Worth remembering for the purpose of applying it to the text in which our Lord is represented in the first (or Matthew’s) Gospel, and by that alone, as citing Daniel by name.  It was this text that so sorely, but I think very unnecessarily, perplexed and gravelled Bentley, who was too profound a scholar and too acute a critic to admit the genuineness of the whole of that book.

Ib.

  The Prophets (said Luther) did set, speak, and preach of the second
  coming of Christ in manner as we now do.

I regret that Mr. Irving should have blended such extravagancies and presumptuous prophesyings with his support and vindication of the Millennium, and the return of Jesus in his corporeal individuality, —­because these have furnished divines in general, both Churchmen and Dissenting, with a pretext for treating his doctrine with silent contempt.  Had he followed the example of his own Ben Ezra, and argued temperately and learnedly, the controversy must have forced the momentous question on our Clergy:—­Are Christians bound to believe whatever an Apostle believed,—­and in the same way and sense?  I think Saint Paul himself lived to doubt the solidity of his own literal interpretation of our Lord’s words.

The whole passage in which our Lord describes his coming is so evidently, and so intentionally expressed in the diction and images of the Prophets, that nothing but the carnal literality common to the Jews at that time and most strongly marked in the disciples, who were among the least educated of their countrymen, could have prevented the symbolic import and character of the words from being seen.  The whole Gospel and the Epistles of John, are a virtual confutation of this reigning error—­and no less is the Apocalypse whether written by, or under the authority of, the Evangelist.

The unhappy effect which St. Paul’s (may I not say) incautious language respecting Christ’s return produced on the Thessalonians, led him to reflect on the subject, and he instantly in the second epistle to them qualified the doctrine, and never afterwards resumed it; but on the contrary, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 15, substitutes the doctrine of immortality in a celestial state and a spiritual body.  On the nature of our Lord’s future epiphany or phenomenal person, I am not ashamed to acknowledge, that my views approach very nearly to those of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Ib. p. 121.

  Doctor Jacob Schenck never preacheth out of his book, but I do, (said
  Luther), though not of necessity, but I do it for example’s sake to
  others.

As many notes, ‘memoranda’, cues of connection and transition as the preacher may find expedient or serviceable to him; well and good.  But to read in a manuscript book, as our Clergy now do, is not to preach at all.  Preach out of a book, if you must; but do not read in it, or even from it.  A read sermon of twenty minutes will seem longer to the hearers than a free discourse of an hour.