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528 DARKNESS AND DAWN
left in charge of the young and struggling Churches. He
sailed in search of the Apostle, and his ship stopped for a
day at Patmos, where he found the Beloved Disciple in his
exile. The ascendency of St. John's personality had overawed
the inhabitants of that rocky islet, and he was suffered
to spend his time in freedom. Onesimus sat with
him under a grey olive tree, on the grassy summit of a rock,
the highest point of the island, and discoursed with him
for hours. The scene was lovely. The brilliant sapphire
of the sea lay beneath them in unbroken calm, rippled here
and there by the white wings of the beautiful seabirds.
The crags glowed a deep rich red, except when they were
covered with grass, on which the pink sea-thrift had already
faded into white. On every side the sea-line was
broken by the fantastic contour of isles and islets. Eastward
on the Ionian shore, so rich in heroic and philosophic
memories, they saw the historic summit of Mount Mycale,
and northwards the island of Thera. A burning mountain,
cast into the midst of the sea, and at that time in a crisis of
violent eruption, it vomited, as though from the depths of
the abyss, its volumes of turbid smoke which hung
like a
cloud at one spot of the far horizon. 1 It was here that St.
John heard from Onesimus the scenes .which had followed
his providential deliverance from the boiling oil, the illumination
of Nero's gardens with living torches, the orgies
of the wild beast from the sea of nations as he wallowed
in the blood of the saints. His whole soul was already
brooding on the awful manifesto in which he answered the
fury of the world, and spoke of the impending destruction of
the two great cities of antiquity Jerusalem, the metropolis
of God's olden Temple; Eome, the metropolis of the
dragon and the Antichrist. Here, too, he entrusted to Onesimus
in whose youth, prudence, and courage he was interested
some of the keys to that strange cryptogram of
the Apocalypse, which, if it had been written otherwise
than in symbols, might have involved the ruin of whole
communities. Among other things he told him that, by
the cabbalistic system of Gematria, which the Greeks called
'
isopsephism, Nero Caesar' in Hebrew letters gave that which
he had called the number of the Beast, 666. It was necessary
1 Sen. Quoest. Nat. ii. 26, vi. 21.