manifestation of God. James and John wanted to call down fire on the inhabitants of a Samaritan village. How infinitely far must they have been, at that time, from the kingdom of God! Peter rebuked Him for prophesying His own death, and was thus, as Christ said, a real stumbling-block in His way. He was urging Him, as the devil did in the wilderness, to sacrifice God and the world rather than Himself. Peter could discover no needs-be in the humiliation and death of Christ. He would have been quite content with a throne for his Master: he did not desire a cross. And so it was with the rest of the disciples. They persisted in thinking, notwithstanding all Christ could say to the contrary, that He intended to deliver the Jews from the dominion of the Romans; they could not grasp the notion that He wished to deliver all men from the dominion of sin. They would have it that He ought to be king of the Jews: it never entered into their thoughts that He was to be the Saviour of the world. They were willing to struggle and to fight, if they might thereby secure for their Master an earthly empire; but they could not appreciate, nor even comprehend, that kingdom of righteousness which it was Christ's sole aim to establish. This misunder standing would lead, of course, to want of sympathy. Daily and almost hourly Christ must have been pained by proofs of their selfishness; and He must have been sadly prepared for their conduct at the last, when one betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver, another denied on oath having ever had anything to do with Him, and all the rest forsook Him and fled. Once more. Christ suffered being tempted." Temptation was to Him as real as to us. He would have fallen, as we sometimes fall, unless He had resisted as we ought always to resist. "He passed through the moral conflict," says Pressensé, "as we do, with all the perils of freedom. If it is maintained that He could not have yielded to temptation, and that He knew it all along, His humanity remains only an illusion, and He was not really tempted at all. Let us bring Christ down from this cold empyrean of theology and receive that sublime text, 'He learned obedience'; which signifies that from a state of natural innocence, He was to raise Himself to the holiness that follows choice. A perilous transit; but in it Christ conquered,— conquered by the sole arms of faith and prayer, and not by girding on Godhood as an impenetrable panoply." The same view is taken by Canon Farrar. Some," he says, "have claimed for Christ not only actual sinlessness, but a nature to which sin was miraculously impossible. What then? If His great conflict were a mere deceptive phantasmagoria, how can the narrative of it profit us? If we have to fight the battle clad in the armour of human free-will, which has been hacked and riven about our bosom by so many a cruel blow, what comfort is it to us if our great Captain fought, not only victoriously, but without real danger, not only uninjured, but without even the possibility of a wound? Where is the warrior's courage, if he knows that for him there is but the semblance of a battle against the simulacrum of a foe? They who would thus honour Him rob us of our living Christ, and substitute for Him a perilous phantom, incapable of kindling devotion or inspiring trust." The account of the Temptation, as it is called, is generally understood in a more or less allegorical sense. Origen, Lange, Schleiermacher, Olshausen, Neander, and Calvin understood it thus. But it is, at any rate, an allegorical representation of a fact, the fact, namely, that Jesus Christ was brought face to face with the powers of darkness, and had to struggle in order to overcome. : : "Command that these stones be made bread," said the tempter. In other words: Spend those powers in the service of the senses and the body, which ought only to be spent in the service of God. "Cast Thyself down from hence." In other words Improvidence and presumption would be no sin in Thee, if Thou art the Son of God. "All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me." In other words: Would it not be better to gain the world in the service of the devil than to lose it in the service of God? The alternatives presented to Christ were very similar to those presented to every member of the human race. He was called on to decide whether or not He would sacrifice duty to pleasure; whether He would take His ease, or work the work of God; whether He would strive for temporal prosperity, or seek the salvation of the world. This temptation was constantly being repeated by His disciples and by His relations. "Since Thou canst do these things," said the latter, "show Thyself to the world," and take what the world will give Thee. He conquered, as we know; but the amount of suffering involved in the conquest is not easily realised. He had to choose between selfishness and self-sacrifice. He determined to obey instead of to be obeyed. He C accepted shame instead of glory. He drew on Himself execration instead of popularity. He consigned Himself to a cross instead of to a throne. If you doubt the agony involved in all this, try and imagine what you would have suffered under similar circumstances. Would not the conflict have torn your very heart in twain? Further, as Ullmann has observed, the Man of Sorrows must have been always enduring the temptation of suffering, in one of its many forms. Not only did He suffer being tempted, but He was tempted being in suffering. We have seen that suffering may be, and frequently is, a means to moral progress; but it has also its drawbacks and disadvantages. It brings with it temptations to fretfulness, to repining, to faithlessness, and, if it be very severe, the temptation which poor Job felt, to curse God and die. Lastly, Christ suffered death. And the fact that His death was no ordinary death, may be clearly seen in the agony He experienced in the anticipation of it. It was no vulgar fear of dying, we may be sure, that so weighed down the Saviour's spirit. It was rather sorrow for the blindness and hardness of those who had rejected Him; sorrow for the comparative failure of His life. The inducement to make a compromise with the |