But still the great question presses on me:--'coming in a cloud'! What is the true import of this phrase?
Has not God himself expounded it?
To the Son of Man, the great Apostle assures us, all power is given in heaven and on earth.

He became Providence,--that is, a Divine Power behind the cloudy veil of human agency and worldly events and incidents, controlling, disposing, and directing acts and events to the gradual unfolding and final consummation of the great scheme of Redemption; the casting forth of the evil and alien nature from man, and thus effecting the union of the creature with the Creator, of man with God, in and through the Son of Man, even the Son of God made manifest.

Now can it be doubted by the attentive and unprejudiced reader of St.Matthew, c.

xxiv, that the Son of Man, in fact, came in the utter destruction and devastation of the Jewish Temple and State, during the period from Vespasian to Hadrian, both included; and is it a sufficient reason for our rejecting the teaching of Christ himself, of Christ glorified and in his kingly character, that his Apostles, who disclaim all certain knowledge of the awful event, had understood his words otherwise, and in a sense more commensurate with their previous notions and the prejudices of their education?
They communicated their conjectures, but as conjectures, and these too guarded by the avowal, that they had no revelation, no revealed commentary on their Master's words, upon this occasion, the great apocalypse of Jesus Christ while yet in the flesh.

For by this title was this great prophecy known among the Christians of the Apostolic age.
Ib.p.