meaning of my text is general: "What I say unto you, I say unto all, watch." The professed followers of Jesus in every age and clime are most deeply interested in it. I shall call your attention

I. To the reasons why we are to watch. II. To the manner in which our watchfulness must be exercised.

May God the Holy Spirit powerfully impress us all with a sense of the danger of sinful spiritual negligence!

I. I am first to speak of the reasons why we are to watch. This duty is but a plain inference from the facts which I laid before you in the preceding discourse, that the sore judgments of the Lord have ever been inflicted in an hour unlooked for.

The suspension of any threatened judgment is a reason for increasing watchfulness. If indeed there were no certainty of its arriving at last, a long delay might furnish, perhaps, some presumptive evidence that all things would ever continue as they were, unchanged: but when we know that what is predicted will assuredly, at some period, be accomplished, the length of the time that is already elapsed is an argument that little yet remains unspent. Does any man imagine, because he has lived sixty, seventy, eighty years, and not seen death, that therefore he shall never, or not for a long time, die? Why, he learns from the mere tale of the years that he has numbered, that now he is on the brink of

the grave. When the tide has long been flowing in, we are sure that the ebb is near at hand. And though the aged man knows not the exact hour, when he shall be summoned from life, yet he has infirmities and sorrows, which warn him to set his house in order. So we have tokens of the world's decrepitude, signs of the last days, which they that are wise are commanded by our Lord to recognise. If we see these, we are surely called to watchfulness. To neglect them, would be like folly as if Belshazzar had braved the vision of the handwriting upon his palace wall, and persisted in his impious revelry.

I shall, in this part of my subject, endeavour to trace the scripture character of

the last days, and point out to you some of those clouds, rising upon the world, which seem to prognosticate the storm. I must premise, that there are some controverted points, on which it would be foreign to my purpose to touch. I take the plain scriptural ground, that, in what are called "the last days," there is to be a coming of the Lord, preceded and attended with tremendous judgments: and I add my conviction that the disastrous character of these last days is now somewhat apparent. Whether the coming of the Lord referred to, be one of those figurative advents, not, as I have proved, uncommon in the bible, or, indeed, that great solemnity, when the Judge shall visibly descend from heaven, and the dead

shall hear his voice, and the earth shall be on fire, I am not called on here to decide. It need not be objected that this indecision is inconsistent with my former discourses. In them, indeed, I particularly proved the certainty and suddenness of Christ's personal and final advent: yet it is anything but incongruous, while exhorting you to watch for that, to say that the signs of some, of any, coming, whether the last or not, whether literal or figurative, are now discernible.

Our Lord, in the celebrated prophecy which he delivered shortly before his death, gave his disciples warning of the near destruction of Jerusalem, and of the judgments of the latter days. It is not,