No charge can be brought against the prophecy which we have been exhibiting, on the score of obscurity or ambiguousness of expression. It is expressed in the plainest terms, and admits of but one interpretation. Nothing can be said in detraction from its claim to inspiration, on the ground of its being general in its expression. It is singularly particular, as well as comprehensive. Nothing can be said in denial of the complete correspondence between these various predictions and the history of the times and places to which they refer. We have drawn the evidence from sources which cannot be suspected of any partiality to the prophetic character of Jesus. The History of the Wars of the Jews, by Josephus the Jewish priest; the Annals, by Tacitus a Roman consul; and the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon the English sceptic, are all the vouchers we require. What then is the alternative to which the student of prophecy is reduced? He must either acknowledge that Jesus was possessed of the spirit of genuine prophecy, or that he was so sagacious as to be able to foretell all these particulars when no one else could see any sign of them, or that the gospels containing these predictions were written after the events. The first the sceptic is resolved at all hazards to deny; the second he cannot suppose; the last he must assert, or give up his cause. For the same reason, therefore, that the heathen Porphyry, when he could not deny the strict correspondence between the prophecies of Daniel and the subsequent history of Egypt and

Syria, rather than confess that Daniel was a prophet, contradicted every principle of historical testimony for the sake of pretending that he must have written after the occurrence of what he foretold; so have some modern Porphyries been driven to assert that the evangelists who relate this prophecy of Jerusalem, must have written after the city was destroyed.* I need not say that the only reason pretended to in support of this assertion, is the very thing we have been laboring to show the strict agreement between the prophecy and the event. Their argument is neither more nor less than the following: If these words were written before the destruction of Jerusalem, Jesus was a genuine prophet; but we will not believe him to have been a genuine prophet; therefore these words were not written before the destruction of Jerusalem. A conclusion as shameless as it is senseless-as opposite to the faith of all history as to the rules of all sound criticism, and the opinion of the learned of all ages. It shows the strength of the argument from prophecy, as well as the infatuated obstinacy with which the human heart is capable of resisting whatever would bind it to the obedience of Christ.

But let us not forget that the destruction of Jerusalem, with its signs and tribulations, is set in the Scriptures as a type of an unspeakably more awful and momentous event-THE END OF THE WORLD. A day cometh when "the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall

* Voltaire. Watson's Ap. for Bible, p. 169.

fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other."* When that day shall arise on the world, knoweth no man. One thing we know, that it will find us just as death shall find us. Death, to each of us, will be virtually the coming of the Son of Then our eternal state will be sealed. Therefore doth wisdom utter her voice: O ye sons of men, prepare to meet your God; for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh. Watch; walk as children of light. Embrace the promises of the gospel, and live by faith in Christ Jesus the Lord. "Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, when he cometh, shall find so doing."

man.

*Matt. 24:29-31.

LECTURE IX.

THE PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY.

THERE is a peculiarity in the argument for the divine authority of Christianity, which we cannot but notice in the commencement of this lecture. While the several parts unite with the utmost harmony and prodigious strength in the construction of one grand system of evidence, each is a perfect argument in itself, and capable of furnishing, had we nothing else on which to depend, an ample support for the whole fabric of Christianity. We speak of the several parts composing that general division to which these lectures are restricted: the external evidence, such as the miracles, the prophecies, and that on which we are now about to enter, the propagation of Christianity. The two former have been discussed. We praise the subject, not the lecturer, in saying that we have not only established on solid ground the genuineness of the miracles of the gospel, and the prophetic attestation to the divine mission of our Lord; but that, in having done thus, we have twice finished the proof of Christianity as a divine revelation. It was complete when we had shown that Jesus and his apostles were attended by the credentials of genuine miracles. It was commenced again, and completed a second time, by a course of argument entirely dif

ferent, when we had shown that Jesus was a prophet, as well as the great subject of prophecy. We are now to begin anew, hoping to prove a third time, and by a course of evidence entirely different from either of the preceding, that the gospel of Christ is none other than "the glorious gospel of the blessed God.” Our argument will be drawn from the rapid propagation of the gospel, in contrast with the difficulties it had to overcome.

It was only forty days after the resurrection of Christ, that he delivered to his little band of apostles the parting charge, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." "Go, teach," or disciple, "all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." In other words, Go, carry the war of the truth into the midst of its enemies; think not your work completed till you have planted the cross upon the high places of the heathen, and have gathered together my elect "from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." Such was the work intrusted to those few unlearned, despised disciples, who formed almost the whole strength of the Christian church in the day when their beloved Master was received out of their sight, and ascended into heaven. Now let us consider, in the first division of this lecture,

I. THE DIFFICULTIES they had to surmount in executing this command. Be it remarked,

1. That the idea of propagating a new religion, to the exclusion of every other, was at that time a perfect novelty to all mankind, with the exception of