so much for the honor of his nation. He himself was not born when it happened, and, though he might have heard the report of it, he would, _perhaps (in the modern way), oppose speculation and hypothesis to fact_." Jenks, another commentator, says: "It is true the Jewish historians, who are not sparing in praise of Jerusalem, do none of them mention this pool, for which, perhaps, this is the reason: that it was taken as a presage of the approach of the Messiah, and, _therefore, they who denied him to be come industriously concealed such an indication of his coming_." No one has ever pretended to have found this pool, although pious travelers have found every other spot consecrated by the life and death of Christ. Helena, the mother of Constantine, as early as A. D. 326, made a pilgrimage to the Holy City to discover the places made sacred by scenes in the life of the Saviour; and when human energy and skill failed, she called to her assistance the aid of the miraculous. But the powers that enabled her to find the true cross, after a waste in the earth of over three hundred years, and detect the place of the Lord's sepulcher, and other sacred spots which Infidel hatred vainly attempted to obliterate, failed to discover the place where the angel of mercy found ground to rest her feet when she descended from heaven, loaded with blessings for the blind, halt and withered. It is admitted by all writers, and especially Michaelis (vol. iii. part I, p. 280), that the Gospel of John was written in answer to the Gnostics, and especially Corinthus, who lived in the last years of the first century. It was possible to spin out the life of John to the end of the century, and thus bring him near the time when Corinthus flourished; but it is fatal to the claim, set up by Irenaeus and others, that John was the author of the fourth Gospel, that the quarrels which grew out of the writings of Corinthus failed to attract notice until some time about the middle of the second century. You may look in vain among all the writings of the Fathers and others of the first century to find the name of Corinthus or any of his writings, although we can trace Gnosticism, in its primitive stages, as early as the first years in the second. Still, it assumed but little importance in its contests with Christianity until some time after the year A. D. 117. Buck says that "_Many persons were infected with the Gnostic heresy in the first century; though the sect did not render itself conspicuous, either for numbers or reputation, before the reign of Adrian, when some writers erroneously date its rise_? There was no call or demand for the fourth Gospel until Christians and Gnostics commenced their quarrels, which was long after John's death, even admitting that he lived to be a hundred years old. There was no help in the emergency which then arose, but to antedate the fourth Gospel, to confound the time when Cerinthus wrote