Her career, for eighteen centuries, has been a chequered one, and she has been under the rule of princes of many creeds, yet there has been no season during all that time, as far as we know, (and during such seasons as she was inhabited at all,) that she has been without her little community of Christians "faithful unto death." Hers was the only church against which no threats were implied in the Revelations, and the only one which survived.
With Ephesus, forty miles from here, where was located another of the seven churches, the case was different.

The "candlestick" has been removed from Ephesus.

Her light has been put out.

Pilgrims, always prone to find prophecies in the Bible, and often where none exist, speak cheerfully and complacently of poor, ruined Ephesus as the victim of prophecy.

And yet there is no sentence that promises, without due qualification, the destruction of the city.