THERE is a story of the apostle John, recorded by Jerome, which may possibly be apocryphal, though both the external and internal evidence in support of it seems to be irrefragable. It relates to the days subsequent to his release from imprisonment on the rock of Patmos, when he had returned to Ephesus. Here, it is said, he would sit, lost in thought, in the assembly, never opening his mouth except occasionally to remark, "Little children, love one another." The younger members of the church, exasperated perhaps at the silence of the beloved disciple, with his memories of those wonderful years of the Master's ministry, and wearied possibly by the monotony of his advice, at last demanded from him why he kept repeating these words. "Because," he answered, "it was the Lord's command; and, if that only is done, it is sufficient."
Fifteen centuries later, one who was regarded as the greatest of the world's thinkers at that time declared that love was all very well in the theater, but that in real life it did considerable mischief. It is quite true that he modified this statement later on, but he left no doubt that he regarded love as essentially a passion, for which he had no more respect than had Whitfield after him. Between the conception of the Galilean fisherman and that of the Elizabethan philosopher there is a great gulf fixed, as wide as the one which separated Dives from Lazarus; nor did any teacher attempt to return absolutely to the definition of the former until Mrs. Eddy uncompromisingly accepted Love as a synonym for God, and declared that the realization of what this means would destroy sin, disease, and death.
The verb commonly used in the Greek Testament to express love is agapao. What its exact meaning was in later Greek, the bastard tongue which in the first century had become in a measure the vernacular of the Mediterranean basin, it is perhaps not yet possible to say; but that in the writings of the New Testament the word had acquired a peculiar "religious-ethical" significance, the lower and more material sense being in turn expressed by phileo, is an admitted fact. The most familiar illustration of this occurs in the record, in the last chapter of the Gospel of John, of the famous charge of Christ Jesus to Peter, "Feed my sheep," where the difference is completely and probably unavoidably lost in the translation:—
