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obey His word, whatever be the fate of S. John; even if his life should be prolonged to the time of the Second Advent, or beyond the time when the greatest sign of the Advent had occurred :-"If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" Among the disciples present, who durst ask no further question, it is not wonderful that this should be understood as a declaration that S. John was actually to protract his days till his LORD should come again in glory nevertheless, as the Apostle himself proceeds to declare, this was a mere inference of theirs, not warranted by our LORD's own words. "JESUS said not unto him, He shall not die; but-If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" The words were uttered in the way of supposition, not of prediction: and having thus carefully repeated them, the Evangelist adds that himself who records these words is the person of whom they were spoken by JESUS CHRIST. "This is the disciple which testified of these things, and spoke these things: and we know that his testimony is true." He it was, who to avoid all error as to our LORD's teaching, comprised these out of his innumerable sayings in that one blessed book: that all like him might know, and reading might believe.

The records of Christianity tell, to a considerable extent, how the beloved Apostle and Evangelist realized these words of his Divine Master; in following Him with Peter and the rest of His faithful servants. When the HOLY SPIRIT at length made

them possessed of Christian light and Christian heroism, no less than of miraculous gifts, again we find Peter and John together: they are associated in the first great work they performed in the name of their risen LORD, the healing of the cripple at the Beautiful gate of the Temple; in their joint fearless confession before the chief priests that would silence them by menaces ; in their imprisonment and release for distant labours; and in their joint mission, after the martyrdom of S. Stephen, to minister confirmation to those whom Philip the deacon had baptized in Samaria. We find these two again associated as pillars of the Church with S. James the Less, Bishop of Jerusalem, when, after the martyrdom of S. James the Great, S. Paul reports to the Apostles and Elders at Jerusalem his mission to evangelize the Gentiles. And this closes the historical notices of S. John which we obtain from the inspired records of the Gospel; but by no means all that we know with tolerable certainty respecting him; partly from the ordinary sources of subsequent Christian history, and partly from the standing evidence to their author, borne by some of the later books of the New Testament.

Passing over what is either fabulous or doubtful, we know that S. John, probably after the decease of the Blessed Virgin Mary in his charge, made the Churches of Asia Minor his particular care, and that of Ephesus especially, of which before his

coming S. Timothy had been made Bishop by the Apostle of the Gentiles. We know that the heresies with which some even then were labouring to pervert the truth of the Gospel were objects of his zealous attention and opposition: particularly the Gnostic errors which would represent our LORD'S assumption of human flesh to be merely apparent and unreal, and that He was but one of many successive emanations from the Fulness of DEITY: against which antichristian statements he every where declares strongly in various parts of his writings, that the true Son of GOD, the WORD who was GOD, was made true man, and lived and died as man upon earth, as all His Apostles witnessed; that He is the Only begotten of the FATHER, the one source of salvation, through whom alone, as the CHRIST, we have the unction of the Holy One, are enlightened, purified, and blessed. Of the zeal displayed by the meek but fervent Apostle against these heresies and their abettors, striking proofs are given us on the unquestionable authority of his disciple, S. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna and Martyr: some of them very little answering the description of what is now termed charity; yet in strict keeping with the tone of his writings in the New Testament: for certainly flying from a bath, because the heretic Cerinthus was there, indicates no stronger abhorrence of the errors that would lead men from the source of salvation, than his writing, that if any man came with any other doctrine than that of the Apostles re

specting the Incarnation of JESUS CHRIST, he should neither be received nor saluted by the faithful; that he that bade him "GoD speed," was a sharer in his evil deeds. His Gospel was written not more to present some striking features of our LORD's history, which the three more perfect histories of His ministry had all omitted; than to present them in connexion with the mysteries of faith, and the fundamental doctrine of the Divine Incarnation. Unlike the other Gospels, it was written after the destruction of the Jewish state or polity and after, in the language of Christians, of Hebrew as well as Gentile believers, the word "Jew" indicated a religion rather than a nation, an adherent of Moses and the Prophets who rejected JESUS CHRIST, rather than a native of Judæa. These, and some other like peculiarities, which recent critics would urge as throwing doubts on the genuineness of this divine and immortal work, are rather proofs of the truth of the tradition of the Church respecting it; that it was the composition of the Apostle in his advanced years, when sojourning among Gentiles.

The Providence of GOD permitted not that the stroke of martyrdom should close the great Apostle's life and when the cruelty of the last of the twelve Cæsars was provoked by his preaching the Gospel at Rome, the Almighty quelled the heat of the boiling oil, and preserved His servant unhurt, like the three holy children in Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. In his banishment by the same tyrant

to the Isle of Patmos, the SPIRIT of GOD still abode with His faithful confessor, and enabled him to write that wonderful book which closes the Canon of Scripture; describing under images which the event alone can fully clear, the future destinies of the Church and the world, and the awful judgment passed on their several ways and works by Him who liveth and was dead,-who liveth for evermore, and hath the keys of hell and of death. At this late period of his life there is a memorable and well attested history of his reclaiming by affectionate exhortation a youth who had so far apostatized from the faith as to become a captain of robbers: a fact which to some readers of his Epistles may be needed as a proof that he admitted the restoration of the lapsed brother, as well as the regeneration of the stranger and infidel; that even when baptismal grace has been wasted and apparently extinct, Divine mercy may restore the wanderer to that purity which should have been always his. At length, at an age far advanced beyond the ordinary term of life, the venerated Apostle and Evangelist fell asleep in the LORD at Ephesus: after exhortations repeated again and again to all the faithful around to love one another, to observe in all things that spirit of charity which is the bond of all virtues in CHRIST's religion,—without which, zeal, and eloquence, and faith, and knowledge of mysteries, will be vain and worthless.

The reflections which this great Apostle's career excite must all have reference to this: and as love

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