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 unless 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

how easy the first steps would become if He could only make some kind of limited and temporary accommodation with evil. If He could get or take its help in any way it would do so much to clear His path. But He was conscious also that for the ideal King, through whom the reign of God was to be realised, this was impossible. He saw that to negotiate with evil was really to worship Satan, and that no advantage was worth the price. He said to Himself in this temptation what He afterwards said to all, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose himself?

The interest of the Temptations, in connexion with our subject, lies in this: they show how the Kingdom of God is in the mind of Jesus essentially bound up with Himself. Jesus is often represented now as teaching us things about the Kingdom of God, and then assuming an attitude of pure passivity, simply waiting on God to bring the Kingdom which no action of man, whether His own or another's, can hasten or hinder; but we see here that to His own mind the coming of the Kingdom is involved in His victory over these temptations. His initial triumph, in principle, over all the assaults of Satan-His resolute turning away, from the very beginning, from every false path-the entrance into the world and into the life of man of a Person thus victorious-are a revelation of what the Kingdom is, and a guarantee that at whatever cost it will prevail. This, it will not be questioned, is how Christian faith conceives Jesus all through the New Testament; but it is of supreme importance to notice that it is how Jesus conceives Himself from the opening of His career. His relation to the Kingdom of God is in no sense accidental. It is in His attitude to the possibilities of earth that its true nature is revealed, and with Him it stands or falls. And what was said of the baptism may be repeated here: it is in this character

and in no other that Jesus stands behind every page of the gospel history. It is only this character which makes that history intelligible; and to try to undermine the narrative, only because we do not share the New Testament attitude to Jesus, is as unwarranted historically as it is on all other grounds gratuitous.

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS IN HIS MINISTRY It has been remarked already that no stress can be laid on the chronology of the gospels, but if it is difficult to arrange the matter in order of time, it is fatal to attempt to systematise it. Of all books on the New Testament, those which deal with the teaching and with the mind of Jesus are the least interesting, because they lapse as a rule into this false path. Nothing in the gospels is systematic. There is no set of ideas which recurs, as in John; no succession of questions emerges to be answered by the application of the same principles, as in Paul. Everything is in a manner casual: everything is individual, personal, relative in some way to the moment and its circumstances, though it may enshrine eternal truth. We may say of Jesus, with even less qualification, what has been said of Luther, that He always spoke ad hoc and often at the same time ad hominem. When words so spoken are reduced to a system the virtue has gone out of them; they no longer leave with us an impression of the speaker. But an impression of the Speaker is precisely what the words of Jesus do leave, and what we are in quest of; and consequently, at the risk of being tedious, it will be necessary to trace the self-revelation of Jesus as it is made from one situation to another, in one relation or another, by one significant utterance or another, in the pages of the gospels. Speaking generally, the order followed will be that in which the various passages of Mark and Q occur in Huck's Synopse, and

it must be remembered that it is not on any single passage, but on the cumulative effect of the whole, that the argument depends.

The summary account which Mark gives of the Galilæan ministry (ch. I 14f.) is no doubt to be taken as a summary: we cannot assume that on any given occasion Jesus used these very words. But there is no reason to doubt that they are a true summary, and truly represent the mind and the message of Jesus. With His appearance 'the time was fulfilled': the great crisis had come in God's dealings with men. It is probably a mistake to say that the apocalyptic idea of a predestined course of events underlies this: the apocalyptic way of calculating times and seasons was foreign to the temper of Jesus, and He repeatedly disclaims it (Matt. 24 36; Acts 17). But if anything can be depended upon in the gospels, it is that He had the sense of living in a crisis of final importance: history up to this point had been, so to speak, preparatory and preliminary, but now the decisive hour had come. It was a gracious hour, and the announcement of what was impending was 'the gospel of God'; but it was an hour in which the true decision was a matter of life and death, and we shall see as we proceed how that decision turned upon a relation to Jesus Himself. The evangelist strikes the true key to the consciousness and the self-revelation of Jesus, when he speaks of the fulness of the time and represents Him as saying, The Kingdom of God has drawn near; repent and believe in the gospel.

JESUS AND THE TWELVE: THE CONDITIONS OF DIS

CIPLESHIP

(Mark 3 13-19; Matt. 10, and parallels in Luke)

The first incident recorded by Mark is the calling of two pairs of brothers, Simon and Andrew, James and