hem carefully and reverently, is the
meaning of the words in this my text, "Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but My words shall not pass away"?

Shall we translate this,--Heaven and earth shall not come true: but My
words shall come true? By so doing we may put some little meaning into
the latter half of the verse; but none into the former. Surely there is
a deeper meaning in the words than that of merely coming true. Surely
they mean that His words are eternal, perpetual; for ever present,
possible, imminent; for ever coming true. So, indeed, they would not
pass away. So they would be like the heavens and the earth, and the laws
thereof; like heat, gravitation, electricity, what not--always here,
always working, always asserting themselves--with this difference, that
when the physical laws of the heavens and the earth, which began in time,
in time have perished, the spiritual laws of God's kingdom, of Christ's
moral government of moral beings, shall endure for ever and for ever,
eternal as that God whose essence they reflect.

Therefore I mean nothing less than that the great and final day of
Judgment is past; or that we are not to look for that second coming of
our Lord Jesus Christ which, as our forefathers taught us to hope, shall
set right all the wrong of this diseased world.

God forbid! For most miserable were the world, most miserable were
mankind, if all that our Lord prophesied had happened, once and for all,
at the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies. But most miserable,
also, would this world be, and most miserable would be mankind, if these
words were not to be fulfilled till some future Last Day, and day of
Judgment, for which the Church has now been waiting for more than
eighteen centuries--and, as far as we can judge, may wait for as many
centuries more. Most miserable, if the Son of Man has never come since
He ascended into heaven from Olivet. Most miserable, if the kingdom of
God has never been at hand, since He gave that one short gleam of hope to
men in Judaea long ago. Most miserable, if there be no kingdom of God
among us even now: in one word, if God and Christ be not our King; but
the devil, as some fancy; or Man himself, as others fancy, be the only
king of this world and of its destinies; if there be no order in this mad
world, save what man invents; no justice, save what he executes; no law,
save what he finds convenient to lay upon himself for the protection of
his pers