will inevitably starve with hunger in the midst of it. But he who knows that man doth not live by bread alone, will not thus, for the sake of living, lose all that makes life dear-will, when he has done his duty, trust God to preserve with all things needful the body He has made-will seek with more earnest endeavour the bread from heaven, and that living water whereof he who drinketh shall thirst no

more.

And thus His first temptation was analogous in form to the last taant addressed to Him on the cross- 66 If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross." "If" since faith and trust are the mainstay of all human holiness, the tempter is ever strongest in the suggestion of such doubts; strong, too, in his appeal to the free-will and the self-will of man. "You may, you can-why not do it?" On the cross our Saviour answers not; here He answers only to express a great eternal principle. He does not say, "I am the Son of God;" in the profundity of His humiliation, in the extreme of His self-sacrifice, He made not His equality with God a thing to be grasped at, “but made Himself of no reputation." He foils the tempter, not as very God, but as very man.

2. The order of the temptations is given differently by St. Matthew and St. Luke, St. Matthew placing second the scene on the pinnacle of the Temple, and St. Luke the vision of the kingdoms of the world. Both orders cannot be right, and possibly St. Luke may have been influenced in his arrangement by the thought that a temptation to spiritual pride and the arbitrary exercise of miraculous power was a subtler and less transparent, and therefore more powerful one, than the temptation to fall down and recognise the power of evil. But the words, "Get thee behind me, Satan," recorded by both Evangelists (Luke iv. 8; Matt. iv. 10)—the fact that St. Matthew alone gives a definite sequence (" then," "again")-perhaps, too, the consideration. that St. Matthew, as one of the Apostles, is more likely to have heard the narrative immediately from the lips of Christ-give greater weight to the order which he adopts.

Jesus had conquered and rejected the first temptation by the expression of an absolute trust in God. Adapting itself, therefore, with infinite subtlety to the discovered mood of the Saviour's soul, the next temptation, challenging as it were directly, and appealing immediately to, this absolute trust, claims the illustration and expression of it, not to relieve an immediate necessity, but to avert an overwhelming peril. Then he brought Him to the Holy City, and setteth Him on the pinnacle of the Temple." Some well-known pinnacle of that well

known mass must be intended; perhaps the roof of the Stoa Basilika or Royal Porch, on the southern side of the Temple, which looked down sheer into the valley of the Kidron below it, from a height so dizzy that, according to the description of Josephus, if any one ventured to look down, his head would swim at the immeasurable depth; perhaps Solomon's Porch, the Stox Anatolikè, which Josephus also has described, and from which, according to tradition, St. James, the Lord's brother, was afterwards precipitated into the court below. "If"-again that doubt, as though to awake a spirit of pride, in the exercise of that miraculous display to which He is tempted-“if thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down." "Thou art in danger not self-sought; save Thyself from it, as Thou canst and mayest, and thereby prove Thy Divine power and nature. Is it not written that the angels shall bear Thee up? Will not this be a splendid proof of Thy trust in God ?" Thus deep and subtle was this temptation; and thus, since Jesus had appealed to Scripture, did the devil also "quote Scripture for his purpose." For there was nothing vulgar, nothing selfish, nothing sensuous in this temptation. It was an appeal, not to natural appetites, but to perverted spiritual instincts. Does not the history of sects, and parties, and churches, and men of high religious claims, show us that thousands who could not sink into the slough of sensuality, have yet thrust themselves arrogantly into needless perils, and been dashed into headlong ruin from the pinnacle of spiritual pride? And how calm, yet full of warning, was that simple answer, "It is written again, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.'" The word in the original (κπeɩpáσeis—Matt. iv. 7; Deut. vi. 16) is stronger and more expressive. It is, "Thou shalt not tempt to the extreme the Lord thy God;" thou shalt not, as it were, presume on all that He can do for thee; thou shalt not claim His miraculous intervention to save thee from thine own presumption and folly; thou shalt not challenge His power to the proof. When thou art in the path of duty trust in Him to the utmost with a perfect confidence; but listen not to that haaghty seductive whisper, "Ye shall be as gods," and let there be no sclf-willed and capricious irreverence in thy demand for aid. Thento add the words so cunningly omitted by the tempter-"shalt thou be safe in all thy ways." And Jesus does not even allude to His apparent danger. Danger not self-sought is safety. The tempter's own words had been a confession of his own impotence-" Cast Thyself down." Even from that giddy height he had no power to hurl Him whom God kept safe. The Scripture which he had quoted was true, though he had perverted it. No amount of temptation can ever

necessitate a sin. With every temptation God provides also "the way

to escape:

"Also it is written,

'Tempt not the Lord thy God,' He said, and stood:

But Satan, smitten by amazement, fell."

3. Foiled in his appeal to natural hunger, or to the possibility of spiritual pride, the tempter appealed to "the last infirmity of noble minds," and staked all on one splendid cast. He makes up for the want of subtlety in the form by the apparent magnificence of the issue. From a high mountain he showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and as the коσμокрáтwр, the "prince of this world," he offered them all to Him who had lived as the village carpenter, in return for one expression of homage, one act of acknowledgment.

"The kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them!" "There are some that will say," says Bishop Andrewes, "that we are never tempted with kingdoms. It may be well, for it needs not be, when less will serve. It was Christ only that was thus tempted; in Him lay an heroical mind that could not be tempted with small matters. But with us it is nothing so, for we esteem more basely of ourselves. We set our wares at a very easy price; he may buy us even dagger-cheap. He need never carry us so high as the mount. The pinnacle is high enough; yea, the lowest steeple in all the town would serve the turn. Or let him but carry us to the leads and gutters of our own houses; nay, let us but stand in our windows or our doors, if he will give us so much as we can there see, he will tempt us thoroughly; we will accept it, and thank him too. . . . . A matter of half-a-crown, or ten groats, a pair of shoes, or some such trifle, will bring us on our knees to the devil."

But Christ taught, "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

There was one living who, scarcely in a figure, might be said to have the whole world. The Roman Emperor Tiberius was at that moment infinitely the most powerful of living men, the absolute, undisputed, deified ruler of all that was fairest and richest in the kingdoms of the earth. There was no control to his power, no limit to his wealth, no restraint upon his pleasures. And to yield himself still more unreservedly to the boundless self-gratification of a voluptuous luxury, not long after this time he chose for himself a home on one of the loveliest spots on the earth's surface, under the shadow of the slumbering volcano, upon an enchanting islet in one of the most

softly delicious climates of the world. What came of it all? He was, as Pliny calls him, "tristissimus ut constat hominum," confessedly the most gloomy of mankind. And there, from this home of his hidden infamics, from this island where on a scale so splendid he had tried the experiment of what happiness can be achieved by pressing the world's most absolute authority, and the world's guiltiest indulgences, into the service of an exclusively selfish life, he wrote to his servile and corrupted Senate, "What to write to you, Conscript Fathers, or how to write, or what not to write, may all the gods and goddesses destroy me, worse than I feel that they are daily destroying me, if I know." Rarely has there been vouchsafed to the world a more overwhelming proof that its richest gifts are but "fairy gold that turns to dust and dross," and its most colossal edifices of personal splendour and greatness no more durable barrier against the encroachment of bitter misery than are the babe's sandheaps to stay the mighty march of the Atlantic tide.

In such perplexity, in such anguish, does the sinful possession of all riches and all rule end. Such is the invariable Nemesis of unbridled lusts. It does not need the snaky tresses or the shaken torch of the fabled Erinnyes. The guilty conscience is its own adequate avenger; and "if the world were one entire and perfect chrysolite," and that gem ours, it would not console us for one hour of that inward torment, or compensate in any way for those lacerating

pangs.

But he who is an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven is lord over vaster and more real worlds, infinitely happy because infinitely pure. And over that kingdom Satan has no power. It is the kingdom of God; and since from Satan not even the smallest semblance of any of his ruinous gifts can be gained except by suffering the soul to do allegiance to him, the answer to all his temptations is the answer of Christ, "Get thee behind me Satan: for it is written, 'Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.""

Thus was Christ victorious, through that self-renunciation through which only can victory be won. And the moments of such honest struggle crowned with victory are the very sweetest and happiest that the life of man can give. They are full of an elevation and a delight which can only be described in language borrowed from the imagery of Heaven.

"Then the devil leaveth Him "-St. Luke adds, "till a fitting opportunity"-" and, behold, angels came and ministered unto Him.”

CHAPTER X.

THE FIRST APOSTLES.

VICTORIOUS Over that concentrated temptation, safe from the fiery ordeal, the Saviour left the wilderness and returned to the fords of Jordan.

The Synoptical Gospels, which dwell mainly on the ministry in Galilee, and date its active commencement from the imprisonment of John, omit all record of the intermediate events, and only mention our Lord's retirement to Nazareth. It is to the fourth Evangelist that we owe the beautiful narrative of the days which immediately ensued upon the temptation. The Judæan ministry is brought by him into the first prominence. He seems to have made a point of relating nothing of which he had not been a personal witness, and there are some few indications that he was bound to Jerusalem by peculiar relations. By station St. John was a fisherman, and it is not impossible that, as the fish of the Lake of Galilee were sent in large quantities to Jerusalem, he may have lived there at certain seasons in connection with the employment of his father and his brother, who, as the owners of their own boat and the masters of hired servants, evidently occupied a position of some importance. Be that as it may, it is St. John alone who narrates to us the first call of the earliest Apostles, and he relates it with all the minute particulars and graphic touches of one on whose heart and memory each incident had been indelibly impressed.

The deputation of the Sanhedrin (to which we have already alluded) seems to have taken place the day previous to our Lord's return from the wilderness; and when, on the following morning, the Baptist saw Jesus approaching, he delivered a public and emphatic testimony that this was indeed the Messiah who had been marked out to him by the appointed sign, and that He was "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." Whether the prominent conception in the Baptist's mind was the Paschal Lamb, or the Lamb of the morning and evening sacrifice; whether "the world" (Kooμos) was the actual expression which he used, or is merely a Greek rendering of the word "people"(); whether he understood the profound and awful import of his own utterance, or was carried by prophetic inspiration beyond himself-we -we cannot tell. But this much is clear, that since his whole imagery, and indeed the very description of his own function and position, is, as we have already seen, borrowed from the Evangelical