Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/171

 of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." This, to a superficial reader, may sound something like a description of the destruction of the universe, but a very little reflection must convince him that it is the sound and appearance only, and not the sense of it. If such terms, when made use of by the prophets, have a purely figurative sense, it is clear that when the same terms are employed by the Redeemer, they must have a similiar significance. In both cases the author is essencially the same, and the images are alike: how reasonable then is the conclusion that they ought to be similarly interpreted. As the descriptions previously adverted to, referred to the affairs of the Church with which they were connected, so does this of our Lord. The learned admit that it cannot mean what it seems to express. The sun may be darkened, and the moon may not give her light; but these are circumstances which frequently occur in the ordinary course of nature: eclipses take place without endangering the safety of the universe, or interrupting the pursuits of men. Meteoric phenomena presenting all the appearance of falling stars are common to every observer, but they do not occasion inconvenience or alarm.

These, of course, cannot be the phenomena to which the Lord referred as the prelude to His second coming. And when we remember that the sun is some millions of times larger than the earth, and that there are some earths in the universe a thousand times greater than this which we