(or Son of God as a synonym of Messiah) may take shape as the investigation goes on, what we have to start from is the experience of an endowment with divine power, and of a heavenly calling to fulfil the grandest ideals of the Old Testament. This consciousness of divine power and of a unique vocation, it is no exaggeration to say, lies behind everything in the gospels. The words and deeds of Jesus, the authority He wields, the demands He makes, His attitude to men, assume it at every point. Whatever may have been the order of His teaching, whatever the importance in His historical career of the hour at which the disciples saw into His secret and hailed Him as the Messiah, there is something of far greater consequence -the fact, namely, that the life of Jesus, wherever we come into contact with it, is the life of the Person who is revealed to us in the Baptism. It is not the life of the carpenter of Nazareth, or of a Galilæan peasant, or of a simple child of God like the pious people in the first two chapters of Luke. It is the life of one who has been baptized with divine power, and who is conscious that He has been called by God with a calling which if it is His at all must be His alone. It is this which makes the whole gospel picture of Jesus intelligible, and which justifies the New Testament attitude toward Jesus Himself. The attitude is justified only if the picture is substantially true; and it is not an argument against the narrative of the baptism, but an argument in favour of it, that it agrees with the whole presentation of Jesus in the gospels, and with the Christian recognition of His supreme place. It agrees with them in the large sense that the subject of the gospel narrative is from beginning to end a person clothed in divine power and conscious that through His sovereignty and service the Kingdom of God is to come.

THE TEMPTATIONS

(Mark 1 12., Matt. 4 111, Luke 4 1-18)

That conception of the consciousness of Jesus with which He is introduced to us in the story of His baptism is confirmed and elucidated by the narrative of the temptation. This was found in the source common to Matthew and Luke, and is given in a more summary form in Mark. It is impossible to say how Mark comes to tell no more than he does, or why Matthew and Luke have so much fuller an account than he. The question is often discussed as if the two versions supplied by our gospels were all that had to be considered-as if Mark must have abridged the source common to Matthew and Luke, or as if that source must have expanded Mark. Surely there is every probability that the subject of these narratives was one which would have a familiar place in oral tradition, and might be known in this way in a more condensed or an ampler form. Why should not Jesusto whom, unless it is pure fiction, the narrative must go back-have spoken of the strange experiences which succeeded His baptism, now with less and again with greater fulness of detail? At one time he might say no more than we find in Mark-that the hour of exaltation, in which He saw heaven opened, and had access of divine power, and heard the voice of God call Him with that supreme calling, was followed by weeks of severe spiritual conflict. He was in the wilderness, undergoing temptation by Satan; He was with the wild beasts, in dreadful solitude; yet He was sustained by heavenly help: the angels ministered to Him. At another time He might use the poetic and symbolic forms which we find in Matthew and Luke, and which were no doubt found in their common source, to give some idea of the nature and issues of this spiritual conflict. This not only

seems to the writer inherently credible, but far more probable than that the imagination of the Church, working on the general idea that Jesus must have had a spiritual conflict at the hour at which He entered on the Messianic career, constructed out of His subsequent experience this representation of what it knew His conflicts to be. No doubt the temptations by which Jesus is here assailed are those by which He was assailed throughout His life, but that is only to say that they are real, not imaginary. A serious spirit with a high calling faces the world seriously, and with true and profound insight. It looks out on to it as it is. It sees the paths which are actually open to it there, along which it may go if it will, and which often seem to offer a seductively short path to its goal. In face of the testimony of the gospels that Jesus did this, it is simply gratuitous to eliminate the temptation from His history, and to explain it by parallels from the mythical history of Buddha, or as the reflection of the Church upon Jesus, not the self-revelation of Jesus to the Church. The historical character of the narrative is supported by what most will admit to be an allusion to it in an undoubted word of Jesus: 'No one can enter into the house of the strong man and spoil his goods unless he first bind the strong man, and then he will spoil his house' (Mark 327, Matt. 12 29, Luke 11 21f.). In the wilderness Jesus bound the strong man. He faced and vanquished the enemy of His calling, and of all the work and will of God for man. He contemplated the false and alluring paths which promised to bear Him swiftly to the fulfilment of His vocation, and in the strength of His relation to God He turned at once and finally from them all.

A closer look at the Temptations throws an important light on Jesus' consciousness of Himself. They are all relative to the character in which He is presented at the Baptism, that of the Son of God, the ideal King in and

through whom God's sovereignty is to be established. Jesus is this ideal King, and the question agitated in the Temptations is how His Kingship is to be realised, how in and through Him the sovereignty of God is to become an accomplished fact in the world. Conscious of His calling, conscious of the divine power which has come upon Him, He looks out upon the world, and upon the ways in which ascendency over men may be won there. The first temptation is concerned with the most obvious. Build the Kingdom, it suggests, on bread. Make it the first point in your programme to abolish hunger. Multiply loaves and fishes all the time. This, as we know from what followed the feeding of the five thousand, when the multitudes wanted to take Jesus by force and make Him their King, was a way to ascendency which lay invitingly open. Men would have thronged around Him had He chosen it, and the temptation to do so lay in the fact that He had the deepest sympathy with all human distress. It was because He had compassion on the multitudes who were ready to faint in the wilderness that He spread a table for them. But he knew that the Kingdom of God could not come by giving bodily comfort a primacy in human nature. He said to Himself in the wilderness, as He said afterwards to others, Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you. Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto everlasting life. The second temptation was one which dogged Jesus through His whole career. Jews demand signs, says Paul; and a ready way to ascendency over them was to indulge in marvellous displays of power. This is what is meant by the temptation of the pinnacle. 'Cast thyself down,' means, 'Dazzle men's senses, and you will obtain the sovereignty over their souls.' This was what men themselves asserted. 'Show us a sign

from heaven.' 'What sign showest Thou then that we may see and believe?' 'Let Him now come down from the cross.' It is not easy for us to understand a temptation which was dependent on the possession of superhuman power, but the important point to notice is that Jesus rejected appeals to the senses as a means to attain ascendency over men for God. He never attempted to dazzle. He made no use of apparatus of any description. An elaborate ritual of worship, awing and subduing the senses, would have seemed to Him, as a means of producing spiritual impressions and winning men for God, a temptation of the devil. He aimed at spiritual ends by spiritual means, and regarded anything else as a betrayal of His cause. And finally, as He looked upon the world in which the Kingdom of God was to come, He saw another kingdom established there already and in possession of enormous power. 'It has been handed over to Me, and to whomsoever I will I give it.' This saying, which in Luke is put into the lips of Satan, is not meant to be regarded as untrue. There would be no temptation in it if it was untrue. It is the terrible fact, which confronts every one who is interested in the Kingdom of God, that evil in the world is enormously strong. It wields vast resources. It has enormous bribes to offer. For almost any purpose it seems able to put one into an advantageous position. At times it seems as though less one is willing to compromise with it, to recognise that it has at least a relative or temporary right to exist, it will be impossible to get a foothold in the world at all. Now this was the third temptation. Jesus would feel it the more keenly because His was truly a kingly nature, born to ascendency, exercising it unconsciously, and now called to realise the ideal and promise of God's King. It was urgent that the power which was His of right should actually come into His hands, and He would feel keenly