Death in the Desert, A

( Dram at is Personæ , 1864.) John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who lay on His breast at the last sad paschal supper, who stood by the cro , and received from the lips of his Lord His only earthly po e ion—His mother; John, the writer of the Gospel which bears his name, and of the letters which breathe the spirit of the incarnated love which was to transform a world lying in wickedne ; the seer of the awful visions of Patmos—the tremendous Apocalypse which closes the Christian revelation—lay dying in the desert; recalled from exile after the death of Domitian from the isle of the Sporades, the volcanic formation of which, with its daily scenes of smoke, brimstone, fire, and streams of molten lava, had aided the apostle to imagine the day of doom, when the angel should cry, “Time shall be no longer.” The beloved disciple, who had borne the me age of Divine love through the cities of Asia Minor, had founded churches, established bishoprics, and had laboured by spoken and written word, and even more effectually by his beautiful and gentle life, to extend the kingdom of God and of His Christ, now worn out with ince ant labours, and bent with the weight of well-nigh a hundred years, the last of the men who had seen the Lord, the final link which bound the youthful Church to its apostolic days, lies dying in a cave, hiding from the bloody hands of those who breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the followers of Christ. Companioned by five converts who tenderly nursed the dying saint, he had been brought from the secret rece in the rock where they had hidden him from the pursuers into the midmost grotto, where the light of noon just reached a little, and enabled them to watch “The last of what might happen on his face.” And at the entrance of the cave there kept faithful watch the Bactrian convert, pretending to graze a goat, so that if thief or soldier pa ed they might have booty without prying into the cave. The dying man lies unconscious, but his attendants think it po ible to rouse him that he may speak to them before he departs: they wet his lips with wine, cool his forehead with water, chafe his hands, diffuse the aromatic odour of the spikenard through the cave, and pray; but still he sleeps. Then the boy, inspired by a happy thought, brings the plate of graven lead on which are the words of John’s gospel, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and having found the place, he pre es the aged man’s finger on the line, and repeats it in his ear. Then he opened his eyes, sat up, and looked at them; and no one spoke, save the watcher without, signalling from time to time that they were safe. And first, the beloved one said, “If one told me there were James and Peter, I could believe! So is my soul withdrawn into its depths.”—“Let be awhile!”—And then— “It is long Since James and Peter had release by death, And I am only he, your brother John, Who saw and heard, and could remember all.” He reminds them how in Patmos isle he had seen the Lord in His awful splendour; how in his early life he saw and handled with his hands the Word of Life. Soon it will be that none will say “I saw.” And already—for the years were long—men had disputed, murmured and misbelieved, or had set up antichrists; and remembering what had happened to the faith in his own days, he could well foresee that unborn people in strange lands would one day ask— “Was John at all, and did he say he saw?” “What can I say to a ure them?” he asks; the story of Christ’s life and death was not mere history to him: “ It is ,” he cries,—“ is, here and now .” Not only are the events of the gospel history present before his eyes, so that he apprehends nought else; but not le plainly, not le firmly printed on his soul, are the more mysterious truths of God’s eternal presence in the world visibly contending with wrong and sin; and, as the wrong and sin are manifest to his soul-sight, so equally does he see the need, yet transiency of both. But matters, which to his spiritualised vision were clear, must be placed before his followers through some medium which shall, like an optic gla , segregate them, diminish them into clearne ; and so he bids them stand before that fact, that Life and Death of Jesus Christ, till it spreads apart like a star, growing and opening out on all sides till it becomes their only world, as it is his. “For all of life,” he says, “is summed up in the prize of learning love, and having learnt it, to hold it and truth, despite the world in arms against the holder. We can need no second proof of God’s love for man. Man having once learned the use of fire, would not part with the gift for purple or for gold. Were the worth of Christ as plain, he could not give up Christ. To test man, the proofs of Christianity shift; he cannot grasp that fact as he grasps the fact of fire and its worth.” He asks his disciples why they say it was easier to believe in Christ once than now—easier when He walked the earth with those He loved? “But,” says John, who had seen all,—the transfiguration, the walking on the sea, the raising of the dead to life,—“could it be po ible the man who had seen these things should ever part from them?” Yes, it was! The torchlight, the noise, the sudden inrush of the Roman soldiers, on the night of the betrayal, caused even him, John, the beloved disciple, to forsake Him and fly. Yet he had gained the truth, and the truth grew in his soul, so that he was enabled to impre it so indelibly on others, that children and women who had never seen the least of the sights he had seen would clasp their cro with a light laugh, and wrap the burning robe of martyrdom round them, giving thanks to God the while. But in the mind of man the laws of development are ever at work, and questioners of the truth arose, and it was nece ary that he should re-state the Lord’s life and work in various ways, to rectify mistakes. God has operated in the way of Power, later in the way of Love, and last of all in Influence on Soul: men do not ask now, “Where is the promise of His coming?” but— “Was He revealed in any of His lives, As Power, as Love, as Influencing Soul?” “Miracles, to prove doctrine,” John says, “go for nought, but love remains.” Then men ask, “Did not we ourselves imagine and make this love?” (That is to say, love having been discovered by mankind to be the noblest thing on earth, have not men created a God of Infinite Love, out of their own pa ionate imagining of what man’s love would be if perfectly developed?) “The mind of man can only receive what it holds—no more.” Man projects his own love heavenward, it falls back upon him in another shape—with another name and story added; this, he straightway says, is a gift from heaven. Man of old peopled heaven with gods, all of whom po e ed man’s attributes; horses drew the sun from east to west. Now, we say the sun rises and sets as if impelled by a hand and will, and it is only thought of as so impelled because we ourselves have hands and wills. But the sun must be driven by some force which we do not understand; will and love we do understand. As man grows wiser the pa ions and faculties with which he adorned his deities are taken away: Jove of old had a brow, Juno had eyes; gradually there remained only Jove’s wrath and Juno’s pride; in proce of time these went also, till now we recognise will and power and love alone. All these are at bottom the same—mere projections from the mind of the man himself. Having then stated the objections brought against the faith of Christ, St. John proceeds to meet them. “Man,” he says, “was made to grow, not stop; the help he needed in the earlier stages, being no longer required, is withdrawn; his new needs require new helps. When we plant seed in the ground we place twigs to show the spots where the germs lie hidden, so that they may not be trodden upon by carele steps. When the plants spring up we take the twigs away; they no longer have any use. It was thus with the growth of the gospel seed: miracles were required at first, but, when the plant had sprung up and borne fruit, had produced martyrs and heroes of the faith, what was the use of miracles any more? The fruit itself was surely sufficient testimony to the vitality of the seed. Minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth, as babes with milk; a boy we bid feed himself, or starve. So, at first, I wrought miracles that men might believe in Christ, because no faith were otherwise po ible; miracles now would compel, not help. I say the way to solve all questions is to accept by the reason the Christ of God; the sole death is when a man’s lo comes to him from his gain, when—from the light given to him—he extracts darkne ; from the knowledge poured upon him he produces ignorance; and from the manifestation of love elaborates the lack of love. Too much oil is the lamp’s death; it chokes with what would otherwise feed the flame. An overcharged stomach starves. The man who rejects Christ because he thinks the love of Christ is only a projection of his own is like a lamp that overswims with oil, a stomach overloaded with nurture; that man’s soul dies.” “But,” the objector may say, “You told your Christ-story incorrectly: what is the good of giving knowledge at all if you give it in a manner which will not stop the after-doubt? Why breed in us perplexity? why not tell the whole truth in proper words?” To this St. John replies, “Man of nece ity must pa from mistake to fact; he is not perfect as God is, nor as is the beast; lower than God, he is higher than the beast, and higher because he progre es,—he yearns to gain truth, catching at mistake. The statuary has the idea in his mind, aspires to produce it, and so calls his shape from out the clay: “Cries ever, ‘Now I have the thing I see’: Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought, From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.” Suppose he had complained, ‘I see no face, no breast, no feet’? It is only God who makes the live shape at a jet. Striving to reach his ideals, man grows; ceasing to strive, he forfeits his highest privileges, and entails the certainty of destruction. Progre is the e ential law of man’s being, and progre by mistake, by failure, by unceasing effort, will lead him, “Where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!” Such is the difficulty of the latest time; so does the aged saint answer it. He would remain on earth another hundred years, he says, to lend his struggling brothers his help to save them from the aby . But even as he utters the loving desire, he is dead, “Breast to breast with God, as once he lay.” They buried him that night, and the teller of the story returned, disguised, to Ephesus. St. John is said to have been banished into the Isle of Patmos, A.D. 97, by the order of Domitian. After this emperor had reigned fifteen years Nerva succeeded him ( A.D. 99), and historians of the period wrote that “the Roman senate decreed that the honours paid to Domitian should cease, and such as were injuriously exiled should return to their native land and receive their substance again. It is also among the ancient traditions, that then John the Apostle returned from banishment and dwelt again at Ephesus.” Eusebius, quoting from Irenæus, says that John after his return from Patmos governed the churches in Asia, and remained with them in the time of Trajan. Irenæus also says that the Apostle carried on at Ephesus the work begun by Paul; Clement of Alexandria records the same thing. It is said that St. John died in peace at Ephesus in the third year of Trajan—that is, the hundredth of the Christian era, or the sixty-sixth from our Lord’s crucifixion, the saint being then about ninety-four years old; he was buried on a mountain without the town. A stately church stood formerly over this tomb, which is at present a Turkish mosque. The sojourn of the Apostle in Asia, a country governed by Magi and imbued with Zoroastrian ideas, and in those days full of Buddhist mi ionaries, may account for many things found in the Book of Revelation. Mr. Browning refers to this in the bracketed portion of the poem, commencing:— “This is the doctrine he was wont to teach, How divers persons witne in each man, Three souls which make up one soul.” They are described by Theosophists as “(1) The fluidic per i soul or astral body; (2) The soul or individual; and (3) The spirit, or Divine Father and life of his system.” (See The Perfect Way , Lecture I., 9.) These three souls make up, with the material body, the fourfold nature of man. Notes. — Pamphylax the Antiochene , an imaginary person. Epsilon , Mu , Xi , letters of the Greek alphabet—e, m, and ch respectively. Xanthus and Valens , disciples of St. John. Bactrian , of Bactria, a province in Persia. “ A ball of nard ,” an unguent of spikenard, odorous and highly aromatic and restorative. Glo a , a commentary. Theotypas , a fictitious character. Pro me the us , son of the Titan Iapetus and the Ocean-nymph Clymene, brother of Atlas, Menœtius, and Epimetheus, and father of Deucalion. When Zeus refused to mortals the use of fire, Pro me the us stole it from Olympus, and brought it to men in a hollow reed. Zeus bound him to a pillar, with an eagle to consume in the daytime his liver, which grew again in the night. Æschylus , the earliest of the three great tragic poets of Greece, born at Eleusis, near Athens, B.C. 525. He wrote the Pro me the us Bound . Ebion , the founder of the early sect of heretics called Ebionites. They held that the Mosaic law was binding on Christians, and believed Jesus to have been a mere man, though an amba ador from God and po e ed of Divine power ( Encyc. Dict. ). Cerinthus raised great disturbances in obstinately defending an obligation of circumcision, and of abstaining from unclean meats in the New Law, and in extolling the angels as the authors of nature: this was before St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Colo i ans, etc. He pretended that the God of the Jews was only an angel; that Jesus was born of Joseph and Mary, like other men. He taught that Christ flew away at the time of the crucifixion, and that Jesus in the human part of His nature alone suffered and rose again, Christ continuing always immortal and impa ible. St. Irenæus relates that on one occasion, when St. John went to the public baths, he found that this heretic was within, and he refused to remain lest the bath which contained Cerinthus should fall upon his head.