It cannot be supposed: That were to asscribe to him a prediction which the event of things hath falsified. Mark his words: "There be some standing here who shall not taste of death." He says not "who shall not die," but "who shall not taste of death." Not to taste of death, is not to feel the pains of it -not to taste its bitterness. In this sense was the same expression used by our Lord upon other occasions, as was indeed the more simple expression of not dying, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death." The expression is to be understood with reference to the intermediate state between death and the final judgment, in which the souls both of the righteous and the wicked exist in a conscious state, the one comforted with the hope and prospect of their future glory, the other mortified with the expectation of torment. The promise to the saints, that they shall never taste of death, is without limitation of time; —in the next, a time being set, until which the persons intended shall not taste of death, it is implied that then they shall taste it. The departure of the

wicked into everlasting torment is in Scrip

ture called the second death. This is the death from which Christ came to save penitent sinners; and to this the impenitent remain obnoxious. The pangs and horrors of it will be such, that the evil of natural death, in comparison, may well be overlooked; and it may be said of the wicked, that they shall have no real taste of death till they taste it in the burning lake, whence the smoke of their torment shall ascend for ever and ever. This is what our Lord insinuates in the alarming menace of the text: This, at least, is the most literal exposition that the words will bear; and it connects them more than any other with the scope and occasion of the whole discourse. "Whosoever," says our Lord, "will lose his life shall find it," shall find,

instead of the life he loses here, a better in the world to come; "and whosoever will save his life shall lose it," - shall lose that life which alone is worth his care: "For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" For there will come a day of judgment and retribution: The Son of Man, he who

now converses with you in a human form, "shall come in the glory of the Father, with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works:" on them who, by patient continuance in welldoing, have sought for life and immortality, -on them he shall bestow glory and happiness, honour and praise; but "shame and rebuke, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil." The purport of the discourse was to enforce a just contempt both of the enjoyments and of the sufferings of the present life, from the consideration of the better enjoyments and of the heavier sufferings of the life to come: and because the discourse was occasioned by a fear which the disciples had betrayed of the sufferings of this world, for which another fear might seem the best antagonist,

for this reason, the point chiefly insisted on is the magnitude of the loss to them who should lose their souls. To give this consideration its full effect, the hearers are told that there were those among themselves who stood in this dangerous predicament. "There be some standing here who shall not taste of death till they see the Son of

Man coming in his kingdom;" and then will they be doomed to endless sufferings, in comparison with which the previous pangs of natural death are nothing. "Flatter not yourselves that these threatenings will never be executed, - that .none will be so incorrigibly bad as to incur the extremity of these punishments: verily, I say unto you, there are present, in this very assembly,-there are persons standing here, who will be criminal in that degree, that they will inevitably feel the severity of vindictive justice, persons who now perhaps hear these warnings with incredulity and contempt: but the time will come, when they will see the Son of Man, whom they despised whom they rejected whom they persecuted, coming to execute vengeance on them who have not known God, nor obeyed the gospel; and then will they be doomed to endless sufferings, in comparison with which the previous pangs of natural death are nothing.

It will be proper, however, to consider, whether, among the hearers of this discourse, there might be any at whom it may

be probable that our Lord should point so. express a denunciation of final destruction.

The

"There are some standing here." original words, according to the reading which our English translators seem to have followed, might be more exactly rendered"There are certain persons standing here ;” where the expression " certain persons" hath just the same definite sense as "a certain person," the force of the plural number being only that it is a more reserved, and, for that reason, a more alarming way of pointing at an individual. Now, in the assembly to which our Lord was speaking, a certain person, it may well be supposed, was present, whom charity herself may hardly scruple to include among the miserable objects of God's final vengeance. The son of perdition, Judas the traitor, was standing there. Our Saviour's first pre

diction of his passion was that which gave occasion to this whole discourse. It may reasonably be supposed, that the tragical conclusion of his life on earth was present to his mind, with all its horrid circumstances; and, among these, none was likely