fore doing these things, he had been put
to death. Therefore, they argued, he must come again, to finish
his uncompleted mission. Such was the derivation of the apostolic
and ecclesiastical doctrine of the speedy second advent of Christ
to judge the dead and the living, and to wind up the present
scheme of things. The belief was inevitable under the circumstances.
To have believed otherwise, they must have reconstructed the current
idea of the Messiah, and have seen in him no political monarch
with an outward realm, but purely a king of truth.

For this they were not ready; though it seems as if, after
the experience of eighteen hundred years, we ought by this
time to be prepared to see that such was really the intention of
Providence.

It is a question of primary interest, whether Jesus himself, in
assuming the Messiahship, regarded it personally as an exclusively
spiritual office, or as a literally including these royal and
judicial functions in a visible form.

Jesus foretold, in the same imaginary used by the previous
prophets, and familiar to the minds of his contemporaries, the
speedy approach of frightful calamities, wars, rumor of wars,
famine and slaughter, Jerusalem compassed with armies and
destroyed. Then, he adds, the Son of man shall come in the clouds
of heaven, with all his holy angels, and take possession of the
scene, apportioning the destinies of the righteous and the wicked.
The question is, whether this pictured reappearance, in such
transcendent pomp and power, was meant by him as a literal
prophecy, to be physically fulfilled in his own person; or as a
moral horoscope of the destined fortunes of his religion, a
figurative representation of the establishment and reign of his
spiritual truth. The latter view seems to us to be the correct one.

In the first place, this is what has actually taken place. In the
growing recognition of his spirit and power, in the spread of his
teachings and name, in the revolutionizing advancement of his
kingdom among men, Jesus has come again and again. Jerusalem was
destroyed by the Romans, as he foretold, amidst unspeakable
tribulations, and the disciples of the new faith installed in
domination over the world. He said the time was then at hand, even
at the doors, that some of those standing by should not taste
death until all these things came to pass. If his prophecy bore a
moral sense, the sequel justified it; if it bore a physical sense,
the sequel refuted