when it does come it may be apparent even in an ordinary life that unavowed convictions had inspired it all along, and that in these convictions lay the key to everything in it that was powerful or characteristic. Others only saw afterwards, but He whose life was involved could say from the beginning, Secretum meum mihi-I know myself and what I have to do. In particular, it is not enlightening here to employ such technical expressions as the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, or to argue that the expression 'My Son,' as used by the heavenly voice, bears an 'official' Messianic meaning. The ideal King of the Psalm stands alone: he is a unique figure, with a unique calling in relation to the Kingdom of God. But though this is the hour at which in a flash of divine certainty His own identity with that ideal figure takes vivid possession of the mind of Jesus or might we not rather say, because this is such an hour-the whole associations of a word like 'official' are out of place. What we are dealing with is not official, but personal and vital. The gospels do not afford us the means of tracing the antecedent preparation for this supreme experience of Jesus, either on the psychological or the ethical side; but it cannot have been unprepared. It was not to any person at random, it was to this Person and no other, that the transcendent calling came; and it must be related in some way to what Jesus was before. Now the one thing which is stamped upon the New Testament everywhere, as the outstanding characteristic of Jesus, is His filial consciousness in relation to God. This was what no sensitive spiritual observer could miss. It was so dominant and omnipresent in Him that it constrained Christians to conceive of God specifically as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is difficult, therefore, to suppose that Jesus could ever hear the words, This is My Son, or could ever repeat them in teaching, without charging and suffusing them with this filial consciousness. The calling of the ideal King, who is spoken of by God as My Son, is not to be contrasted with this as official with personal; rather must we suppose that on the basis of this personal relation to the Father the consciousness of that high calling became suddenly and overwhelmingly real to Jesus. The consciousness, it might be put, of the Fatherhood of God, as something realised in Him as it was in no other, is the spiritual basis of all conceptions of His place, vocation, and destiny, and therefore it is not to be opposed to these last nor excluded from them. This is the line also on which our minds are led by the one scene preserved from our Lord's earliest manhood in Luke 240 ff. On the banks of the Jordan as in the courts of the Temple Jesus was about His Father's business. His consciousness of Himself, as determined by the heavenly voice, was solitary, incomparable, incommunicable; but it was the consciousness of one who before it and in it and through it called God Father; it was not official, but personal and ethical, filial and spiritual throughout. It is only another way of saying this if we remark that a quite unreal importance is often supposed to belong to the asking and answering of such questions as When did Jesus first claim to be the Messiah? When did the consciousness that He was Messiah awake in His own mind? What modifications, if any, did He introduce into the meaning of the term? All such questions exaggerate the official as opposed to the personal in the life of Jesus, and in doing so they undoubtedly mislead. Jesus was greater than any name, and we must interpret the names He uses through the Person and His experiences and powers, and not the Person through a formal definition of the names. However such titles as Messiah (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 1 (Mark 1 19f., 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 as 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 |