Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/338

 an irretrievable oblivion, under the fire and sword of the invader. The glories of the ancient covenant seemed to have passed away forever; and in the high devotion of the Jew, a blank was now left, by the destruction of the only temple of his ancient faith, which nothing else on earth could fill. Henceforth he might be trained to look for a spiritual temple,—a city eternal in the heavens, whose lasting foundations were laid by no mortal hand, for the heathen to sweep away in unholy triumph; but whose builder and maker was God. Thus prepared, by the mournful consummation of their country's utter ruin, for the reception of a pure faith, the condition of the disconsolate Jews must have appeared in the highest degree interesting to the solitary surviving apostle of Jesus; and he would naturally devote the remnant of his days to that portion of the world where he might make the deepest impression on them, and where his influence might spread widest to the scattered members of a people, then as now, eminently commercial.

Under these peculiarly interesting circumstances, the Apostle John is supposed to have arrived at Ephesus, where Timothy, still holding the episcopal chair in which he had been placed by the Apostle Paul, must have hailed with great delight the arrival of the venerable John, from whose instructions and counsels, he might hope to derive advantages so much the more welcome, since the sword of the heathen persecution had removed his original apostolic teacher from the world. John must have been, at the time of his journey to Ephesus, considerably advanced in life. His precise age, or the date of his arrival, are altogether unknown, nor are there any fixed points on which the most critical and ingenious historical investigation can base any certain conclusion whatever, as to these interesting matters. Various and widely different have been the conclusions on these points;—some fixing his journey to Ephesus in the reign of Claudius, long before the destruction of Jerusalem, and even before the council on the question of the circumcision. The true character of this tale can be best appreciated by a reference to another circumstance, which is gravely appended to it by its narrators;—which is, that he was accompanied on this tour by the Virgin Mary, and that she lived there with him for a long time. This journey too, is thus made to precede the journey of Paul to Ephesus, by many years, and yet no account whatever is given of the reasons of the profound silence observed in the Acts of the Apostles, on an event so im