Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/278

 which has been supposed to give any hint of the manner of his death, is that in the last chapter of John's gospel. "Jesus says to him—'I most solemnly tell thee, when thou wast young, thou didst gird thyself and walk whither thou wouldst; but when thou shalt be old, another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldst not.' This he said, to make known by what sort of death he should glorify God." It has been commonly said that this is a distinct and unquestionable prophecy that he should in his old age be crucified,—the expression, "another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst not," referring to his being bound to the cross and borne away to execution, since this was the only sort of death by which an apostle could be said, with much propriety or force, to glorify God. And the long-established authority of tradition coinciding with this view, or rather, suggesting it, no very minute examination into the sense of the passage has ever been made. But the words themselves are by no means decisive. Take a common reader, who has never heard that Peter was crucified, and it would be hard for him to make out such a circumstance from the bare prophecy as given by John. Indeed, such unbiased impressions of the sense of the passage will go far to justify the conclusion that the words imply nothing but that Peter was destined to pass a long life in the service of his Master,—that he should after having worn out his bodily and mental energies in his devoted exertions, attain such an extreme decrepid old age as to lose the power of voluntary motion, and die thus,—at least without necessarily implying any bloody martyrdom. Will it be said that by such a quiet death he could not be considered as glorifying God? The objection surely is founded in a misapprehension of the nature of those demonstrations of devotion, by which the glory of God is most effectually secured. There are other modes of martyrdom than the dungeon, the sword, the axe, the flame, and the stone; and in all ages since Peter, there have been thousands of martyrs who have, by lives steadily and quietly devoted to the cause of truth, no less glorified God, than those who were rapt to heaven in flame, in blood, and in tortures inflicted by a malignant persecution. Was not God truly glorified in the deaths of the aged Xavier, and Eliot, and Swartz, or the bright, early exits of Brainerd, Mills, Martyn, Parsons, Fisk, and hundreds whom the apostolic spirit of modern missions has sent forth to labors as devoted, and to deaths as glorious to God, as those of any who swell the deified lists of the ancient martyrolo