And any habit that militates against our doing this tends to spiritual wastefulness, and violates in spiritual things the command which surely applies to them in a far higher degree than it does to temporal things, "Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost."

Treasure then, my brethren, in your minds and hearts whatever you hear in this sacred place agreeable to God's word: let no opportunity of gaining instruction and edification go to loss: be diligent in coming to the house of God-be diligent in listening to the word of God—be diligent in recollecting every explanation, every application of that word: and be assured that if you do so hear and mark, you will also learn and inwardly digest: and that one sermon, the most commonplace soever, thus attended to from the deep conviction that the smallest atom of Divine truth it may contain is too valuable to be lost, will do you more good than hundreds of the most eloquent discourses heard but to be admired and then immediately forgotten.

SERMON IX.

CHRISTIAN WATCHFULNESS.

MATT. XXV. 13.

"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh."

THESE words of solemn warning, my brethren, were addressed by our blessed Lord to his disciples on an occasion equally solemn. Seated on the summit of the mount of Olives, in the midst of the faithful few who had left their all to follow him, He was gazing on the rebellious city which was so soon to crucify its King-on the temple which He was never again to enter. "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate !" With this mournful valediction He had just quitted the spot where in his infancy He had been received into the arms of the aged Simeon: where in his childhood He had astonished the teachers of the law by his understanding and his answers: and where He had subsequently spent so many hours during his brief ministry endeavouring to soften the stubborn wills and to open the benighted eyes of his people, but alas! in vain! they would not come to him that they might have life! But now He had quitted it for ever" Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!"

Struck with the mournful solemnity of this farewell his disciples gathered round him as He went forth from the temple, and one of them, speaking in the name of the rest, called his attention to the magnificence of the structure, "Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!" As though inviting Jesus to revoke, if possible, words which must have struck cold to the heart of Israelites, who loved and venerated beyond all other places the place where God's honour dwelt! But what calm sternness is there not in the Saviour's answer

to this appeal! "Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down!" Total destruction! Not even a ruin left of all that gorgeous palace of the Most High! No wonder that the disciples imagined that their Master was speaking of the end of all things, when He thus announced the demolition of the sanctuary where alone God might be propitiated for the sins of men: the sanctuary which had been reared by kings, and the surpassing glories of which had been sung by prophets: no wonder that in their anxious question they coupled together two events, which to a Jew must have seemed almost necessarily connected: "Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” And, indeed, these two events, however widely separated in time, are most closely united in principle: for as the demolition of the temple terminated the first dispensation, so the end of the world is but the termination of the second: as the ruins of the temple buried the law, so the ruins of

the world shall bury the Gospel: and as God's vengeance on his rebellious people served more effectually to instal the Gospel kingdom of faith and hope and love, so shall his wider vengeance on a rebellious world instal that better kingdom, in which faith and hope shall be lost in the full satisfaction of actual enjoyment, and love alone remain. Accordingly our Lord in answering this compound question of his disciples, so far from separating what they had joined, himself embraces in one view the scenery of both events: throughout the remarkable prophecy which he delivered on this occasion, and which is recorded in the 24th chapter of St Matthew, the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world are inseparably intermingled: and whilst the fearful portents which actually accompanied that memorable sign, the horrors which signalized the outpouring of God's wrath on the doomed city, are pourtrayed with vivid accuracy, we cannot but recognize that the representation, as a whole, is far too gigantic to have been yet fulfilled: that it requires the universe for its scene: the day of judgment for the fulness of its time.

The intrinsic similarity of the two events might not however suffice to account for our Lord's thus uniting them in one indissoluble tenor of prophetic warning, were it not connected with the peculiar mode in which futurity seems to have been revealed to the prophetic mind. This mode is clearly indicated by the title which originally was the only one applied to prophets: for as we learn from 1 Sam. ix. 9, "he that is now called a Prophet was

beforetime called a Seer." Now this title seer indicates seeing, beholding, mental vision, as the mode in which future events were made known: and this inference is confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt by the circumstance that of all the titles given to prophets in the sacred language the title seer is the only one which bears upon the mode in which futurity was revealed, or indeed upon the revelation of futurity at all: for the other name, which we translate prophet', means nothing more than preacher, and relates exclusively to that function of the prophets whereby they were the instructors of the people, preachers of righteousness, without implying any disclosures of futurity whatever. Hence we may gather that the chief, if not the only method by which God signified to his servants those things that should shortly come to pass was by causing them to behold them in vision: it was not the dull and tedious narrative of a chronological succession, but the vivid and instantaneous impression of a picture, in which would naturally be grouped together in immediate juxtaposition all events connected with each other by a common origin or by similarity of principle. And this view is strongly corroborated by the light it throws upon those numerous passages in the prophets of the Old Testament in which we find the first and second coming of our Lord brought into immediate contact: his second advent in his glorious majesty appearing to be the instantaneous result of his first advent in great humility: for though the two events