YOU all know that this Sunday is called the First Sunday in Advent. You all know, I hope, that Advent means coming, and that these four Sundays before Christmas, as I have often told you, are called Advent Sundays, because upon them we are called to consider the coming of our King and Saviour Jesus Christ. If you will look at the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for these next four Sundays, you will see at once that they all bear upon our Lord’s coming. The Gospels tell us of the prophecies about Christ which He fulfilled when He came. The Epistles tell us what sort of men we ought to be, both clergy and people, because He has come and will come again. The Collects pray that the Spirit of God would make us fit to live and die in a world into which Christ has come, and in which He is ruling now, and to which He will come again. The text which I have taken this morning, you just heard in this Sunday’s Gospel. St. Matthew tells you that Jesus Christ fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem in state upon an ass’s colt; and St. Matthew surely speaks truth. Let us consider what the prophecy is, and how Jesus Christ fulfilled it. Then we shall see and believe from the Epistle what effect the knowledge of it ought to have upon our own souls, and hearts, and daily conduct. Now this prophecy, “Behold, thy king cometh unto thee,” etc., you will find in your Bibles, in the ninth verse of the ninth chapter of the book of Zechariah. But I do not think that Zechariah wrote it. St. Matthew does not say he wrote it; he merely calls it that which was spoken by the prophet, without mentioning his name. Provided it is an inspired word from God, which it is, it perhaps does not matter to us so much who wrote it: but I think it was written by the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps in the beginning of the reign of the good king Josiah; for the chapter in which this text is, and the two or three chapters which follow, are not at all like the rest of Zechariah’s writings, but exactly like Jeremiah’s. They certainly seem to speak of things which did not happen in Zechariah’s time, but in the time of Jeremiah, nearly ninety years before. And, above all, St. Matthew himself seems plainly to have thought that some part, at least, of those chapters was Jeremiah’s writing; for in the twenty-seventh chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and in the ninth verse, you will find a prophecy about the potter’s field, which St. Matthew says was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet. Now, those words are not in the book of Jeremiah as it stands in our Bibles: but they are in the book of Zechariah, in the eleventh chapter, twelfth and thirteenth verses, coming shortly after my text, and making a part of the same prophecy. This has puzzled Christians very much, because it seemed as if St. Matthew has made a mistake, and miscalled Zechariah Jeremiah. But I believe firmly that, as we are bound to expect, St. Matthew made no mistake whatsoever, and that Jeremiah did write that prophecy as St.