of the age,"

ble of the tares of the

36-43.

coming in clouds to scatter his enemies, and gather in his elect.

Observe," his elect" here are his remnant of Israel. In vain he had sought again and again, as he says at the close of the 23rd chapter, to gather the nations together; but here the desires of his heart will at last be accomplished—they will be gathered at last from the four winds of heaven. Thus this 37th verse of the 23rd chapter may serve to throw light on the 31st of the 24th, which last is often wrongly applied to the Church, "The end instead of to Israel. (See Isa. lxv. 9, 22.) See the annexed in the para- DIAGRAM, showing the above division of the Week. And now, if I am asked whether I believe the expression, field.-Matt. the end of the age," in the parable of the tares and the wheat xiii. 24-30, in Matt. xiii., applies, as in Matt. xxiv., to the last week of Daniel, I reply I confess that I do. Let us then look at the passage. The object of Christ in this parable was to correct a mistake into which he knew his people would fall with regard to his purposes. The wheat being sown in the field, and the tares shortly after sown by the enemy, the servants are here represented as deeming it their part, in order to keep the crop pure, to get rid of the tares. Hence the question they ask, "Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? From whence then hath it tares ?" And again," Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up ?" Here was their error; and therefore he lets them a little into his counsels. He gives them to know that it was to be a mixed state to the end-that the tares and the wheat, the children of the kingdom and the children of the wicked one, were to grow in the field-to occupy the same world till he himself should come to set every thing right. not be till the close of Daniel's last week.

This, we know, will

Then the Messiah This then leads me to

will come and establish his kingdom.
think that "the end of the age" in this passage, or "the har-
vest," as it is otherwise figuratively termed (verse 39), is the end
of Israel's age, namely, the week, at the termination of which the
Lord will come to separate between good and evil-between his
own people and the world-in a way that he will not do till then.

According to this, I may be told, then, that I apprehend that the Church will be on earth during the week, in the tribulation under the beast. To this I reply, that I believe it will be quite the reverse. The Church, I feel fully assured, will be

caught up to the Lord before the week opens, before the Antichrist rises. How is this? it will be said. Are not the saints in this dispensation "the children of the kingdom," and has it not been just stated that they will be on earth to the end? Yes, the members of Christ's mystical body, the Church, are surely the children of the kingdom; but this is no reason that they are exclusively such. The children of the kingdom I take to be a phrase of very general meaning, embracing all the people of God between the Lord's first coming in grace and his second coming in judgment—between the cross and the glory. What the Lord means to say, I believe, is, that the wicked and the righteous (the latter meaning the Church of God in the first place, and then after they are caught up, the Jewish remnant, who will then be raised up,) shall continue together on earth till the end. That then, "in the time of harvest," that is, not at any precise point of time, but during the week, he will say to the reapers, "Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them." This I take to be a preparatory action previous to their being actually burnt, and the wheat gathered in.

Then there is another point. When the Lord speaks of the tares and the wheat as thus growing together, as they are doing at present, we must view this as representing the condition of things, as a whole, between his first and last coming, without taking into account the fact that, during that time, generation after generation, both of the righteous and wicked, die offthat there is constant succession-incessant fluctuation, altogether different from that from whence the image is borrowed, seeing that, in the natural world, the very same seed that is sown in one month springs up and is reaped in another. But on the other hand, when we actually come to the time of harvest, then we must lose sight of the past generations rising and dying, one after another, in constant succession, and look alone at the generation alive at the time. And these only will be dealt with in that day of Christ's coming. These only, I say, seeing that the wicked of former generations will not then be raised from their graves, but will be reserved for judgment after the thousand years are expired (Rev. xxi. 7—18;) while the Church of God, on the other hand, will have been caught up to heaven before the week opens. (1 Thess. iv. 16-18.) This, then, I believe, quite determines who the wheat are at the time of the harvest,

G

namely, the Jewish remnant-the righteous ones on the earth at that time. These, while the wicked are judged, will be spared, gathered into the barn, as we read in this parable. So far as it goes, it speaks of the deliverance and blessing of the righteous; but the parable does not touch on the glory of the children of the resurrection: this is reserved for the interpretation thereof (in the 43rd verse), where the righteous are seen as shining forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father; that is, not those upon earth in that day who will be in the kingdom of the Son of man, but those in the heavenly places, where the Father will be supreme.

Now then let us consider the question why the end of the age should be termed "the harvest." And here I will mention what I meant to have reserved altogether for the second part of our subject; but which, as it belongs to this question, I must briefly anticipate. Between Moses and Christ I have traced, as we shall afterwards see, three periods of Seventy Weeks, or 490 years, marked, each at the close, by a great crisis in Israel. Each of these cycles, or, if you please, the three taken together, may be termed a dispensational harvest time—it being a probationary period, a time of especial dealing on the part of the Lord with his people, foreshadowed, as we shall afterwards see, by the annual harvest time of Israel, the seven weeks or fortynine days between the Passover and the day of Pentecost. Through every one of these cycles we trace nothing but failure in Israel; and how especially the last of them ended, we already have seen, namely, with the cutting off of Messiah, and the blotting out of the week, so that Israel's cry, had they but the heart to feel and acknowledge their sin, would be, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." (Jer. viii. 20.) And this will at last be the cry of the remnant. The time of harvest, though suspended now for a season, will be revived in the end; the Lord will put the sickle again into the hand of the reaper, and so the elect will be saved; while the wicked, on the other hand, will perish. The last week of Daniel is just a part of that age which began with Nehemiah's return the termination of Israel's harvest time-whether we look at the three cycles together, or only at one, namely, the last of the three.

Then there is another thing connected with this. The Lord