against the idea that it was immediately at hand, had been interpreted as pointing to a very short interval before it should be upon them. 'We which are alive and remain' may represent a class of similar expressions not thus meant by the speaker, but capable of conveying the idea that the hearers should see the Lord's appearing in their own time. I again quote from the same Introduction as before: 'The time of our Lord's coming was hidden from all created beings,-nay, in the mystery of his mediatorial office, from the Son himself (Mark xiii. 32). Even after His Resurrection, when questioned by the Apostles as to the time of his restoring the kingdom of Israel, His reply is still, that it is not for them to know the times and the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power (Acts i. 7).' Here then is a plain indication, which has not, I think, been sufficiently made use of in judging of the Epistles. The Spirit was to testify of Christ: to take of the things of Christ and show them unto the Apostles. So that, however much that Spirit, in His infinite wisdom, might be pleased to impart to them of the details and accompanying circumstances of the Lord's appearing, we may be sure that the truth

spoken by our Lord, 'Of that day and hour knoweth no man,' would hold good with regard to them, and be traced in their writings. If they were true men, and their words and epistles the genuine production of inspiration of them by that Spirit of Truth, we may expect to find in such speeches and writings tokens of their appointed uncertainty of the day and hour; expectations, true in expression and fully justified by appearance, yet corrected, as God's purposes were manifested, by advancing experience and larger effusions of the spirit of prophecy. If then I find in the course of St. Paul's Epistles, that expressions which occur in the earlier ones, and seem to indicate expectation of the Lord's almost immediate coming, are gradually modified,—disappear altogether in the Epistles of the imprisonment,—and are succeeded by others speaking in a very different strain, of 'dissolving, and being with Christ,' and passing through death and the resurrection, in the latest Epistles,I regard it, not as a strange thing, not as a circumstance which I must explain away for fear of weakening the authority of his Epistles, but as exactly that which I should expect to find: as the very strongest testimony that these Epistles were written

by one who was left in this uncertainty-not by one who wished to make it appear that inspiration had rendered him omniscient. And in this, the earliest of those Epistles, I do find exactly that which I might expect on this head. While every word and every detail respecting the Lord's coming is a perpetual inheritance for the Church,-while we continue to comfort one another with the glorious and heart-stirring sentences which he utters to us in the word of the Lord,' no candid eye can help seeing in the Epistle how the uncertainty of 'the day and hour' has tinged all these passages with a hue of near anticipation: how natural it was that the Thessalonians, receiving this Epistle, should have allowed that anticipation to be brought even yet nearer, and have imagined the day to have been actually at hand.

The nature of the contents of this first Epistle will have been already surmised. It was written because the Apostle wanted to fill up by exhortation and consolation the necessary defects of a teaching, which had been indeed most earnest and plain as far as it had gone, but had been broken off before it was complete. The earlier portion of the letter is spent in congratulating the Thessalo

nians and praising them for the simplicity and readiness with which they had received his message, and for the eminence of their faith, which had become since then matter of notoriety: in reminding them also of the whole character of his own demeanour among them: his disinterested independence of them, and gentle, even mother-like, affection towards them. He next recalls to mind the hostility of the Jews, not so much to himself as to them, and draws a comparison between them. and the churches of Judea in this respect (14-16). Then he touches gently his own case, showing how this same hostility had, since his departure, defeated one and another scheme which he had made for seeing them (17-20). The third chapter is occupied with a narrative of the circumstances under which the report of Timothy respecting them had reached him, and with expressions of thankfulness and affection resulting thereupon; concluding (11-13) with a wish for the possibility of his visiting them, and for their increase in love and holiness, that they might be blameless before God at the Lord's coming. And only now begin the practical exhortations and corrections of defects. These correspond to the order in which those de

fects have been noted above.

Thessalonica seems,

like its wealthy sister Corinth, to have been disgraced by the prevalent practice of immorality. The disciples there are, in consequence, exhorted to purity, and to the chaste adoption of that only method which God has provided for man's lawful use. Next he very gently touches on a want of brotherly love, blaming, where he seems to praise, as was often his habit. And thus he passes on to that which is in the mind of every Christian, the great passage in the Epistle: the revelation respecting the state and prospects of the dead in Christ. I have before spoken of the mistake which they had made; let us now see how St. Paul corrects it.

They who had, through the victory of Jesus, exchanged death for sleep (see below), are gone to Jesus, and when God brings Him back to us, they will also be brought together with Him. For the order which shall be observed-no device of the Apostle's own mind, but revealed to him by the Lord-will be this: the living will have no advantage over the sleeping, because the Lord himself shall come down from heaven and awake the dead, who, before anything else is done, shall rise their spirits, which came with Jesus, being