nto the world, but
beyond that necessary communication of her experience we cannot think of
her as speaking of her sacred memories. Silence and meditation, longing
and waiting, would have filled the years till the hour of her release.

But in the quiet hours spent with S. John it would be different. Between
the Blessed Virgin and S. John there was perfect understanding and
perfect sympathy, and we love to think of the hours that they would have
spent together in deep spiritual intercourse. Those hours would not be
hours of reminiscence merely; they would rather be hours in which these
two would attempt with the aid of the Spirit Who ruled in them so fully
to enter deeper and ever deeper into the meaning of Incarnate God.
Jesus would be the continual object of their thought and their love, and
meditation upon His words and acts would lead them to an ever increasing
appreciation of their depth and meaning.

We have all felt, in reading the pages of S. John, how vast is the
difference both in attitude toward his subject and in his understanding
of it from that of the other Evangelists. The earlier Evangelists seem
deliberately to keep all feeling out of their story, to tell the life of
our Lord in the most meagre outline, confining themselves to the
essential facts. Anything like interpretation they decline. In S. John
all this is changed. The Jesus whom he presents is the same Jesus, but
seen through what different eyes! The same life is presented, but with
what changes in selection of material! The Gospel of S. John seems
almost a series of mediations upon selected facts of an already familiar
life rather than an attempt to tell a life-story. And so indeed we think
of it. When S. John wrote, the life of our Lord as a series of events
was already before the Church. The Church had the synoptic Gospels, and
it had a still living tradition to inform it. What it needed, and what
the Holy Spirit led S. John to give it, was some glimpse of the inner
meaning of the Incarnation, some unfolding of the spiritual depths of
the teaching of Jesus.

We know how it is that different people listening to the same words get
different impressions and carry away with them quite different meanings.
We hear what we are able to hear. And S. John was able to hear what the
other disciples of our Lord seem not to have heard. What dwelt in his
memory and was worked up in his meditations and was at length
transmitted to us, was the meaning of such