incidents as the interview
with Nicodemus, and the talk with the woman of Samaria, the discourse on
the Holy Eucharist and the great High-priestly prayer. Men have felt the
contrast between S. John and the other Evangelists so intensely that
they have said that this is another Christ who is presented by S. John,
and the influences which have shaped the author of the Fourth Gospel are
quite other than those which shaped the men of the inner circle of
Jesus. But no: it is the instinctive, or rather the Spirit-guided,
selection of the material afforded by those years of association with
Jesus for the purpose of transmitting to the Church a spiritual depth
and beauty, a spiritual significance in our Lord's teaching, that the
earlier Gospel had hardly touched.

Which perhaps they could not touch because when they wrote there was not
yet in the Church the spiritual experience which could fully interpret
our Lord. Through the life of union with the risen Jesus and all the
spiritual experience, all the illumined intelligence that that life
brought, S. John was enabled to understand and interpret as he did.
Writing far on toward the end of the first century he was writing out of
the personal experience of Christian living of many years, which brought
with it year by year an increased power of spiritual vision opening to
him the depth and wonder of the fact of God made man. It is to an
experience of our Lord that he appeals as the basis of his teaching.
"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have
seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, of the Word of life: (for the life was manifested, and we have
seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which
was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have
seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship
with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and His Son Jesus
Christ." And as we read on in S. John's Epistles we cannot fail to see
how deeply the years of meditation have influenced his understanding of
our Lord and His teaching, and how much his past experience of our Lord
has been illumined by the experience of the risen Jesus which has
followed. At no time, we are certain, has S. John been out of touch with
his Master.

And can we for a moment think that the years of intercourse with our
Lady meant nothing in the spiritual development of S. John? On the