SERMONS.

SERMON I.

CHRIST'S SECOND COMING AND OUR WATCHING.

ST. MARK Xiii. 37.

"What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch."

ADVENT SUNDAY, the New Year's Day of the Church, has again come round. Again we pray God for " grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, that when His Son shall come again in His glorious majesty to judge both the quick and dead, we may rise to the life immortal." Again we hear the Church's trumpet sounding, "Now it is high time to awake out of sleep for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed."

Again we are reminded by the Gospel for the day, in which we are told of Christ's coming to Jerusalem, " meek and lowly, riding on an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass," that the day is impending when He will come in

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all the glories of the Godhead, with His angels, on the clouds of heaven, and in flaming fire. Men will not then ask, "Who is this?" neither will others answer, "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth, of Galilee." At the first piercing blast of the trumpet that wakes the dead they will know that the Son of man has come. Some will call on the mountains to fall on them, and the rocks to cover them, and some will say, "Lo! this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us; this is the Lord, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation." That all of us here to-day may be amongst these last, I now, as Christ's minister, and praying for His presence and grace, bring again before you the warnings and lessons of Advent.

The doctrine of the second coming of Jesus Christ is an article of the creed: "From thence," i. e. from the right hand of God, "He shall come to judge the quick and the dead." What do we confess before God and men when we repeat these words? We then say that we believe that That Person of the Godhead Who laid aside His glory and assumed our nature, and appeared among us as Jesus, the Christ, and was put to the most shameful of deaths, and who rose again and ascended, and has not since been seen of men —except in vision by St. John at Patmos, or by St. Paul on the way to Damascus, or by St.

Stephen when dying-that He, at a moment only known to His Father, ever impending, which may be to-day, or may be a hundred years hence, will suddenly rend the vail that separates between the seen and the unseen, and reappear.

We believe this because of His own words, "As the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." (Matt. xxiv. 27.) "They shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." (Matt. xxiv. 30.) Again, we believe it because of the words of the angels when He ascended:" This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." (Acts i. 2.) Again, because of such words as "Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him." (Rev. i. 7.) We believe then from these sayings of Christ and His angels and His ministers that He will thus come, as He has prophesied, personally, in the very body in which He ascended; publicly, so that every eye shall see Him; suddenly, in a moment.

We believe that this His second coming wi be in the greatest possible contrast to all other visitations that are called in Scripture "His comings."

First, He will come publicly, in all the glory of the Godhead; so that all men, whether they

will or not, shall see Him, as the three Apostles saw Him on the mount of transfiguration, or as St. John saw Him in the Isle of Patmos, and fell at His feet as one dead. In this respect His second advent will be in the greatest possible contrast to His first, when He came as a weak infant, and was laid in a manger in the outhouse of an inn. And He will also come personally: in our flesh we shall see God; we shall see Him for ourselves; our eyes shall behold Him, our ears shall hear the voice of Him who once called us to Him in accents of most loving invitation, but who will then speak as God spake from the top of Sinai.

In this respect, that He will come again personally and visibly, His Second Advent will be distinguished from all other events called His comings. For instance, He came in vengeance to destroy the impenitent and unbelieving city of Jerusalem; this was a coming in the way of providence; He came not in person, but in power. Again, He came to His Church on the day of Pentecost; this was a coming not visible but spiritual: He came by His Spirit. In the same way He comes to each individual soul when He reveals to that soul His love and His beauty, but this is also spiritual. And He comes in the sacraments, but here again His coming, though real and effectual, is yet spiritual. In all these He leaves not His throne. But when He comes again He will

rise up from His place: He will again visit in person the earth.

Again, we shall not go to Him, He will come to US. The time of each man's death has been said to be Christ's coming to that man. It may be so in a very limited sense, though I am not aware that it is once said to be so in Scripture. For when Christ comes it will not be to each one separately, as at death, but to all at once. We shall not pass to meet Him into the unseen world, He will meet us all gathered together in this very world of sight and sense before it is made new.

Again, His coming will be sudden. It will be as a cry at midnight, waking men out of their first sleep. It will be like the lightning, which always startles, no matter how black the thunder-cloud. It will be as the thief in the night, who approaches noiselessly and stealthily, and we are in his power. So, the Saviour Himself tells us, shall the coming of the Son of man be. Seven times does He warn us that He will come as a thief.

It is well on this Sunday, especially in these days, when infidel-minded men are studiously confounding Christ's second appearing with His providential or spiritual comings, to remind ourselves of the essential difference betwixt this and all others that can by any stretch of language or metaphor be called "His comings."