to which S. John took her after the crucifixion.  Did she remain there, or did she follow S. John, and at length come to live with him in Ephesus?  Ephesus puts forward the claim, and we feel that it would be well founded in the nature of the relation between these two, if S. Mary lived until the settlement of the last of the apostles in the Asian city.  Our Lord’s committal of His Mother to the beloved disciple implies their personal association as long as S. Mary lived:  if till S. John was settled in Ephesus, then we may be sure that she was there.  She would be with S. John as long as she lived, but can we think of her as living long?  Would not a great love draw her to another world and the presence of her triumphant Son?

Let us, however think, as one tradition bids us, of our Lady as living some time with S. John at Ephesus.  We can understand the situation because it is so much like our own.  These Asia Minor cities of the imperial period were curiously like the great centers of population in the Western world of to-day—­London, Paris, New York, Chicago.  There was the same over-crowding of population, the same intense commercial activity, the same almost insane thirst for amusement and excitement, the same degeneracy of moral fibre.  The sins that sapped the life of Ephesus are the same that degrade contemporary life.  In some ways Ephesus was, possibly, more frankly corrupt; but on the other hand it had no daily press to advertise and promote sin and social corruption.  There is more of Christianity and of Christian influence in the modern city, but even here there is a curious resemblance between the two.  The Christian Religion had but recently been introduced into Ephesus, but already it had precisely that touch of ineffectiveness that seems to us so modern.  The message of the risen Lord to the angel of the Church in Ephesus is:  “Nevertheless I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love.  Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.”

The things that hearten us are sometimes strange; but I suppose that there is a feeling of encouragement in our present day distress and spiritual ineffectiveness in the thought that even under S. John the Church in Ephesus was not wholly ideal.  The conditions which baffle us, baffled him.  The converts who were so promising and enthusiastic declined in zeal and fell back under the spell of worldliness.  Zeal is a quality which is maintained with great difficulty, and the pull of the world, whether social or business, is steadily exercised.  Converts in Ephesus, like converts in New York, felt that their friends were right who declared that they were quite unnecessarily strict, and that in order to serve Christ it was not necessary to turn their backs absolutely on Diana.