And that all His disciples, and St Paul as much as any, put that meaning upon His words, is a matter of fact and of history, to be seen plainly in Holy Scripture.

But, while the text compels us to believe that the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans was a coming of the Son of Man—­a manifestation of the Kingdom of God—­a day of Judgment, in the strictest and most awful sense; yet we are not compelled to limit the meaning of the text to the destruction of Jerusalem.

No prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation.  Prophets, apostles—­how much more our Lord Himself—­do not merely indulge in presages; they lay down laws—­laws moral, spiritual, eternal—­which have been fulfilling themselves from the beginning; which are fulfilling themselves now; which will go on fulfilling themselves to the end of time.

So said our Lord Jesus of His own prophecies concerning the destruction of Jerusalem.  It was but one example—­a most awful one—­of the laws of His kingdom.  Not in Judaea only, but wherever the carcase was, there would the eagles be gathered together.  In the moral, as in the physical word, there were beasts of prey—­the scavengers of God—­ready to devour out of His kingdom nations, institutions, opinions, which had become dead, and decayed, and ready to infect the air.  Many a time since the Roman eagles flocked to Jerusalem has that prophecy been fulfilled; and many a time will it be fulfilled once more, and yet once more.

And what else, if we look at them carefully and reverently, is the meaning of the words in this my text, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away”?

Shall we translate this,—­Heaven and earth shall not come true:  but My words shall come true?  By so doing we may put some little meaning into the latter half of the verse; but none into the former.  Surely there is a deeper meaning in the words than that of merely coming true.  Surely they mean that His words are eternal, perpetual; for ever present, possible, imminent; for ever coming true.  So, indeed, they would not pass away.  So they would be like the heavens and the earth, and the laws thereof; like heat, gravitation, electricity, what not—­always here, always working, always asserting themselves—­with this difference, that when the physical laws of the heavens and the earth, which began in time, in time have perished, the spiritual laws of God’s kingdom, of Christ’s moral government of moral beings, shall endure for ever and for ever, eternal as that God whose essence they reflect.

Therefore I mean nothing less than that the great and final day of Judgment is past; or that we are not to look for that second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ which, as our forefathers taught us to hope, shall set right all the wrong of this diseased world.