صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

SERMON I.

ST. JAMES v. 8.

For the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.

TIME was, when I know not what mystical meanings were drawn, by a certain cabalistic alchymy, from the simplest expressions of holy writ,-from expressions in which no allusion could reasonably be supposed to any thing beyond the particular occasion upon which they were introduced. While this frenzy raged among the learned, visionary lessons of divinity were often derived, not only from detached texts of scripture, but from single words,-not from words only, but from letters— from the place, the shape, the posture of a letter: and the blunders of transcribers, as they have since proved to be, have been the ground-work of many a fine-spun meditation.

It is the weakness of human nature, in every instance of folly, to run from one extreme to its opposite. In later ages, since we have seen the futility of those mystic expositions in which the school of Origen so much delighted, we have been too apt to fall into the contrary error; and the same unwarrantable license of figurative interpretation which they employed to elevate, as they thought, the plainer parts of Scripture, has been used, in modern times, in effect to lower the divine.

Among the passages which have been thus misrepresented by the refinements of a false criticism, are all those

[ocr errors][ocr errors]

which contain the explicit promise of the “coming of the Son of Man in glory, or in his kingdom;” which it is become so much the fashion to understand of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman arms, within half a century after our Lord's ascension, that, to those who take the sense of Scripture from some of the best modern expositors, it must seem doubtful whether any clear prediction is to be found in the New Testament, of an event in which, of all others, the Christian world is the most interested.

As I conceive the right understanding of this phrase to be of no small importance, seeing the hopes of the righteous and the fears of the wicked rest chiefly on the explicit promises of our Saviour's coming, it is my present pur. pose to give the matter, as far as my abilities may be equal to it, a complete discussion; and although, from the nature of the subject, the disquisition must be chiefly critical, consisting in a particular and minute examination of the passages wherein the phrase in question occurs, yet I trust, that by God's assistance, I shall be able so to state my argument, that every one here, who is but as well versed as every Christian ought to be in the English Bible, may be a very good judge of the evidence of my conclusion. If I should sometimes have occasion, which will be but seldom, to appeal to the Scriptures in the original language, it will not be to impose a new sense upon the texts which I may find it to my purpose to produce, but to open and ascertain the meaning, where the original expressions may be more clear and determinate than those of our translation. And in these cases, the expositions which grammatical considerations may have suggested to me, will be evidenced to you, by the force and perspicuity they may give to the passages in question, considered either in themselves or in the connection with their several contexts.

It is the glory of our church, that the most illiterate of her sons are in possession of the Scriptures in their mother tongue. It is their duty to make the most of so great a

« السابقةمتابعة »