Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/239

 meet the Lord in the air." Here, as in the original prediction, the Lord's coming is declared, the attendant angels, the trumpet, and the clouds are plainly spoken of. The gathering together of the elect in the Lord's narrative, is put by the Apostle as "the dead in Christ rising first;" and the circumstance of the elect being gathered from the winds, in the former, is spoken of in the latter, as meeting the Lord im the air. It is, therefore, most plain that the Apostle, when writing to the Thessalonians, was not delivering to them original information on the point, but simply stating, in his own way, that which, he had been informed the Lord had said upon the subject. He was not present when the discourse was delivered, and every one knows how terms suffer and become changed by traditional handling: this being so, the figurative character of the Lord's description is not at all disturbed by the Apostle's paraphrase; and, consequently, any effort to construe it naturally, is to do violence to its proper signification, and to create in the imagination the idea of phenomena which appal reason, defy philosophy, and which never can be realized.

As, then, it is most true that the Lord's description of His second coming to judgment is given in purely figurative language, and as the opinions which are commonly entertained upon this subject are drawn from that description, interpreted in a merely literal sense, it follows that such interpreters have not perceived its true signification. What that is we shall endeavour to discuss and elucidate in another chapter. In the meantime we may observe, that in our view of the case the prediction was never designed to receive any literal fulfilment on the plane of our natural earth, and that the actual scene of the occurrence was to be