The Isle of Patmos

       We are approaching Patmos, the island of vision, where Domitian's prisoner and exile was given to see all the victories and all the woes, and all the horrors and all the raptures of earth and heaven going by him in a panorama, pleasing and Mistered, and blackened and illumined. The Evangel John has made that island the most famous of all earthly islands. Not Scio, in which Homer lived, nor Samos, the birthplace of Pythagoras, nor Coos, in which Hippocrates was born, nor Rhodes in which the Colossus stood, nor St. Helena where Napoleon died, nor Guernsey in which Victor Hugo was banished, has been so famous either on earth or in heaven. Patmos is a rock sheer down, a plateau at the top reaching to the foot of another rock, that lifts its bare forehead to great height, then a long line of rock, sinking, rising, growing more defiant or subsiding into valleys in which there is no verdure, but only desolation and barrenness are cradled. The island is a place where an evangelist and other offenders against sinful authority might easily be starved. John's condition suggested no doubt much of the imagery of his inspired dream. As the famished are apt to dream of food, John writes of the deliverance of the righteous, saying, "They shall hunger no more." Plenty of water but most of it salt, the hot tongue of the evangelist thought of the liquid supplies of heaven, saying, "They shall thirst no more." The waves today are in commotion. A high wind is blowing the billows of the Mediterranean against the bluffs of Patmos, and each wave has a voice and all the waves together make a chorus, and so they may have done in John's time and become symbols of the multitudinous anthems of heaven, and he says they are "like the voice of many waters." But this morning the Mediterranean was very smooth. The waters were crystal and the sunlight seemed to set them on fire, and there was a mingling of white light and intense flame, and so some day while John looked out from his cavern home in yonder hillside he may have been led thereby to think of the splendors before the throne, and he speaks of them as the "sea of glass mingled with fire."

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