children of Israel: yet the blessings connected with it are not confined to them alone, for their restoration and conversion will be to the world like life from the dead. At the present time, indeed, the horizon, as far as the utmost stretch of sense can reach, is dark and foreboding, and every Christian heart must "sigh and cry," on account of the abominations which are perpetrated in our land, and must feel deeply grieved at the thought, that though national guilt has been acknowledged by a special day of humiliation, yet that there is so little appearance of any real forsaking of our national crimes. But that the difference between truth and error, revelation and human tradition, still seems to be almost lost amidst the dangerous principles of expediency, which prevail so much around us.

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While, then, the prospect before us, to the Christian's eye, is one of no small alarm, let us, my brethren, by faith, fix our anticipating gaze upon the glory which is to be revealed, and be ever looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.” All Scripture, indeed, will be fulfilled, and faith expects the accomplishment of it all. But it is the glorious appearing of the Son of man that is every where presented to our view as the great object of our hope; let us not,

then, be turned away by any of the difficulties which the reasoning powers of poor finite man might suggest in opposition to this truth,-THE

PERSONAL

PREMILLENNIAL ADVENT of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which is emphatically the hope of the Apostolic Church; but let us cleave to the sure word of prophecy, expecting whatever God has promised; remembering that, whatever may be the order in which these events may transpire, not one word can possibly fail of all that the Lord has said. "Seeing then," dear brethren," that ye look for such things, be diligent, that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless." Let the believer who has fled for refuge to Jesus Christ the Saviour, and who is yet sometimes much hindered in the hopeful anticipation of the expected glory, by a consciousness of present shortcomings and manifold infirmities, know for a surety, that the promises of God in Christ Jesus are not made to the degree but to the reality of grace; not to the intensity, but to the genuineness of faith. I say not this that any of you, my Christian brethren, should be satisfied with your present attainments, but to excite you to plead at the throne of grace what you have received, as a reason why more should be bestowed upon you; that thus you may be led to

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use all diligence to make your calling and election sure, so that an entrance may be ministered to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."

"Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen."

LECTURE XII.

THE DAY OF THE LORD.

BY THE HON. AND REV. H. M. VILLIERS, M.A., RECTOR OF ST. GEORGE'S, BLOOMSBURY; AND CANON

RESIDENTIARY OF ST. PAUL'S.

2 PET. III. 10.

"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

PERMIT me, dear brethren, in opening the last Lecture of the series, to express my thankfulness to God for the great and increasing interest which has been manifested this year in the very important study of unfulfilled Prophecy. I do not speak only of the crowded congregations

which have met in this church on every occasion of delivering a prophetical Lecture; but I refer also to the strong and powerfully written criticisms, which have emanated from the press upon the different volumes of sermons which have been preached in this place.

Of their tone there is nothing to complain; a few sharp expressions may be expected to flow from a critic's pen, even though he be a Christian critic; and when we meet with them in our opponents, they should teach us to set a watch over our own lips. Nor must I complain of the weight of our opponents' arguments. As a candid investigator of truth, I have felt it a duty to read them, and weigh them, and compare them with Scripture. And I am free to confess, that I am not shaken in any opinion I held and have avowed from this place again and again. That there are difficulties in the view which we entertain and in that which our opponents entertain I suppose both parties will have the honesty to avow. And if asked to fill up all the minor parts of the great skeleton plan which we have in these different series endeavoured to set before you, I am ready to confess that I cannot; but I know our opponents cannot make their system tally in every particular; and after weighing every