not that the sign shall be imprinted on a cloud, or in any part of the heavens; but that he who is now in the heavens shall, when he comes down, have a sign and signification of his own; that is, proper to him who is there glorified, and shall return in glory. And he disparages the beauty of the sun, who inquires for a rule to know, when the sun shines, or the light breaks forth from its chambers of the east; and the Son of Man shall need no other signification, but his infinite retinue, and all the angels of God worshipping him, and sitting upon a cloud, and leading the heavenly host, and bringing his elect with him, and being clothed with the robes of majesty, and trampling upon devils, and confounding the wicked, and destroying death: but all these great things shall be invested with such strange circumstances, and annexes of mightiness and divinity, that all the world shall confess the glories of the Lord; and this is sufficiently signified by St. Paul, We shall all be set before the throne or place of Christ's judicature; For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God:* that is, at the day of judgment, when we are placed ready to receive our sentence, all knees shall bow to the holy Jesus, and confess him to be God the Lord; meaning, that our Lord's presence shall be such, as to force obeisance from angels, and men, and devils; and his address to judgment shall sufficiently declare his person and his office, and his proper glories. This is the greatest scene of majesty that shall be in that day, till the sentence be pronounced; but there goes much before this, which prepares all the world to the expectation and consequent reception of this mighty Judge of men and angels.

The majesty of the Judge, and the terrours of the judgment, shall be spoken aloud by the immediate

*Rom. xiv. 10.

forerunning accidents, which shall be so great violences to the old constitutions of nature, that it shall break her very bones, and disorder her till she be destroyed. Saint Jerom relates out of the Jews' books, that their Doctors use to account fifteen days of prodigy immediately before Christ's coming, and to every day assign a wonder, any one of which, if we should chance to see in the days of our flesh, it would affright us into the like thoughts, which the old world had, when they saw the countries round about them covered with water and the divine vengeance; or as those poor people near Adria, and the Mediterranean Sea, when their houses and cities are entering into graves, and the bowels of the earth rent with convulsions and horrid tremblings. The sea, they say, shall rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, and thence descend into hollowness, and a prodigious drought; and when they are reduced again to their usual proportions, then all the beasts and creeping things, the monsters and the usual inhabitants of the sea, shall be gathered together, and make fearful noises to distract mankind: the birds shall mourn and change their songs into threnes and sad accents: rivers of fire shall rise from east to west, and the stars shall be rent into threds of light, and scatter like the beards of comets; then shall be fearful earthquakes, and the rocks shall rend in pieces, the trees shall distil blood, and the mountains and fairest structures shall return into their primitive dust; the wild beasts shall leave their dens, and come into the companies of men, so that you shall hardly tell how to call them, herds of men, or congregations of beasts; then shall the graves open and give up

give up their dead, and those which are alive in nature and dead in fear, shall be forced from the rocks whither they went to hide them, and from caverns of the earth, where they would fain have been

concealed; because their retirements are dismantled, and their rocks are broken into wider ruptures, and admit a strange light into their secret bowels; and the men being forced abroad into the theatre of mighty horrours, shall run up and down distracted and at their wit's end; and then some shall die, and some shall be changed; and by this time the elect shall be gathered together from the four quarters of the world, and Christ shall come along with them to judgment.

These signs, although the Jewish Doctors reckon them by order and a method, concerning which they had no other revelation (that appears) nor sufficiently credible tradition; yet for the main parts of the things themselves, the holy scripture records Christ's own words, and concerning the most terrible of them; the sum of which, as Christ related them, and his Apostles recorded and explicated, is this, 1he earth shall tremble, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken, the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood; that is, there shall be strange eclipses of the sun, and fearful aspects in the moon, who when she is troubled looks red like blood; The rocks shall rend, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, The heavens shall be rolled up like a parchment, the earth shall be burned with fire, the hills shall be like wax, for there shall go a fire before Him, and a mighty tempest shall be stirred round about Him:

Dies irae, Dies illa

Solvet sec'lum in favilla;

Teste David, cum Sibyllâ.*

The trumpet of God shall sound, and the voice of the Archangel; that is, of him who is the prince of

*That day, that day, that dreadful day,
When man to judgment wakes from clay,
What hope shall be the sinner's stay!

SCOTT.

all that great army of spirits, which shall then attend their Lord, and wait upon and illustrate his glory; and this also is part of that which is called the sign of the Son of Man; for the fulfilling of all these predictions, and the preaching of the gospel to all nations, and the conversion of the Jews, and these prothat sign. digies, and the address of majesty, make up The notice of which things some way or other came to the very heathen themselves, who were alarmed into caution and sobriety by these dread remembran

ces:

-Sic cum, compage soluta,

Saecula tot mundi suprema coëgerit hora,
Antiquum repetens iterum chaos, omnia mistis
Sidera sideribus concurrent: ignea pontum
Astra petent, tellus extendere littora nolet
Excutietque fretum; fratri contraria Phoebe
Ibit,-
-Totaque discors
Machina divulsi turbabit foedera mundi.*

Which things when they are come to pass, it will be no wonder if men's hearts shall fail them for fear,

ages

*So shall one hour at last this Globe control,
Break up the vast machine, dissolve the whole,
And time no more through measured roll.
Then Chaos hoar shall seize his former right,
And reign with Anarchy and endless Night;
The starry lamps shall combat in the sky,
And, lost and blended in each other, die;
Quench'd in the deep the heavenly fires shall fall,

And ocean cast abroad o'erspread the Ball;

The Moon no more her well known course shall run
But rise from western waves and meet the Sun;
Ungovern'd shall she quit her ancient way,
Hers ambitious to supply the day.
Confusion wild shall all around be hurl'd
And discord and disorder tear the world.

Lucan, lib. i.

ROWE.

and their wits be lost with guilt, and their fond hopes destroyed by prodigy and amazement; but it will be an extreme wonder, if the consideration and certain expectation of these things shall not awake our sleeping spirits, and raise us from the death of sin, and the baseness of vice and dishonourable actions, to live soberly and temperately, chastely and justly, humbly and obediently; that is, like persons that believe all this; and such, who are not madmen or fools, will order their actions according to these notices. For if they do not believe these things, where is their faith? If they do believe them and sin on, and do as if there were no such thing to come to pass, where is their prudence, and what are their hopes, and where their charity? How do they differ from beasts, save that they are more foolish? for beasts go on and consider not, because they cannot; but we can consider, and will not; we know that strange terrours shall affright us all, and strange deaths and torments shall seize upon the wicked, and that we cannot escape, and the rocks themselves will not be able to hide us from the fears of those prodigies which shall come before the day of judgment; and that the mountains (though when they are broken in pieces we call upon them to fall upon us) shall not be able to secure us one minute from the present vengeance; and yet we proceed with confidence or carelessness, and consider not that there is no greater folly in the world, than for a man to neglect his greatest interest, and to die for trifles and little regards, and to become miserable for such interests which are not excusable in a child. He that is youngest hath not long to live : he that is thirty, forty, or fifty years old, hath spent most of his life, and his dream is almost done, and in a very few months he must be cast into his eternal portion; that is, he must be in an unalterable condition, his final sentence shall pass according as he shall