argument in proof of that coming being pre-millenial.

The theme is one of vast moment. The event itself involves our eternal interests, and the destiny of the world. If it be the fact that the once despised Nazarene, the persecuted Galilean, who was crucified between two thieves, but, having risen from the dead, ascended to heaven, and received all power and authority in heaven and on earth, is there waiting till the † Matt. 24. 3.

* Luke, 21. 7.