tural idea, that the material universe would be destroyed and give place to a new order of things. But if this idea was connected in their minds,—as it no doubt was,—with the impression that the Lord would then come to reward the faithful and punish the disobedient, the force of truth, in its external and apparent form,—the only form in which they were prepared to receive it,—was brought to bear directly upon the conscience and life. That the apostles correctly understood the prophecies in regard to the coming of the Lord and the end of the world, will hardly be maintained by any one, who has observed the discrepancies which exist in their writings, when treating upon these subjects. In the first epistle to the Thessalonians, chapter 4th, Paul says: "We which are alive, and remain unto his coming, shall not prevent them which are asleep,"—plainly intimating the expectation, that he and his brethren who were then alive, would live to witness the second coming of the Lord. The same apostle, in writing to Timothy, charges him to keep a certain commandment, "until the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ." And in writing to Titus, he speaks of looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God, and our savior Jesus Christ. In fact it appears to have been the constant tendency of the teaching and writing of the apostles, to direct attention to the second coming of the Lord, as an event which was literally near at hand. Their expectations on this subject were evidently not realized. There was the beginning of a long series of disappointments, which have been repeated in almost every century of the christian dispensation, and which seem likely to continue so long as the christian church continue to substitute the literal for the spiritual, sense of the prophecies. But the apostle Paul evidently saw, in the subsequent years of his life, that he had been too hasty in his expectations of the immediate coming of the Lord. For at a later period, he addressed another letter to the Thessalonian church, the principal object of which appears
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