Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/336

 *mary impulse to the Holy Spirit, which was the constant and unerring guide of all the apostles in their movements abroad on the great mission of their Master. The divine presence of their Lord himself, too, was ever with them to support and encourage, in their most distant wanderings, even as he promised at parting,—"Lo! I am with you always, even to the end of the world." But historical investigation may very properly proceed with the inquiry into the real occasion which led him, under that divine guidance, to this distant city, among a people who were mostly foreign to him in language, habits and feelings, even though many of them owned the faith of Christ, and reverenced the apostle of his word. It is said, but not proved, that a division of the great fields of labor was made by the apostles among themselves, about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem; and that, when Andrew took Scythia, and others their sections of duty, Asia was assigned to John, who passed the rest of his life there accordingly. This field had already, indeed, been gone over by Paul and his companions, and already at Ephesus itself had a church been gathered, which was now flourishing under the pastoral care of Timothy, who had been instructed and commissioned for this very field, by Paul himself. But these circumstances, so far from deterring the apostle John from presenting himself on a field of labor already so nobly entered, are supposed rather to have operated as incitements to draw him into a place where so solid a foundation had been laid for a complete fabric. As a center of missionary action, indeed, Ephesus certainly did possess many local advantages of a high order. The metropolis of all Asia Minor,—a noble emporium for the productions of that great section of the eastern continent, on whose farthest western shore it stood,—and a grand center for the traffic of the great Mediterranean sea, whose waters rolled from that haven over the mighty shores of three continents, bearing, wherever they flowed, the ships of Ephesus,—this port offered the most ready and desirable means of intercourse with all the commercial cities of the world, from Tyre, or Alexandria, or Sinope, to the pillars of Hercules, and gave the quickest and surest access to the gates of Rome itself. Its widely extended commerce, of course, drew around its gates a constant throng of people from many distant parts of the world, a few of whom, if imbued with the gospel, would thus become the missionaries of the word of truth to millions, where the name of Jesus was before unknown. And since, after the