phet, if he
had stopped short where Daniel stopped. For what he goes on to
foretell has not been fulfilled. For he proceeds to say, that "there
shall be signs in the sun, and the moon, and the stars," &c. All this
is taken from the 2nd chapter of Joel, who says that such things
shall take place; not, however, at the destruction of Jerusalem, but
in "the latter days," at the time of the restoration of Israel. So that
here Jesus has been rather unlucky. For, in truth, there were no
signs in the sun, and the moon, and the stars, at that time; neither
was there upon earth any "great distress of nations," except in
Judea. Nor were "the powers of heaven" shaken. Certainly, they
did not see Jesus "coming in the clouds of heaven, with power,
and great glory;" and most assuredly, that generation did pass
away, and many others since, and "all these things" have not been
fulfilled.

I know very well, and have very often smiled over the contrivances
by which learned Christians have endeavoured to save the credit of
this prophecy. They say that--it is a figurative prophecy relating
entirely to the destruction of Jerusalem, which did in fact take
place in that generation; that the expressions about the "distress of
nations," and "the sea and waves roaring," the "signs in heaven,"
&c., are merely poetical; and that the shaking of the powers of
heaven was merely the shaking and pulling-down the stones of the
temple, figuratively called heaven; and that the glorious coming of
Jesus "in the clouds of heaven, with power, and great glory,"
meant merely, that he sent Titus, and the Romans to destroy,
Jerusalem, or perhaps might have been an invisible spectator
himself.

The reader will easily see, that all this is nonsense. And the
Commentator Grotius, after meddling a great while in this
troublesome business, at length ventures to insinuate, that God
might have suffered Jesus to be in a mistake about the time of his
second coming, and to tell the Apostles what he did, for the sake of
keeping up their spirits!

But to annihilate the figurative hypothesis of these well-meaning
Commentators at once, it will be only necessary to bring forward
the testimony following. 1. The other Evangelists make an express
distinction between the destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of
Jesus; and not only so, but represent him as saying, that after that
event, (i. e., the destruction of Jerusalem, "in those days," i. e., in
the same era in which that