n from heaven." _Maran atha_--"our Lord
cometh"--was the great watchword of the waiting Church. When, at the
table of the Lord, they ate the bread and drank the cup, they proclaimed
His death "till He come." "Amen; come, Lord Jesus," is the passionate
cry with which our English Scriptures close.

For all those, then, to whom the New Testament speaks with authority,
the fact of Christ's return is established beyond all controversy. But
what will be the nature of His coming? Will it be visible and personal,
or spiritual and unseen? Will it be once and never again, or repeated?
Will Christ come at the end of history, or is He continually coming in
those great crises which mark the world's progress towards its appointed
end? These questions have been answered with such admirable simplicity
and scriptural truth by Dr. Denney that I cannot do better than quote
his words: "It may be frankly admitted," he says, "that the return of
Christ to His disciples is capable of different interpretations. He came
again, though it were but intermittently, when He appeared to them after
His resurrection. He came again, to abide with them permanently, when
His Spirit was given to the Church at Pentecost. He came, they would all
feel who lived to see it, signally in the destruction of Jerusalem, when
God executed judgment historically on the race which had rejected Him,
and when the Christian Church was finally and decisively liberated from
the very possibility of dependence on the Jewish. He comes still, as His
own words to the High Priest suggest--From this time on ye shall see the
Son of Man coming--in the great crises of history, when the old order
changes, yielding place to the new; when God brings a whole age, as it
were, into judgment, and gives the world a fresh start. But all these
admissions, giving them the widest possible application, do not enable
us to call in question what stands so plainly in the pages of the New
Testament,--what filled so exclusively the minds of the first
Christians--the idea of a personal return of Christ at the end of the
world. We need lay no stress on the scenery of New Testament prophecy,
any more than on the similar element of Old Testament prophecy; the
voice of the archangel and the trump of God are like the turning of the
sun into darkness and the moon into blood; but if we are to retain any
relation to the New Testament at all, we must assert the personal return
of Christ as Judge of all."[53]

So