o some extent, in the sense which
previously occupied their minds. He knew that often he was not
understood; and he frequently said to his followers, "Who hath
ears to hear, let him hear." His disciples once asked him, "What
shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" He
replied, substantially, "There shall be wars, famines, and
unheard of trials; and immediately after the sun shall be
darkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fall
from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Then
shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with
great power. And he shall sit upon the throne of his glory, and
all nations shall be gathered before him, and he shall separate
them one from another." That this language was understood by the
evangelists and the early Christians, in accordance with their
Pharisaic notions, as teaching literally a physical reappearance
of Christ on the earth, a resurrection, and a general judgment, we
fully believe. Those ideas were prevalent at the time, are
expressed in scores of places in the New Testament, and are the
direct strong assertion of the words themselves. But that such was
the meaning of Christ himself we much more than doubt.

In the first place, in his own language in regard to his second
coming there is not the least hint of a resurrection of the dead:
the scene is confined to the living, and to the earth. Secondly,
the figures which he employs in this connection are the same as
those used by the Jewish prophets to denote great and signal
events on the earth, and may be so taken here without violence to
the idiom. Thirdly, he expressly fixed the date of the events he
referred to within that generation; and if, therefore, he spoke
literally, he was grossly in error, and his prophecies failed of
fulfilment, a conclusion which we cannot adopt. To suppose that he
partook in the false, mechanical dogmas of the carnal Jews would
be equally irreconcilable with the common idea of his Divine
inspiration, and with the profound penetration and spirituality
of his own mind.

He certainly used much of the phraseology of his contemporary
countrymen, metaphorically, to convey his own purer thoughts. We
have no doubt he did so in regard to the descriptions of his
second coming. Let us state in a form of paraphrase what his real
instructions on this point seem to us to have been: "You cannot
believe that I am the Messiah, because I do not