shall tarry till I come and avenge myself upon

tion and if I will so, what is that to thee?'

:

this generaThe story

that is told of both these apostles confirms this exposition; for it is taken for granted by all, that St. Peter had his crown of martyrdom, before Jerusalem fell; and St. John survived the ruins of it."

[Dr. Lightfoot would have been too far in advance of his age, if he had proceeded from a sounder interpretation of the Scriptures, to a truer system of theology. It is perhaps an argument in favor of his interpretations, that he seems to have been wholly unconscious of their logical result. While depriving the common doctrine of a future general judgment of so large a part of its supposed scriptural proof, he still appears, like most theologians of his time, to have received the doctrine itself almost as an axiom. He even found additional evidence of it in his figurative interpretation. Witness the following argument in a sermon upon "The Great Assize."

"Was not the judgment and sad conflagration of Jerusalem, and destruction of the Jewish church and nation, an assurance of the judgment to come; when the expressions whereby it is described are such as, you think, meant nothing else but that final judgment? As, 'Christ's coming: coming in clouds, in his glory, in his kingdom-the day of the Lord; the great and terrible day of the Lord-the end of the world; the end of all things:-the sun darkened; the moon not giving light:-the stars falling from heaven, and the powers of heaven shaken: - the sign of the Son of man appearing in heaven: - heaven departing as a scroll rolled together, and every mountain and hill removed out of its place,' &c. You would think, they meant nothing but the last and universal judgment; whereas their meaning, indeed, is Christ's coming in judgment and vengeance against the Jewish city and nation; but a fore-signification also of the last judgment."— Works, Vol. vi., p. 354.

The logical result of such interpretation did not escape that sharp controversialist, Bishop Horsley, as appears from the following passage, in which, quite unintentionally no doubt, he virtually recommends this interpretation as adopted extensively and even by 66 some of the best modern expositors."

Among the passages which have been thus misrepresented by the refinements of a false criticism, are all those which contain the explicit promise of the coming of the Son of Man in glory, or in his kingdom: which it is become so much the fashion to understand of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman arms within half a century after our Lord's ascension, that, to those who take the sense of Scripture from some of the best modern expositors, it must seem doubtful whether any clear prediction is to be found in the New Testament, of an event in which, of all others, the Christian world is the most interested."- Horsley's Theological Works, Vol. I., p. 2.

It may be remarked alike of Dr. Lightfoot and of most of his successors in the figurative interpretation, and that without any disparagement of their merits, that they have been more successful in establishing the necessity of such an interpretation, than in rising to the fulness and spirituality of the figurative sense. They have rested too much in the outward, to the neglect of the inward; too much in the sign, to the neglect of the thing signified. Their thoughts have been too much occupied with the intense tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem, and too little with those vast, those infinite spiritual transactions, of which that destruction was a mere circumstance. It is only by a greater elevation and consistency of view, that the figurative interpretation can be raised above the objections with which it has been so often and, notwithstanding its demonstrativeness, even so plausibly assailed.]

III. DR. ROBINSON ON MATTHEW XXIV. 29–31.

From an Article in the Bibliotheca Sacra, 1843, on "The Coming of Christ, as announced in Matt. xxiv. 29-31," by Rev. EDWARD ROBINSON, D. D., Professor of Biblical Literature in the Union Theological Seminary.

- [The peculiarity of the views expressed by this eminent scholar consists chiefly in his adopting as the basis of his calculation the largest measure of a generation, a hundred years, and in his finding the accomplishment of the predictions in Matt. xxiv. 29–31, not in the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, but in "the great final catastrophe of the Jewish people" in the time of Adrian, in that "bloody tragedy" which "was at length brought to a close

at the unknown city of Bether, in the eighteenth year of Adrian, A. D. 135." Even if we may not fully appreciate his reasons for this extension of the time, and may be looking for a higher spiritual and practical sense than he has developed, still we cannot read without great interest so able an argument for the figurative interpretation, from one whose opinions are commended to our confidence by so much thoroughness of research and so much soundness of judgment.]

"Our Lord himself limits the interval within which Jerusalem shall be destroyed and his coming' take place, to that same generation: Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. The language is here plain, definite, and express; it cannot be misunderstood, nor perverted. It follows, in all the Evangelists, the annunciation of our Lord's coming,' and applies to it in them all, just as much as it applies to the antecedent declarations respecting Jerusalem; and more directly, indeed, inasmuch as it stands here in a closer connection.” — p. 540.

6

"The question now arises, Whether, under these limitations of time, a reference of our Lord's language to the day of judgment and the end of the world, in our sense of these terms, is possible? Those who maintain this view attempt to dispose of the difficulties arising from these limitations in different ways. Some assign to eveéws the meaning suddenly, as it is employed by the Seventy in Job 5: 3, for the But even in this passage, the purpose of the writer is simply to mark an immediate sequence,

.פתאם .Heb

- to inti

mate that another and consequent event happened forthwith. Nor would any thing be gained, even could the word eveéos be thus disposed of, so long as the subsequent limitation to 'this generation' remained. And in this, again, others have tried to refer yeveά to the race of the Jews or to the disciples of Christ; not only without the slightest ground, but contrary to all usage and all analogy. All these attempts to apply force to the meaning of the language are vain; and are now abandoned by most commentators of note.".

- p. 541.

"We come now to our last preliminary inquiry, viz. Whether the language of Matthew in vv. 29-31 is in fact applicable to merely civil and political commotions and revolutions? and whether the solemnity and strength of the language, and the grandeur and pomp of the mode of representation, do not necessarily imply a catastrophe more general and more awful, than the fall of a single city or the subversion of a feeble people? Can it be, then, that the language of these verses should refer merely to the destruction of Jerusalem or of the Jewish nation?

"Not to dwell here on the well-known fact, that the language of the Orient, and especially that of the Hebrew prophets, is full of the boldest metaphors and the sublimest imagery, applied to events and things which the manner of the Occident would describe without figure and in far simpler terms; it will be sufficient to show, that similar language is employed, both in the Old and New Testaments, on various occasions arising out of changes and revolutions in the course of human events; and especially in respect to the judgments of God upon nations. We will take the verses in their order.

"Verse 29. Here it is said, that after the preceding tribulation, the darkness of the sun and moon, the falling of the stars, and the shaking of the powers of heaven are to be the harbingers of the Lord's coming. The powers (duváμeis) of heaven' are the sun, moon, and stars, the D'Don NY, host of heaven, of the Old Testament. Now that the very same language and the same natural phenomena are employed in other places to mark events in human affairs and to announce God's judgments, is apparent from the following passages:

"In Is. c. 13, woes and judgments are denounced against Babylon. In v. 9 it is said,' the day of the Lord cometh ... to lay the land desolate;' and in v. 10 the following signs and accompaniments are pointed out: For the stars of

heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light; the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.'

"In Is. c. 34, similar woes and judgments are proclaimed against Idumea; see vv. 5, 6. The prophet in v. 2 describes 'the indignation of the Lord upon all nations, ... he hath utterly destroyed them ;' and in v. 4 he continues: ' And all the host of heaven (Sept. δυνάμεις τῶν οὐρανῶν) shall be dissolved; and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll; and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as the withered leaf from the fig-tree.'

“In Ez. c. 32, the prophet takes up a lamentation for Pharaoh, v. 2; in the succeeding verses his destruction is foretold; and then the prophet proceeds in v. 7, as follows : 'And when I shall put thee out, I will cover the heaven, and make the stars thereof dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light. All the bright lights of heaven will I make dark over thee, and set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord God.'

"In Joel 2: 30, 31 (3: 3, 4, Heb.) the very same phenomena are described as appearing before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.' In Acts 2: 19, 20, this passage is quoted by the Apostle Peter, and applied directly to the great events which were to accompany the introduction of the new dispensation, — including obviously the signs and wonders attendant upon the death and resurrection of our Lord; the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost and upon the churches afterwards; the spread and establishment of Christianity; and the final termination of the Mosaic dispensation in the subversion of the temple-worship and the irretrievable ruin of the Jewish nation.

"These examples are enough to show, that the language of the verse under consideration may well be in like manner understood as symbolic of the commotions and revolutions of states and kingdoms. In respect to the other two Evange