There is every reason to believe that St. John remained in Jerusalem not merely to the Virgin's death but till after the Apostolic Council; for St. Paul states that, when present on the latter occasion with Barnabas, he was greeted cordially by the apostles; and that, when James and Cephas and John, who were accounted chief pillars of the Church, perceived the grace given him, they extended both to him and his companion the right hand of fellowship. As this is the first recorded meeting of the illustrious three, Peter, Paul and John, so is it the last. Peter's day of work was almost spent; the foundation of the Church which he had it in charge to lay was almost complete. Paul, who was legitimate successor to the James of Herod's persecution, was but beginning his work, for to him belonged the building up of the main part of the structure. John's work was yet in the future; he was to take it up at the point where Paul left it and put on roof and cornice. “It was his vocation," says M. de Pressensé, "to preserve the most precious jewels in the treasury of Christ's revelations, and to bring to light the most sacred and sublime mysteries of the Gospel. In order to fulfil this mission, he must needs wait until the Church was ready for such exalted teaching." We have then in John the spectacle of a man long held in leash,

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I "Each of the Three has his distinct place in the first formation of the early Church. Peter is the Founder, Paul the Propagator, John the Finisher-Peter the Apostle of the rising dawn, Paul of the noon in its heat and in its clearness, John of the sunset."-Stanley, Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age, p. 4.

Early Years of Christianity, p. 374.

remaining under protracted training, and whose main work in life was not to be done till old age had silvered his hair and bowed his frame. Let no one, marking in himself the infirmities that rise when youth lies far in the background, say that his day of work is past. The experience of age may well compensate the world for any abatement of youthful impulse.

This Jerusalem life of the Apostle, which lasted so far as we know for twenty years or more after the Ascension-of what sort was it, and how did it prepare him for his later work? His mind appears gradually to have assumed a more contemplative cast, which is no wonderful change when we consider the deep impression made on it by the affecting scenes he had witnessed of his Lord's passion. Nor would the society of the mother of Jesus fail to exert a chastening influence upon his character. As once she pondered the events attending the birth of her Son, so with feelings more absorbed, though more divided, must she have dwelt on the circumstances of his death. No saintlier presence than hers could have moved in the household, none have acted as nobler teacher to the Apostle-a holier than Monica to a greater than Augustine. These two influences may indeed have cooperated. "His fulfilment of the solemn charge entrusted to him may have led him to a life of loving and reverent thought rather than to one of conspicuous activity. We may, at all events, feel sure that it was a time in which the natural elements of his character, with all their fiery energy, were being purified and mellowed, rising step by step to that high serenity which we find perfected

I

in the closing portion of his life." The Scriptures give no account of the Virgin's death, as in truth they have given but the scantiest notices of her life; she is allowed to pass from the narrative as unremarked as Salome or any of the other women, St. Luke at least being accessible to no charge of Mariolatry. But whenever her real assumption, the assumption of her spirit, came, and her own Son received her to himself, then was freedom given to her adopted son to follow his brother-apostles and go abroad in the interests of Christianity.

The date of St. John's departure from Jerusalem cannot be fixed with precision. It has been conjectured that, as no mention is made of him on the occasion of Paul's last visit to that city in the year A.D. 58, he must have left it some time previously. But the argument from silence is notoriously unsafe; and it seems to be specially so here, as we recall how brief and tumultuous was Paul's visit, and reflect that John, if then absent, may have been away only on some passing errand. Unless we suppose him to have remained in or near Jerusalem for another ten years, there is no spot to which we can transfer him with a shadow of confidence. The unwavering voice of tradition carries him after a while to Ephesus; but there are sound reasons to prevent our admitting his presence there till this decade has elapsed. One of these is that St. Paul, when writing to the churches in the neighbourhood of Ephesus during these years,

Professor Plumptre, in The Bible Dictionary, vol. i. p. 1106 a.

as well as when writing from its neighbourhood, makes no allusion to him; and another is drawn from Paul's well-known reluctance to trespass upon the province of a fellow-labourer. Now the execution of this apostle took place at Rome in the year A.D. 68; and there are various indications that St. John's missionary work in Asia Minor, if it could not begin earlier, did commence from about that time. For then the churches of the district, bereft by the removal of their founder, would be demanding a sustaining and reorganizing hand. The grievous wolves had, as Paul forewarned the elders, entered in, not sparing the flock, and of their own body had men arisen speaking perverse things in the hope of drawing away disciples; for Peter, writing to Christians. of the same region and time, refers to men among them who stumbled at the word and used their liberty as a cloak of maliciousness. But wholly apart from the growth of heresy in the Ephesian church, its central position made it of the highest importance that a wise teacher should step into the vacated chair. Ephesus stood at the conflux of Eastern and Western commerce, at the meeting point between the religious thought of the two worlds, where the shock of conflict was in some respects greater than at Rome or Athens, so that "no city could have been better chosen as a centre from which to watch over the churches and follow closely the progress of heresy." At the same time, while the position of Ephesus and

I Pressensé, Early Years of Christianity, p. 382. An interesting sketch of the resources of Ephesus is given by Conybeare and Howson, and by Tristram in his Seven Golden Candlesticks.

the needs of its Christian inhabitants conspired to attract the apostle John, troubles were beginning in Judæa, which soon culminated in the fall of Jerusalem and could not fail to warn away one who had listened to the Saviour's last discourse on Olivet.

We shall not then be far wrong if we assign his arrival in Ephesus to the year A.D. 68 or 69. But what may have employed him on reaching his new sphere of labour is matter of conjecture. None of his writings belongs to so early a date by ten years, unless we suppose the Apocalypse to have been received and recorded while the world yet smoked with the fires of the Neronic persecution. As however the evidence leans to a later origin for the exile to Patmos, we are left to fill up the vacant space from the passing hints of Scripture and the ampler supplies of tradition. We gather from the former source no more than that a strong connexion was formed between the Apostle and the churches of the coast. This intimacy would naturally be of gradual growth; and we may fairly assume that he spent much of his time in visiting and establishing the congregations formed in the neighbouring towns. At Ephesus itself abundance of work would be found in resisting the progress of evil, forasmuch as even within the church "bitter dissensions had arisen, obliterating that love which is the greatest of Christian graces. The new philosophy had been employed as the vehicle of grossly erroneous views concerning the person and nature of the Son of God." It was

1 Alford, How to Study the New Testament, vol. i. p. 115.