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THE TEMPTATION.

T every step the disclosure of the life of Jesus was a surprise. He came into the world as no man would imagine that a Divine person would come. His youth was spent without exhibitions of singular power. His entrance upon public life was unostentatious. His baptism, to all but John, was like the baptism of any one of the thousands that thronged the Jordan.

Shall he now shine out with a full disclosure of himself? Shall he at once ascend to Jerusalem, and in the greatness of his Divinity make it apparent to all men that he is indeed the very Messiah ?

This was not the Divine method. It was not by a surprise of the senses, nor by exciting mere wonder among unthinking men, that Jesus would make plain his Divine nature. It was by evolving a sweeter and nobler life than man ever does, and in circumstances even more adverse than fall to the lot of man, that his nature was to be shown.

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It is not strange to us, now well instructed in the spirit of Christ's mission, that he did not enter at once upon his work of teaching. Midway between his private life, now ended, and his public ministry, about to begin, there was to be a long and silent discipline. The three narratives of the Temptation, by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, lift us at once into the region of mystery. We find ourselves beyond our depth at the first step, and deep follows deep to the end. The mystery of that Divine Spirit which possessed the Saviour, the mystery of forty days' conflict in such a soul, the mystery of the nature and power of Satan, the mystery of the three final forms into which the Temptation resolved itself, these are beyond our reach. They compass and shroud the scene with a kind of supernatural gloom. The best solution we give to the difficulties will cast but a twilight upon the scene.

It has been supposed by many that the Temptation took place among the solitary mountains of Moab, beyond the Jordan. It was thither that Moses resorted for his last and longing look over the Promised Land; and it would certainly give us a poetic gratification if we could believe that the "exceeding high" mountain, from which the glory of the world flashed upon the Saviour's view, was that same summit upon which his type, the great prophet Moses, had stood, thus singularly making the same peak behold the beginning of the two great dispensations, that of the Old and that of the New Testament. It is a pleasant fancy, but hardly true as history. Westward from Jericho, rising in places with steep cliffs of white limestone fifteen hundred feet in height, is a line of mountains, whose irregular and rugged tops against the sky, seen from the plains of the Jordan, present a noble contrast to the ordinary monotony of the Judæan hills. One, called Quarantania, from its supposed relation to the forty days of temptation, has been pointed out by tradition as the scene of the Lord's conflict. It rises high, is pierced with caves and gashed with ravines, and is solitary and wild enough to have been, as recorded by Mark, a lair of wild beasts, as it continues to be to the present day.

Into the solitude of this mountain in the wilderness came Jesus, under the same guidance as that which convoyed the

prophets of old. Indeed, we must dismiss from our minds modern notions, and even the ideas which ruled in the time of Jesus, and go back to the days of Samuel, of Elijah, and of Ezekiel, if we would get any clew to the imagery and the spirit of the extraordinary transaction which we are about to consider. Had this scene been recorded of some of the prophets hundreds of years before, it would have harmonized admirably with the narratives which relate the old prophetic histories. But in the later days of Gospel history this scene of temptation is like some gigantic boulder drifted out of its place and historic relations, and out of sight and memory of the cliffs to which in kind it belonged. It is in perfect accord with the elder Hebrew nature, and it was the last and greatest of that sublime series of prophetic tableaux, through which Hebrew genius delivered to the world its imperishable contributions of moral truth.

Like the seers of old, Jesus was powerfully excited by the descent upon him of the Divine Spirit. There were all the appearances common to states in which there is a partial suspension of voluntary action. The language of the Evangelists is significant. Luke says: "And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness" ("led up," says Matthew). But Mark's language is more strikingly significant of the prophetic orgasm: "And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness." This is the language of the prophet-paroxysm. Seized with an irresistible impulse, so the "holy men of old" were impelled by the Spirit. Thus Ezekiel says: "In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very high mountain.” (Ezek. xl. 2.) The operation of the Divine inspiration upon the mind of Ezekiel throws important light upon the philosophy of this opening scene of Christ's ministry.

We believe the temptation of Christ to have been an actual experience, not a dream or a parable, in which his soul, illumined and exalted by the Spirit of God, was brought into personal conflict with Satan; and the conflict was none the less real and historic, because the method involved that extraordinary ecstasy of the prophet-mind. Of the peculiarities of the prophetic state we shall speak a little further on.

The whole life of Christ stands between two great spheres of temptation. The forty days of the wilderness and the midnight in the garden of Gethsemane are as two great cloudgates, of entrance to his ministry and of exit from it. In both scenes, silence is the predominant quality.

The first stage of the Temptation includes the forty days of fasting. This may be said to have been the private struggle and personal probation.

The forty days were not for human eyes. If the history of these experiences was ever spoken, even to the ear of John, the most receptive of the disciples, it was not designed for record or publication. It is more probable that the experience was incommunicable. Even in our lower sphere, mental conflicts cannot be adequately reported. The vacillations of the soul, a full expression of its anxieties, its agonizing suspense, shame, remorse, of its yearnings and ambitions, cannot be uttered or written. For the word "shame" does not describe the experience of shame. Nor is the word "love" a portrait of love. The real life of the heart is always unfolding in silence; and men of large natures carry in the centre of their hearts a secret garden or a silent wilderness. But in how much greater degree is this true of the mystery of Christ's temptation in the wilderness, and of his trial in Gethsemane! If there are no heart-words for full human feeling, how much less for divine!

We know that Jesus grappled with the powers of the invisible world, and that he was victorious. His life in the wilderness is not to be imagined as the retirement of a philosophic hermit to contemplative solitude. The cavernous mountain was not merely a study, in which our Lord surveyed in advance the purposes of his ministerial life. All this, doubtless, formed a part of his experience; but there was more than studious leisure and natural contemplation. There was a conflict between his soul and the powers of darkness; a sphere of real energy, which the opposing elements of good and evil in the universe met in intense opposition.

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Out from that infinite aerial ocean in the great Obscure, beyond human life, came we know not what winds, what immeasurable and sweeping forces of temptation. But that the

power and kingdom of the Devil were there concentrated upon him, was the belief of his disciples and the teaching of the Apostles, and it is the faith of the Christian Church. It is not needful for us to understand each struggle and its victory. It is enough for us to know, that in this unfriendly solitude every faculty in man that is tried in ordinary life was also tested and proved in Jesus.

He was "tempted in all points," or faculties, as we are, though not with the same means and implements of temptation. No human being will ever be tried in appetite, in passion, in affection, in sentiment, in will and reason, so severely as was the Lord; and his victory was not simply that he withstood the particular blasts that rushed upon him, but that he tested the utmost that Satan could do, and was able to bear up against it, and to come off a conqueror,—every faculty stamped with the sign of invincibility.

The proof of this appeared in all his career. The members of his soul were put to the same stress that sinful men experience in daily life. There may be new circumstances, but no new temptations; there may be new cunning, new instruments, new conditions, but nothing will send home temptation with greater force than he experienced, or to any part of the soul not assaulted in him. Through that long battle of life in which every man is engaged, and in every mood of the struggle which men of aspiration and moral sense make toward perfect holiness, there is an inspiration of comfort to be derived from the example of Christ. In places the most strange, and in the desolate way where men dwell with the wild beasts of the passions, if there be but a twilight of faith, we shall find his footstep, and know that he has been there, — is there again, living over anew in us his own struggles, and saying, with the authority of a God and the tenderness of a father: "In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." The world is a better place to live in, since Christ suffered and triumphed in it.

We pass now to another form of the Temptation. It was no longer to be a private and personal scrutiny. Jesus had baffled the tempter, and driven him back from the gate of every emotion. But Jesus was not to be a private citizen. He