St. Augustine had been assured by what he considered no light testimony that St. John was not dead, but asleep in his sepulchre, and that the motion of his breast as he breathed might be perceived by a gentle movement of the earth. The words of our Lord after his Resurrection, concerning the beloved disciple, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee,” gave scope to conjecture concerning the fate of this Evangelist, and yet in some degree set bounds to that spirit of lying invention which in process of time annexed as many fables to corrupted Christianity as the Greek and Roman poets had engrafted upon their heathenism, or the Rabbis upon the Jewish faith. “Sinner that I am,” said a French prelate with demure irony, when a head of St. John the Baptist was presented to him to kiss in some Church of which it was the choicest treasure,—“sinner that I am, this is the fourth head of the glorious Baptist that I have had the happiness of holding in these unworthy hands!” But while some half dozen or half score of these heads were produced, because it was certain that the Saint had been beheaded, no relic of St. John the Evangelist's person, nor of the Virgin Mary's, was ever invented. The story of the Assumption precluded any such invention in the one case,—and in St. John's the mysterious uncertainty of his fate had the same effect as this received tradition. The Benedictines of St. Claude's Monastery in the Jura exhibited his own manuscript of the Apocalypse,—(the most learned of that order in no unlearned age, believed or affected to believe that it was his actual autograph,)—and they considered that it was greatly enhanced in value by its being the only relic of that Saint in existence.