or has any vivid expectation of, this
personal coming of Christ. Think of the Christian Church as taking its
faith and hope from the New Testament; and then compare that faith and
hope, as it actually exists with reference to this point, with the New
Testament,--and the discrepancy is most remarkable. In the days when
it was written, eighteen hundred years ago, every eye was fixed on,
every man's thought was busy about, the coming of the Lord. You will
hardly find a chapter in the epistles in which it is not spoken of, or
alluded to, with earnest anticipation and confidence. Whereas now,
when it is brought so much nearer to us, it has almost vanished out of
the consideration of the Church altogether. No doubt, something may be
said by way of reason why it should occupy a less prominent place in
our thoughts than it did in theirs. The Lord's own words, and those of
the Divinely-commissioned messengers who announced His return, spoke
of it simply as certain, without any note of time being attached.
Hence, those who had seen Him depart believed that they themselves
should behold Him returning. There can be no doubt in any fair-judging
mind that, besides these eye-witnesses, St. Paul, when he wrote that
fifth chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, had a full
persuasion that he himself should be of those on whom the house not
made with hands that is to be brought from heaven was to be put,
without his being unclothed from the earthly tabernacle. He looked at
such unclothing in his own case as possible, but was confident that it
would not happen so. And again, when, in the over-zeal of the
Thessalonians, they imagined that the coming of the Lord was actually
upon them, and he in his second Epistle checks and sets right that
premature assumption, he does so in words which, as he wrote them,
might very well have had all their fulfilment within the lifetime of
man. Those words now appear to us in more of the true sense in which
the Spirit, who spoke by Paul, intended them: we see that the apostasy
there predicted, and the man of sin there set down as to be revealed,
are great developments or concentrations of the unbelief of churches
and nations; but there is no evidence that the men of that day saw any
such meaning in the words. As it was gradually, and not without
conflict of thought, revealed to Peter and his side of the apostolic
band, that the Gentiles were to be fellow-heirs and partakers of the
peace of Christ,