therefore must have subsided into such a contentment with her condition, become so forgetful of her widowhood, and pleased with her injurious adversary, as to cease from the desire, and the hope, and the prayer of any judgment: and now how exactly this hath come to pass in these days, I leave you to witness, who know with what reluctancy and indignation ye first heard me denounce judgment upon the apostasy, and upon ourselves, if we did not repent; who can witness how the great body of the church abhorreth to hear of it; and how, in all their public meetings, in all their reports, and in all their publications, they speak of nothing but universal conversion and millenial blessedness, not only to the apostate nations of Christendom, but to the whole earth, so that truly we are come to that poverty and negation, and I may even say contradiction, of faith, which the Lord representeth as immediately preceding his coming, and the concomitant of those days of wickedness, dark and gross as were the days of Noah and Lot. รูป The next passage of Scripture to which I would refer you, as proving the same point, that the last days of the present dispensation were to be evil, and not good, is found in the id and iiid chapters of the Second Epistle of Peter; in the former of which (verses 1, 2, 3) are described the false teachers and damnable heresies which would bring the truth of God into contempt and raillery of men. And, end that the church. of crying unto the 1. them what preva the unjust, how " Judge of all; call your atti avenge his unto him. I tell you This the i he ( ..the Apostle ent now of a deir damnation of a long time , and hastened or the likeness of parallel of their all conditions and gandeth none but these Lot, and of the angels ir first estate; and he ption of their wickedness ole chapter of which I will characteristics (ver. 18, 19),d daring of their language, words of vanity, and their false pretension to a liberty which is ery of corruption, and their desvernment, and speaking evil of digNow whether these be characteristics adical and liberal people, who have won ied the ascendant of all things, literary, tic, political, and religious, I leave you udge, while I proceed with my discourse shew you that these evil times hold on, and Continually grow worse until the Lord comes. This you will observe, by following the context of the iiid chapter, where the Apostle first states at to have been the end of his Second Epistle to keep the church in the remembrance of this apostasy, which was to arise and increase in the church until the time of the end. Concerning which, he saith again (ver. 3), that "there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own inclinations, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?" This carries us a point farther than our Lord's gentle, though strong, way of representing the condition of his church before his coming. He contents himself with questioning, whether he shall find any faith surviving upon the earth at the time of his coming as the Judge. But Peter expressly declares that there shall be no faith; and not only so, but that the hope of his coming shall be scoffed at: and he assigns as the reason of this mockery, that they wish all things to continue as they are, or, in other words, they wish the course of nature and the law of cause and effect to continue unbroken and uninterrupted by any interference of the power and majesty of God. And if this be not the cant of all our philosophers and religionists, judge ye. Against this false notion of the perpetuity of the present state of the world, having adduced (ver. 5) the creation and (verses 6 and 7) the deluge, he proceedeth (ver. 9) to declare that the cause of God's procrastination is not indifference to the poor widow's prayer, but the manifestation of his own long-suffering and sparing mercy; and then he declareth (ver.10) that the day of the Lord should come as a thief in the night, when the household should be all asleep, and no one upon the watch. These two passages from Luke and Peter do beautifully harmonize together in D giving no hint of any amendm: ་་ events of the " three, of A which k conti thre arnal setemptuous ..s church in should come od came upon 1, when they did s and were given in at Noah entered into ne and destroyed them it was in the days of Lot, ...rink, buy, sell, plant, and e day that Lot went out of re and brimstone from heaven, ..em all. en, have I laid before you all, or passages where this period of the ays is referred to; and brought under cration the various mysteries of the Credence which are then to proceed and course: and the result of the whole aew words, to be, that "the last days a of expression used to denote the conca of that long season of trial and of oppresea which the Jewish people were destined to ergo at the hand of Divine Providence; and e troublous morning of that long day, during which they should begin to realize all the blessings of the New Covenant, and to be radiated with all the glory of Messiah the King--the latter days, namely, of that long period of time, during which they should be given up to captivity and oppression, and after ich they should find their might again, and e up to the prey in the day of the Lord's vengeance, and of Zion's recompence; the latter days likewise of that lesser, though also long, period during which the church should be under Antichrist, and at the end of which she should rise in the glory of the resurrection morn. In improvement upon the subject, I observe, how utterly repugnant to the language of the Holy Spirit used in the Old-Testament Scriptures, it is to interpret the last days of which our text discloseth the fearful character as referring to the last days of the Jewish dispensation, when every thing fell out directly the reverse of all these things which are to happen in the last days of the Holy Scripture. I observe, secondly, how vain it is to refer the last days to the conclusion of the Millennium, long after the Jews are brought in, long after the nations have been all converted, long after wars have ceased, and every other mystery written in the Prophets hath been accomplished: because as the other is far too soon, this is far too late, seeing it is in these very last days that all those things are to be accomplished which draw on the restoration of the Jews, and the blessedness of the whole earth. The last days of the prophet Jacob is a time when all the twelve tribes of Israel are conquering and overturning; of Balaam, when the sun out of Jacob is scorching up his enemies; of Daniel, when the Jews are restored |