LECTURE XVI.

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MATHEW xi. 10.

I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee.

If it was part of God’s dispensation, that there should be one to prepare the way before Christ’s first coming, it may be expected much more, that there should be some to prepare the way before his second.  And so it is expressed in the collect for the third Sunday in Advent:  “O Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee; grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end.  Amen.”  NOW, in what does this preparing for him consist; and what is its object?  The Scripture will inform us as to both.  The object is, “Lest he come and smite the earth with a curse;” lest, when he shall come, his coming, which should be our greatest joy and happiness, should be our everlasting destruction; for there can abide before him nothing that is evil.  This is the object of preparing for Christ’s coming.  Next, in what does the preparation consist?  It consists in teaching men to live above the common notions of their age and country; to raise their standard higher; to live after what is right in God’s judgment, which often casts away, as faulty and bad, what men were accustomed to think good.  And as the people of Israel, although they had God’s revelation among them, had yet let their standard of good and evil become low, even so it has been in the Christian Israel.  We have God’s will in our hands, yet our judgments are not formed upon it; and, therefore, they who would prepare us for Christ’s coming, must set before us a commandment which is new, although old:  in one sense old, in every generation, inasmuch as it is the same which we had from the beginning; in another sense, in every generation more new, inasmuch, as the habits opposed to it have become the more confirmed; and the longer the night has lasted, the more strange to our eyes is the burst of the returning light.

But when we thus speak of the common notions of our age and country being deficient, and thus, in effect, commend notions which would be singular, do we not hold a language inconsistent with our common language and practice?  Do we not commonly regard singularity as a fault, and attach a considerable authority to the consent of men in general?  Nay, do we not often appeal to this consent as to a proof which a sane mind must admit as decisive?  Even in speaking of good and evil, have not the very words gained their present sense because the common consent of mankind has agreed to combine notions of self-satisfaction, of honour, and of love, with what we call good, and the contrary with what we call evil?