privileges of His people, and should see Him no more till they adopted the language which they now condemned in the people, and welcomed Him as the Messiah, blessing Him that came in the name of the Lord. With this prediction of their rejection and dispersion, and of their future conversion, He closed His Ministry, and for ever quitted the Temple.

This is by far the most animated of all our Lord's discourses, and the most likely to give offence. It could not fail of astonishing the people, who looked up to their teachers with reverence. And even those against whom it was levelled were confounded: they knew not what course to take, and so let Him go quietly away, without attempting to lay hands upon Him, as they had sometimes done before upon much less provocation.

117. Jesus prefers the widow's Mite, because her all, to the large sums given out of their superfluity by the rich. Mark xii. 41-44. Luke xx. 1-4.

However, previously to His departure, Jesus noticed the persons who were putting money into the chest, placed in the court in which He had been speaking, for the reception of voluntary contributions towards the expenses of the Temple, and bore His testimony to the charity of a Widow, who threw in two Mites, a sum less than our farthing, the smallest that was allowed to be given, and all that she possessed. This our Teacher pronounced to be a greater gift than the large donations of the rich, who only gave out of their superfluity, whereas she had retained nothing to purchase necessary food, for which she must depend upon her own labour, or precarious charity. The incident conveys an useful lesson 'both to the poor and rich; it encourages the poor to do what they can, because God, who looks into the heart, values the gift according to the disposition of the giver; and it im

presses upon the rich a lesson, that has been taught even by heathen moralists, that it is not enough that their alms be large, for not the amount, but its proportion to their means, is the measure of their liberality. It is to be feared, however, that even the most liberal assign what He will not consider as a due proportion. Respect for Him who commended the widow, prevents any from condemning her bounty; but bounty far inferior to hers has been censured by the rich as improvident; and the poor are too apt to forget, that the fact is recorded for their imitation, I do not say literally, but in the spirit. The duty has never been more powerfully enforced than by St. Paul, who urges it as a motive for diligence in our calling. Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, that he may have to give to him that needeth. (Eph. iv. 28.)

118. Jesus, on leaving the Temple, foretels its destruction, and afterwards on the mount of Olives declares to four of His Apostles the signs that shall precede His second coming. Matt. xxiv. xxv. Mark xiii. Luke xxi.

The disciples, as they were departing, endeavoured to draw their Master's attention to the magnificence of the Temple, meaning thereby to intimate their regret as well as wonder at its predicted destruction; Jesus simply replied, that the time was coming when there should not be left one stone upon another that should not be cast down. No event could at the time appear less probable, for the Romans had as yet no motive to injure one of their own provinces; and when Jerusalem was taken after a siege of nearly five months, Titus, on entering, and looking up at the fortifications which the Jews had abandoned, exclaimed, Surely we have had God for our assistant, for what could human hands or machines do against these towers! He was anxious to save

the Temple, out of regard to its sanctity, or the wish of preserving such a distinguished ornament of the Empire; but the pertinacity of the infatuated people, and the fury of his own soldiers, were the means through which the Almighty defeated his purpose. The Jews themselves first set fire to God's holy and beautiful house, and then the Romans; and the General's endeavours to extinguish the flames were unavailing yet he was able in part, by personal exertion, to save the golden Candlestick, the Shew-Bread Table, and other sacred furniture, which adorned his and his father's Triumph, and which we at this distant day may see sculptured on the still remaining Memorial of the fall of Judah-his Arch in the Roman Forum. The very foundations of Jerusalem were afterwards dug up in search of buried treasure; and the words of Micah (iii. 12.) were literally fulfilled, Therefore for your sake shall Zion be ploughed up as a field, and Jerusalem become heaps. Onr Lord's prophecy also was most exactly verified about forty years after it was uttered; and it is not a simple prediction of the fact, but consists of a variety of particulars, such as the city being surrounded with a trench, the unparalleled misery of the besieged, and the complete destruction both of Town and Temple, which could never have been predicted in all its particulars, except by a true Prophet, and the literal fulfilment of which would never have been known, unless it had pleased Providence to preserve to us the best commentary upon it, in the minute detail of the siege, by Josephus, who was in the Roman camp, never embraced Christianity, and might not have heard of the prediction. He had the best opportunity of acquiring information, and his notorious flattery of the Romans would prevent his exaggerating their cruelty.

When they had withdrawn to the Mount of Olives, where they were alone, His three confidential disciples and Andrew asked when these things should be, and what should be the sign of His coming, and of the end of the age which was to

follow. Great, says Dr. Hales, has been the embarrassment and perplexity of commentators concerning the meaning of this enquiry; and four hypotheses are still afloat on the subject. The first confines the whole enquiry to the approaching destruction of Jerusalem; the second connects with it Christ's second advent in the Regeneration, according to Jewish expectation; the third substitutes for this advent His last, accompanied with the general judgment; and the fourth, which unites all the preceding in the answer to the three questions, Hales himself supports. Certainly several of the phrases are, according to our ideas, more suitable to the final and more important coming of the Son of Man at the last day, to judge the whole human race, than His coming through the agents of His Providence, the Roman Legions, to take vengeance on His apostate people, and to terminate the Jewish dispensation. Still our Lord's positive declaration, that the existing generation should not pass away till all these things were fulfilled, necessarily limits such expressions as the darkening of the sun and moon-the falling of the stars—and the shaking of the powers of heaven-and even the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds with great glory— to the destruction of Jerusalem; nor is the use of these figures to denote a temporal calamity, so harsh and bold as it may appear to persons not so familiar as the disciples were with the language of ancient prophecy. Bishop Porteus maintains, that the whole twenty-fourth chapter in its primary

a Isaiah describes the future fall of Babylon in the same imagery, (chap. xiii. 9, 10, 13.) Behold, the day of the Lord cometh-for the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their lighl: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine;—therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place: and chap. xxiv. 23. xxxiv. 4. Joel says, (ii. 31.) that the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come. Coming in the clouds sometimes means not the personal appearance of the Deity, but His manifestation, by some signal act of Providence. Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt. Isaiah xix. 1. 2 Sam.

xxii. 10.

acceptation relates to the destruction of Jerusalem, but that the images are for the most part applicable also to the day of judgment, and that an allusion to that great event, as a kind of secondary object, runs through almost the whole prophecy. In Isaiah, he observes, there are no less than three subjects, the restoration of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, the call of the Gentiles to the Christian covenant, and the redemption by the Messiah, so intimately blended together, that it is extremely difficult to separate them; and in the same manner our Saviour seems to hold out the destruction of Jerusalem, His principal subject, as a type of the dissolution of the world, which is the under-part of the representation. By thus judiciously mingling together these two important catastrophes, He gives at the same time, according to the Bishop, a most interesting admonition to His hearers, and a most awful lesson to His future disciples; and thus the benefit of His predictions, instead of being confined to a few believers of His own age, is extended to every subsequent period of time. It is certain that the Jews, and even the early Christians, believed that the destruction of Jerusalem and the general judgment, if not contemporaneous, would only be separated by a very small interval, and this idea led the Apostles to put the questions together. But I conceive, that the two events are kept distinct, and that our Lord, after answering the first, avails Himself of it to prepare them for His final judgment; the first was to happen within the lifetime of some of that generation, but of that [later] day knoweth no man; (34-36.) and that this transition, about which commentators are so much divided, commences, as Doddridge maintains, with the exhortation to watch, as they know not at what hour their Lord cometh, Therefore be ye also ready. (Matt. xxiv. 42-44.) The prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem was of peculiar importance to believers of that generation, since their own preservation from death, and