PREFACE.

THE Pupils of St. John,-is the title a very narrow, or a very comprehensive one? Narrow in one sense, for the direct pupils of St. John who can be ascertained and proved to have been such, and to have transmitted his instructions at any length, confine themselves to two, with about three more whose names and the titles of their works are alone preserved.

But taken in another light, and regarding as the disciples of St. John not only those whose biography states that they actually sat at his feet and listened to his discourses, but those whose tenor of thought can be traced to his doctrine; and regarding his pupils as churches rather than as single persons, the term becomes a very wide one. None of the Apostles, excepting St. Paul, has so largely contributed to Holy Scriptures, or left such visible traces of his teaching upon the Church; and while St. Paul's

special office was to plant, St. John's seems to have been to organize and systematize.

Looking back on the history of the Evangelist, we see how peculiar was his own preparation for his office in the Church. Youngest of all the Twelve, yet one of the first to become a follower of our Lord, he was especially distinguished by His personal love, and admitted, together with his own elder brother James, and with Simon Peter, to the sight of those deeper and greater manifestations of Divinity from which the others were excluded. Yet all this time it was the youthful qualities of love and zeal that chiefly marked his conduct throughout the Gospel history; he did not stand forth and ask or answer questions, or enter into arguments on the new subjects then revealed, as did Peter, Thomas, Philip, and Jude; but he followed, he listened, and, like the Virgin Mother, laid up these things in his heart —above all, those deepest and most spiritual lessons that at the moment of their utterance passed over the heads of their hearers.

Still the nearest, and pre-eminent in love during the Passion Sorrow and the Resurrection Joy, he was yet by his sacred trust, the care of the Blessed Virgin, set aside from the active labours of his brethren during the first missions of the Church. In the Book of the Acts we find him at first as the com