be received for the substance, Himself - and not for the accidents, His miracles.

Without going too much at length into the meaning of the third temptation, I would offer the following suggestions for its interpretation. Our Lord had His own way of entering into the authority and glory of His Messianic kingdom. When the hour for it was come, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that the Son may glorify thee! And God glorified Him as He glorified God, in, we may be sure, the divinest way, the way of Gethsemane and Calvary. A few months before, when Jesus was beginning to prepare His disciples for the way in which He was to be glorified, Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him, saying, Be it far from thee Lord; this shall never be unto thee. But he turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art a stumbling-block unto me: for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men. If it was a temptation of Satan to shrink from entering upon His kingdom in the divine way, surely it was Satan himself in the human temptation that assailed Him to establish that kingdom in just the opposite way, upon the principles not of love and service and sacrifice, but of pride and ambition and earthly self-exaltation. To surrender one's soul to such motives as these is to fall down and worship Satan. Pride, or the worship of Self, is the subtlest, the first and the last, of human temptations. Even when one has given oneself in faith and hope to God, it creeps in in spiritual form to poison and corrupt the joy and exaltation that

belong of right to these. Jesus could recognize and accept the glory which is the reward of spiritual victory, and in that moment detect and exclude every trace of self-seeking or self-exaltation. He could perfectly lose Himself in the act in which He most perfectly found Himself. The only true humility is that of perfect love. One can lose oneself only in preoccupation with that in others which takes and fills the place of self. The power to do this, which is the triumph of divine love, is the only secret of putting behind that opposite spirit which is of the devil.

Thus the issue of the three temptations was the decisive, though not yet the final and complete, victory of the three great principles which are the spiritual foundations of the kingdom of God - Faith, Hope, Love. As they were the constituents of our Lord's own divine human life, so are they the constituents of that selfsame life as He imparts it to us by His spirit

in us.

III

THE DIVINE SONSHIP OF HUMANITY

As we have seen that the realization of a divine sonship, not so much in human nature as in human life, was the end and achievement of the earthly life of Jesus, it may be well to delay a little upon the attempt to see more exactly what that sonship signifies. And it may be as well to put the question in the form suggested above: Are we to find the divine sonship made so much of by our Lord in a fact of nature or in an act of life? It is an old and familiar issue among us: Did Jesus Christ find man son of God, or did He make him so? When we are baptized into Christ, are we thereby only declared to be, or are we thereby made, children of God? I shall not so much undertake to decide between these two views as attempt to state the truth of both. But we must admit at once that, on the surface at least, the stress of the New Testament and the Church is much more on the second view than on the first. They seem to make little of the natural sonship and much of the spiritual, the communicated or acquired. Our sonship originated with and dates from Christ. It exists only in Him, and can be ours only as we are in Him, by the grace of God upon us and the grace of God in us. We can find the

explanation of this only, I think, in an analysis of the fact and meaning of sonship in general.

What then do we mean by sonship, word or thing? All through nature life reproduces itself; like begets like. But we do not apply the terms father and son to vegetable or animal relationships of begetter and begotten. In their case the relation is only a natural one in which themselves have no part, for the reason

that, in the true sense, they have no selves. In the case of even the higher animals that which is begotten is like that which begot it by the sole fact of its begetting, though it should never know its parent or any member of its species. But a man is not a man, in what is distinctive of man, by being merely born of man. He would never become man apart from, or except through, subsequent personal association with man. What essentially differences man from the brute, what according to Aristotle constitutes his higher and distinctive part, actually comes to him not by physical birth but by personal association. I say actually, not of course potentially. But whatever of spiritual or personal potentiality a human being inherits by birth is as though it were not until it is elicited by the second birth of intercommunication and association. It is born not of blood but of intelligence and affection and will and self-activity. So we may say that in that which truly constitutes it, that which separates it from mere vegetable and animal generation, sonship is a personal and not a physical relationship. It comes through knowing and realizing itself. Of course we may say that it could not know itself if it did not already

exist. And in this is the truth of the natural sonship. But when we endeavour to fix the true meaning and content of sonship we find that that mere potential existence is actual and practical non-existence.

The clearest statement of the matter seems to me to be afforded by Aristotle's account of virtue. No man is virtuous by nature, for the simple reason that virtue is not a natural but a personal quality. It is not virtue except in so far as it has come through oneself, consciously, voluntarily, and of choice. Yet virtue is the most natural thing in the world, and vice the most unnatural. Virtue is the fulfilment of our nature, but it is our fulfilment of it, and it does not really exist prior to our act and activity in its production. Nature constitutes us-not virtuous, but to become so, to make ourselves so. And it so constitutes us by making us persons, by endowing us with reason to know and will to act of ourselves. Just so it is with our sonship to God. What is natural in it is a mere potentiality which, actually and practically, is equivalent to non-existence. It is of course no small thing that we are by nature endowed with spiritual and personal potentialities; that is the condition of all else we may be or become. Yes, but it is only the condition, out of which we may become all sorts of opposites and contradictories. The potentiality to be virtuous or to be children of God is equally the potentiality to be vicious and children of the devil. Shall we say that we are these too by nature? If it is more natural to be child of God than of the devil, that can only mean that in ourselves becoming the one we will more perfectly realize ourselves