Here it is a trial to your patience that the cross of Christ should be such a rock of offence, and that he who bore its agony and its shame for the expiation of human guilt should be "despised and rejected of men," that his grace and his authority should be trampled upon by the very apostates whom he suffered to save, and that his people, bearing his name and supporting his cause, should be exposed on that account to so much persecution and reproach. But when your Saviour comes, he will appear in mighty power and in dazzling glory-his enemies will be punished with the destruction from which they would not permit him to redeem them-the numberless trophies of his humiliation and his blood will be assembled to magnify and to honour him—and all the hosts of heaven will unite with all the redeemed from the earth, to ascribe to him the blessing, and the praise, and the dominion, which he had so richly won for himself, by achieving the salvation of a guilty world, and bringing a countless multitude of ruined creatures back to the God from whom they had departed, and to the felicity which they had forfeited and lost.

Experiencing such evils, and looking forward to such a deliverance, desire for the second coming of Christ must necessarily exist and prevail in your minds. Whether in prosperity or in adversity, you cannot but cherish it as you anticipate that event. Not a step can you take in the

journey of life, but the circumstances of your condition will suggest it. When overtaken by the storm of persecution, and involved in the depths of outward distress or of spiritual calamity, it will become strong, ardent, and predominant. And when, in the hour of dissolution, you cast the eye of faith to him in whom you trust, and hear him saying, "Behold I come quickly and my reward is with me"-you will be ready to reply, in full purpose and earnest longing of affection, "Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus!"

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SERMON XXI.

PATIENT WAITING FOR THE SECOND
COMING OF CHRIST.

1 Cor. i. 7.

Waiting for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

IN our last discourse on these words, we considered them as implying an ardent and decided desire for the event to which they refer.

V. It now only remains to observe, in the fifth place, that the words of the text imply that the Christian waits for the coming of his Saviour in the exercise of patience and resignation.

Submission to the divine arrangements is a necessary part of the Christian character, at all times, and in all circumstances. He who is destitute of this grace shows himself to be destitute of the very first principles of a believer in God and in Christ. And whatever he may have in other respects, he wants that without which the Gospel cannot be to him either a standard of faith or a

rule of conduct, in such a sense, or to such an extent, as to carry him to heaven. But while this spirit of submission must distinguish him in general, and pervade all the workings of his mind, and the whole tenor of his deportment; there are cases in which it is more conspicuously becoming and indispensable, and in which it is expedient to have it more especially recommended and enforced. One of these is the case now under consideration. The believer is supposed to be looking forward to the second coming of Christ with strong and ardent desire; and not merely is his desire produced by a belief in the superiority of the heavenly world to which he then expects to go, over the present world in which he is still doomed to dwell, but his desire is vehement in proportion to the liveliness of those views which he entertains respecting the happiness on which he is to enter, and the severity of those evils, from whose pressure the change which he anticipates is wholly and for ever to emancipate him. If his faith be so vigorous as to realize with great clearness the glories of the future state-if his hopes are remarkably vivid and assured-if his existing circumstances have been stripped of many of those comforts and allurements which formerly wedded him to the earth-and if numerous and protracted distresses have destroyed his relish for the place which he now inhabits, and hedged him in to the contem

plation of immortality as that in which alone he can expect to find repose-in such a situation he is apt to become discontented with his continuance in the world-to fret and complain that his stay in it is unduly prolonged-and so to wish for admittance into those better, and brighter, and more blissful regions that lie beyond it, as to make his present condition unreasonably irksome, and its various duties distasteful and oppressive. And, therefore, it is peculiarly proper to remind believers, who are either thus tempted, or are in danger of being so tempted, of the necessity of a humble and cheerful acquiescence in the will of God, whether he is pleased to shorten or to lengthen their abode in the wilderness. And it is the more especially proper and useful to remind them of this, when we are exhorting them to cherish the desire of Christ's second coming-not only teaching them that such an affection is natural and lawful, but representing it to them as necessarily resulting from true faith in the reality of that event, and conscious preparation for the felicity into which it is to introduce them.

Nor are these two things in any degree inconsistent. The one is by no means a negation of the other. My desire for Christ's second coming does not infer that, in the blameable meaning of the phrase, I am impatient for it. The patience in which I am required to possess my