idolatry, in their alarmed zeal for its support, made use of the worst specimens of imperial tyranny to check the advancing evil.
PATMOS.
The place chosen for his banishment was a dreary desert island in the Aegean sea, called Patmos. It is situated among that cluster of islands, called the Sporades, about twenty miles from the Asian coast, and thirty or forty southwest of Ephesus. It is at this day known by the observation of travelers, to be a most remarkably desolate place, showing hardly anything but bare rocks, on which a few poor inhabitants make but a wretched subsistence. In this insulated desert the aged apostle was doomed to pass the lonely months, far away from the enjoyments of Christian communion and social intercourse, so dear to him, as the last earthly consolation of his life. Yet to him, his residence at Ephesus was but a place of exile. Far away were the scenes of his youth and the graves of his fathers. "The shore whereon he loved to dwell,"—the lake on whose waters he had so often sported or labored in the freshness of early years, were still the same as ever, and others now labored there, as he had done ere he was called to a higher work. But the homes of his childhood knew him no more forever, and rejoiced now in the light of the countenances of strangers, or lay in blackening desolation beneath the brand of a wasting invasion. The waters and the mountains were there still,—they are there now; but that which to him constituted all their reality was gone then, as utterly as now. The ardent friends, the dear brother, the faithful father, the fondly ambitious and loving mother,—who made up his little world of life, and joy, and hope,—where were they? All were gone; even his own former self was gone too, and the joys, the hopes, the thoughts, the views of those early days, were buried as deeply as the friends of his youth, and far more irrevocably than they. Cut off thus utterly from all that once excited the earthly and merely human emotions within him, the whole world was alike a desert or a home, according as he found in it communion with God, and work for his remaining energies, in the cause of Christ. Wherever he went, he bore about with him his resources of enjoyment,—his home was within himself; the friends of his youth and manhood were still before him in the ever fresh images of their glorious examples; the brother of his heart was near him always, and nearest now, when the persecutions of imperial tyranny seemed to draw him towards a sympathetic participation in the
