The place chosen for his banishment was a dreary desert island in
the Aegean sea, called Patmos. It is situated among that cluster of
islands, called the Sporades, about twenty miles from the Asian coast,
and thirty or forty southwest of Ephesus. It is at this day known
by the observation of travelers, to be a most remarkably desolate
place, showing hardly anything but bare rocks, on which a few poor
inhabitants make but a wretched subsistence. In this insulated desert
the aged apostle was doomed to pass the lonely months, far away from
the enjoyments of Christian communion and social intercourse, so dear
to him, as the last earthly consolation of his life. Yet to him, his
residence at Ephesus was but a place of exile. Far away were the scenes
of his youth and the graves of his fathers. “The shore whereon he
loved to dwell,”――the lake on whose waters he had so often sported or
labored in the freshness of early years, were still the same as ever,
and others now labored there, as he had done ere he was called to a
higher work. But the homes of his childhood knew him no more forever,
and rejoiced now in the light of the countenances of strangers, or
lay in blackening desolation beneath the brand of a wasting invasion.
The waters and the mountains were there still,――they are there now;
but that which to him constituted all their reality was gone then,
as utterly as now. The ardent friends, the dear brother, the faithful
father, the fondly ambitious and loving mother,――who made up his little
world of life, and joy, and hope,――where were they? All were gone; even
his own former self was gone too, and the joys, the hopes, the thoughts,
the views of those early days, were buried as deeply as the friends
of his youth, and far more irrevocably than they. Cut off thus utterly
from all that once excited the earthly and merely human emotions within
him, the whole world was alike a desert or a home, according as he
found in it communion with God, and work for his remaining energies,
in the cause of Christ. Wherever he went, he bore about with him his
resources of enjoyment,――his home was within himself; the friends of
his youth and manhood were still before him in the ever fresh images of
their glorious examples; the brother of his heart was near him always,
and nearest now, when the persecutions of imperial tyranny seemed
to draw him towards a sympathetic participation in the pains and
the glories of that bloody death. The Lord of his life, the author
of his hopes, the guide of his youth, the cherisher of his spirit,
was over and around him ever, with the consolations of his promised
presence,――“with him always, even to the end of the world.”