Professor Crosby is the victim of a system, which has taken him captive, and carries him whithersoever it will. He follows it wherever he can see it; and when it gets beyond his sight, he shuts his eyes, and still pursues it by the scent and the sound of its flying foot-steps. His theory is, that "the second coming of Christ, with its associate events, the end of the world, the resurrection of the dead, and the general judgment, must have already taken place," (namely, at the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus;) "and all expectation of these events as still future is forbidden by the Scriptures." How these sublime events, and all the awful predictions in the Bible respecting them, came to pass at that time, he does not pretend to explain. But his system requires him to say that it is so ; and bravely he says it. And if the exigencies of his system had required him to say, that all the declarations of the New Testament respecting the heavenly blessedness of righteous souls were fulfilled in the rejoicings of the whole Christian Church at the sack of Zion, he would not want courage to make the affirmation.

Indeed, it is perfectly clear, that many of the expressions which have ever been understood as descriptive of heavenly happiness, must be oddly interpreted by Professor Crosby. Thus, the parable of the sheep and goats, if it had its final and complete fulfilment at the destruction of Jerusalem, must teach that the righteous, as the "blessed of the Father, inherited" at that time, "the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world." It is certainly very singular that, while there has been preserved such ample record of the unequalled woes which then fell upon the Jewish nation,— woes which made that political tragedy a fitting image of the destruction of the wicked at the last day,— history is totally silent as to any remarkable felicity then enjoyed by the persecuted people of the Lord. There is nothing in the circumstance of Ziou's devastation, which would lead us to suppose that the saints then exulted in it to such an incredible degree as to "enter into the joy of their Lord," at the sight or the tidings of those cruel sorrows, in the anticipation of which Jesus wept on the mount of Olives. But no matter! Mr. Crosby's theory requires him to believe and print such absurdities and impossibilities; and the inexorable theory must be obeyed.

This imperious theory, in audacity of interpretation, goes far beyond what we used to call ultra-Universalism. That scheme of belief, corrupt and foolish as it is, never ventured so far as Professor Crosby has done in this matter; and even now, its older advocates have publicly expressed their dissent from his sweeping conclusions. The passages relating to the Second Advent, and to the general resurrection and judgment, and to the eternal state of all mankind, are so numerous, amounting to many hundreds, as to form a very large proportion of the New Testament. If all these have now no prospective interest, but were long since fulfilled, how much is taken away from the value of the Book which contains them. It loses at once a vast proportion of its utility as a motive to holy action and a life of prayer.

And what shall we say of the stupidity of Christendom ? If all these stirring declarations of our Lord and his apostles were receiving their fulfilment at the ruin of Jerusalem, as Mr. Crosby says, "in the precise sense " which was contemplated when they were uttered,— in " the very highest, noblest, heavenliest sense of which those words are susceptible,"— how came it to pass, that the entire Christian community, then exulting in the redemption of most of the exceeding great and precious promises it had received, either had not the sense to be aware of its happiness, or felt it so slightly as to leave no record of it for them that should come after ? It is considered to be essential to the character of a true prediction, that, however obscure previous to its accomplishment, it should be unmistakably explained by the event. But the dull Christian world, which, with all its dullness, has had to itself by far the greater part of the intelligence of all ages, past and present, has never been aware of this wholesale fulfilment of what were true predictions when first uttered, though the fact of Jerusalem's destruction has been no secret. Christendom, however, will be apt to retort this implied charge of dullness upon the author of this new theory, so long as he shall fail to point out some tolerably natural sense, figurative as it must be, in which the conditions of every one of those predictions are satisfied by that theory. This task, as we shall presently shew in few words, he will never be able to perform.

Let us first recur, for a moment, to the diminished utility of the Scriptures on Mr. Crosby's one-idea system of interpretation. If all those passages relating to the later coming of Christ, in every sense of .that phrase, together with all that is said of the end of the world and its final conflagration, and all that is said of the resurrection of the dead, small and great, and buried in sea or land, as also the general judgment of all mankind by Jesus Christ, and the consequent adjudged states of eternal happiness to the righteous and eternal damnation to the wicked;—if all these passages referred exclusively to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, and were then and there fulfilled,— then the gospel reveals to us nothing beyond the grave, promises no future state of conscious existence, and brings no vision of life and immortality to light. The ex-professor seriously argues, that " there are no warnings to Prepare for death," "no precepts to Watch with reference to death," " no promise to believers of Rest at death," and that " it is never urged as a motive to Repentance that death is near," that " it is never presented as a motive to sobriety and prayerfulness, that the end of life is at hand; " and that these things are mentioned only in connection with the ruin of Jerusalem. If these things are so, what moral influence is the New Testament to exert in making us holy and penitent, at this distant day ? The desolation of Zion was indeed a terrible example of divine vengeance ; but what is it to us more than the devastation of Nineveh and Babylon, of the cities of the plain, or of the ante-diluvian world? Will it be pretended that we can live the life of faith as well in reference to a historic past which is seen, as in reference to a prophetic future which is unseen, but no less certain? Shall we find the remembrance of that dread hour when the city of David was laid in heaps, smoking with the invaders' fires, and steaming with the blood of its defenders, to be as strong an incentive to a life of self-denial, of indifference to the world, and of communion with heavenly things, as is found in the common belief as to the " last things " of earth ? Or shall we not find, on the trial of Mr. Crosby's new scheme of interpretation, that the gospel has died out, and suffered the loss of all its primitive power to sanctify and save ?

Christian interpreters have usually understood the second coming of Christ, as distinguished from his first coming at Bethlehem, to be his promised return to the world at the final consummation of its affairs. But the expression, coming of Christ, when not numerically distinguished, they have understood not only of one or the other of those events; but also, in many instances, of the actual destruction of Jerusalem ; of Christ's coming to his disciples for the purpose of spiritual communion and indwelling, (John xiv. 23. Rev. 3: 20:) of his coming at the death of an individual, who is thus instantly ushered into Christ's presence; of his coming in special acts of judgment on backsliding churches, (Rev. ii. 5; ) of his spiritual coming, or reign of grace over the nations of the earth, at the millennium : and finally of his coming for the judgment of all men at the end of the world. Which of these events may be designed in any particular passage, must be determined by examining it in its connections.

Mr. Crosby's book did not allow him space to develope all that he would have offered in defence of his scheme; and much less will our brief pages suffer us to expose so much as a hundredth part of the absurdities in which it is involved. Out of a vast collection of passages before us, each of which is sufficient to explode it, we will offer a few of such as first present themselves, and which are incapable of any rational explanation on his plan.

Let us begin with passages in which the coming of Christ is spoken of as limiting the time when various duties will be of binding force, and various promised blessings may be expected. The Apostle Paul, speaking of the celebration of the eucharist, says: " As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew forth the Lord's death till he come." According to Professor Crosby's view, there has been no authority for observing the Lord's Supper since the ruin of Jerusalem. The institution was for a limited time, and expired when that time arrived. He can never go to the Lord's table without as great a piece of mistimed devotion as if he were to go to Jerusalem to eat the passover, and to offer young pigeons or turtle-doves in sacrifice.

Our Saviour promised his disciples, saying: " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." But, by Mr. Crosby's book, the disciples can have enjoyed none of the special presence of Christ in their evangelical labors, since Jerusalem was laid waste.

Paul, in writing to the severely persecuted Thessalonian Christians, promises them rest with himself from all their troubles, when the Lord " shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe in that day." What day? The day of Jerusalem's overthrow! But before that, the apostle himself, and most of those he was attempting to console, were resting in their graves. And as to the survivors, what consolation or what cessation from persecution could they have derived from the ruin of a remote city, of which they probably knew nothing till many weeks after it occurred. That Christ then took signal vengeance on many of them that " obeyed not the gospel," cannot be doubted. But what special manifestation was there, at that time, of his glory in the saints ?

Our Lord, when speaking of his approaching departure, said to his disciples: " I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, / will come again, and receive you unto myself." When Jerusalem fell beneath the swords and fire-brands of Rome, did our Saviour come, and take the whole college of apostles bodily, with himself, into heaven, or any other prepared place ?

Hear the prayer of the crucified thief: " Lord, remember me, when thou comest in thy kingdom." Think you that this petition had the slightest reference to the final downfall of the Jewish polity ?

When our Lord asked that remarkable question: " Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh shall he find faith on the earth ? " — is it credible that he looked forward to the time of Jerusalem's catastrophe, as a season to be peculiarly marked by the disappearance of faith from the earth ? And was there such a disappearance at that time ? Or did the saints, on the contrary, then lift up their rejoicing heads, because the day of their redemption had come ? Or, did neither of these phenomena then appear ?

Take that noted passage : " Then cometh the end, when Christ shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule, and all authority, and power. For he must reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." What can be more preposterous than the notion, that the disastrous fate of Jerusalem was the signal for the Messiah to lay down his mediatorial kingdom ? Or that the moral condition of the world at that period corresponded with the assurance that Jesus should then be reigning in universal and acknowledged supremacy ?

Where is the sense of the questions which the apostle asked of his converts: " What is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing ? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming ? " When Zion fell, the apostle had been for years rejoicing in the crown of martyrdom; but surely he was at that time altogether disappointed as to this other crown which Mr. Crosby thinks he was so confidently expecting.

And so, when praying for these same spiritual children, he asked that their " whole spirit, soul, and body, might be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Can it be supposed that he thought their innocence would be safe from corruption when Jerusalem should be no more ? Why pray that they may be kept blameless till then, and no longer ?

The same apostle, in his charge to Timothy to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold on eternal life, enjoins him to " keep this commandment without spot, unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ." Why this strange

limitation of his faithful obedience to the time of the subversion of the Jewish national state ? What conceivable relation can there be between such duties and the event which is supposed by Professor Crosby to limit their performance ?

Consider the direction given to the Church at Corinth, to excommunicate an incestuous member, " delivering such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." Had the destroying of Jerusalem any tendency to bring such persons to repentance ? And now that Jerusalem has long been destroyed, can ex-communications be of any avail?

Were the fallen angels, and Sodom and Gomorrah, which, as the Scriptures teach, were reserved for final doom at the day of judgment, subjected to the full execution of their sentence while Jerusalem was wrapped in flames ?

We might fill scores of pages with just such quotations and queries, all equally irreconcilable with Professor Crosby's theory, as are these passages, taken as they happened to come up. That theory will necessitate in him who maintains it a reconstruction of the entire New Testament, and of the whole plan of salvation. We wonder not that our author stopped short in his work. We only marvel that he should have sent out such a crude conception into the world.

On reading over his first four " propositions," we were profoundly affected at the blindness which let in many texts into his lists, most fatal to the point they were adduced to sustain ; and at the prejudice which winked out others, which it would not do so much as to look at in such a connection. But when he comes to his "fifth proposition," which ought to have been most labored of all, he dismisses it in half of a duodecimo page. And the sixth and last proposition is despatched with a brevity equally astonishing. On the strength of an undigested jumble of assertions, he expects his readers to be converted to the belief, that "the Second Coming of Christ, with its associate events, the End of the World, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the General Judgment, must have already taken place ; and all expectation of these events as still future is forbidden by the Scriptures," — " and must be explained in a figurative or spiritual, rather than a literal sense, and in such a sense as admits an application to what has already taken place."

These are the redoubtable fifth and sixth propositions, announced without a line of argument, or word of proof. When we found that we had got to the end, before we were half way to the middle of the discussion, we fairly rubbed our eyes, thinking that we must be laboring under an optical illusion. But it is no illusion! The author leads us into the wilderness, and leaves us there, merely indicating to us the general direction in which he supposes the proper field of inquiry to lie. His book is like one of those alleys hedged on either side with thorns, which used to be common in the old-fashioned landscape-gardening of England, and which led on the unsuspecting visitor, till, at a sudden turn, he found himself just stepping into a ditch, or running plump against a stone-wall. These walks were called " haw-haws; " a name which, (with all deference to the etymologists,) was probably derived from the bursts of derisive laughter which assailed the astonished stroller. Mr. Crosby's book is a complete " haw-haw," and nothing but the solemnity of the topics of which it treats can exempt it from merited ridicule.

Though he could not find time or room to argue out the main point in his theory, he could reserve a space exceeding one-third of the volume for an Appendix, devoted to the perpetration of a very vile trick of authorcraft. Well knowing that he could father his new-born and illegimate theory on no writer more respectable than himself, he compiles this appendix of extracts relating to Biblical interpretation," in some of which he does not profess to believe himself. Here we have long quotations from John Robinson, Dr. Woods, Professors Park, Stuart, Stowe, and Robinson, Drs. Lightfoot, Gill, Clark, Watts, and Macknight, and Messrs. Barnes, and Bout on. and others ; — not one of whom agrees in the general views of Mr. Crosby, and most of whose writings here copied have no particular reference to the subject in hand. It is inconceivable that all these worthies should be dragged into this appendix, for any other purpose than to produce a deceptive appearance of orthodox sanction for our author's heterodox notions.