It was at Ephesus, the capital of Proconsular Asia, that he whom we too may call ‘the Venerable’ held his modest court, and from thence that he went on circuit, organizing and visiting the little congregations formed in the cities and greater towns of the province. We have a glimpse of these activities in the famous story of the Robber Chief. We are more concerned with the contemplative side of his life, with that inward retrospect which occupied his mind. I do not doubt that it is true that the other Gospels, as they came into circulation among the churches, were brought to him, and that he expressed his approval of them. The story makes him speak with unique authority, which has about it however nothing artificial, but is just the natural deference for one who of all men living was in the best position to know the things of which he spoke. His approval of the other Gospels was calm and objective, but critical. I believe that the precious statements that Papias has preserved for us about the compositions of St. Mark and St. Matthew are really fragments of his criticism. I accept also as literally true the story that it was partly because he felt that there was something wanting in the older records, and partly because of the urgency of those around him, that the old man at last was himself impelled to write. Browning’s ‘Death in the Desert’ presents him at a later stage—at the last stage of all—but as an imaginative reproduction of the circumstances and frame of mind in which the Gospel was written, it is the best that I know. At Ephesus in Asia the embers of the apostolic age glowed longer than elsewhere; and we cannot wonder that here the torch should be lit which was to be handed on to later times. If the devotion of disciples had to do with the writing of the Gospel, we may be sure that it also had to do with the commending and spreading of the Gospel when written. It is possible enough that they were the first to give it the name of ‘the spiritual Gospel.’ As such it passed from hand to hand; and again it is not surprising that those who prided themselves on superior spirituality and insight, like the Gnostics, showed a special fondness for this Gospel, as we are told they did[85]. Neither is it any more surprising that in an opposite quarter, where a spirit like that of our own Hanoverian Bishops looked with jealousy upon every outbreak of enthusiasm, there should be a movement of reaction against the Gospel which seemed to encourage such manifestations (the Alogi). The catholic Church went calmly on its way, and these partialities and inequalities soon found their level. By the time of Irenaeus there is a stable equilibrium; no one of the four Gospels is either before or after another. And this is really the lesson taught by the Muratorian Fragment, though the writer has to speak a little more apologetically—there are, it is true, differences, but all are inspired by the self-same Spirit.