If, now, we examine the gospel of John, we find its internal character agreeing with the ancient tradition that it was written at Ephesus late in the apostle's life. That it was composed at a distance from Judea, in a Gentile region, is manifest from his careful explanation of Jewish terms and usages, which among his countrymen would have needed no explanation. No man writing in Judea, or among the Galileans who habitually attended the national feasts at Jerusalem, would have said, "And the passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh," 6:4; "Now the Jews' feast of tabernacles was at hand," 7:2, etc. The absence of all reference to the overthrow of the Jewish polity, civil and ecclesiastical, may be naturally explained upon the supposition that the apostle wrote some years after that event, when his mind had now become familiar with the great truth that the Mosaic institutions had forever passed away to make room for the universal dispensation of Christianity; and that he wrote, too, among Gentiles for whom the abolition of these institutions had no special interest. In general style and spirit, moreover, the gospel of John is closely allied to his first epistle, and cannot well be separated from it by a great interval of time; but the epistle undoubtedly belongs to a later period of the apostle's life. From the language of John, chap. 5:2, "Now there _is_ at Jerusalem, by the sheep-gate, a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue, Bethesda, _having_ five porches,"--it has been argued that, when John wrote, the city must have been still standing. But Eusebius speaks of the pool as remaining in his day, and why may not the porches, as useful to the Roman conquerors, have been preserved, at least for a season?