It is not unusual for an author to return to the perusal and examination of a work composed by him in bygone years with a deepened belief of the truth of its contents, accompanied by an overwhelming conviction of its want of completeness. Another chapter may be added to what was written before, and then, when all is done, the pen may be laid down, with the feeling that not one-half of all the beautiful truth to which the book relates has yet been told. A circumstance so common in connection with efforts of genius finds something of a parallel here, in connection with the higher and nobler exercises of inspiration. It is to the last degree affecting to behold the aged Evangelist reading over his own Gospel, dwelling with delight upon sacred memories of the Divine Friend who so graciously loved him, and whom he so gratefully loved in return, thinking of one act of his after another, one word of his after another, never written, and realizing the impossibility of producing a perfect portrait of the Divine original, yet folding up his own MS. with the devout assurance that in giving it to the Church he was an instrument, in the hands of the Spirit, of bestowing upon mankind one of the richest treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I. The Evangelist here speaks of books—of the possibility of writing an immense number of them on one subject; and thus he calls to our mind the saying of the wise man, that “of making many books there is no end.” They were very numerous in the ancient world. The library of the Ptolemies at Alexandria was of such prodigious magnitude that it numbered half a million volumes. Large public and private collections were not uncommon in St. John’s time; and in Rome, at that period, the bookseller’s trade signally flourished. In the shop doors lists of new publications were exhibited; nor were the prices of some by any means immoderate, a considerable proportion of the MSS. being so small as to come under the modern denomination of pamphlets or tracts. Thus early existed multitudes of those productions which Milton eloquently describes as “not dead things,” but such as “contain a potency of life,” as “active as the soul whose progeny they are,” preserving, “as a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect which bred them,” as “vigorously productive” as the “fabulous dragon’s teeth,” and which, being “sown up and down,” may, like them, perchance, spring up into armed men. Throughout the civilized world, in the first account of Christianity, were there books containing “the life-blood of master spirits,” that “ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason.” And besides these, there existed, among the elect people of God, a literature incomparably superior to anything else—a literature furnished by historians, poets, and moralists, who far surpassed merely classic ones. For now, in the fulness of time, the Greek, as well as the Hebrew