wheat into his garner, but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable.'

In the midst of the crowds that were receiving baptism at the hands of John, there appeared one whose calm eye, lofty brow, and sublime yet lowly bearing, attracted universal attention. It was Jesus. Announcing his wish to be baptised by John, he received an excuse-'I have need to be baptised of thee, and comest thou to me?' Jesus, desirous of complying with all God's ordinances, and of uniting himself with the inferior and preparatory dispensation before he under took the establishment of the greater and the permanent, the church of the living God, answered-Grant my request, I beg, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.' And Jesus, when he was baptised, went up straightway out of the water; and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him. And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' John bore a clear and decided testimony to Jesus, saying, 'This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.' The consecration of Jesus under John's hands was thus accompanied by the beginning of those extraordinary attestations from heaven which, if they were chiefly designed to aid the infirmities of sinful men, could not have been powerless in the mind of the Son of God. Higher natures readily recognise those spiritual agencies which are supreme over material things. He that afterwards spoke of a faith which could remove mountains, must in the words from heaven have not only known the voice whose whisperings had long been familiar to his inward ear, and whose behests were law to his soul, but have already had a dim consciousness that the Spirit, whose utterance it was, found easy access whithersoever it went, and did and accomplished its whole will.

The place where John taught was well chosen for publicity. It was on the Jordan, near Jericho, at a point where several high roads met, and where an audience was readily found. Thence had the great news already gone to Jerusalem. Travellers would speedily convey it up the great vale of the Jordan, along the high lands of Pere'a, over into Arabia, and down to the southern districts of Palestine and Si'nai. And what would be the one feature that would never fail from the narrator's lips? It is recorded in the words just cited. The opening skies, the descending dove, the living voice, were all so striking as to rouse the dullest mind and awaken attention wherever the event was told. And the more striking would the narrative be, because the dove

was the sacred bird of Syria, which thus by anticipation seemed to acknowledge the claims of the new Teacher. Nor was the place, historically, without a special propriety. Here was it that Joshua had led the forefathers of Israel dryshod over the bed of the river into the Land of Promise (Josh. iv.). In this sacred spot did a second Joshua-one with the same name (Jesus and Joshua are identical), but a yet higher vocation-take his first stand in founding a community which should eventually cover all the habitable globe (Matt. iii. 1—17; Mark i. 1—11; Luke iii. 15-23; John i. 15—18).

CHAPTER II.

JESUS IS TEMPTED.

A great change had in a brief space come over Jesus. He who so lately had wrought as a carpenter in Nazareth, found himself announced from heaven, recognized of John, and proclaimed over the land, as the Messiah, the Saviour of the world. What wonder if fear mingled with surprise in Jesus' bosom? Was he really equal to the task? What was the task? Did he know it in its fulness? Did he know it with precision? Conscious of being fully set to go wheresoever God should call him, still, what was the exact nature of his mission? Educated as a Jew, imbued with Jewish ideas, had his consciousness freed itself from all that was merely Jewish? Was he to be merely the 'King of the Jews,' and, if so, a king after some high but still earthly kind? Or, in being the Saviour of the world, was his office purely spiritual? and, if spiritual, so universal; independent of time, place, and circumstance; high as the heavens, boundless as eternity, holy and benign as the Spirit of God? Such seemed to be the real nature of his calling. Yet the outer world around him pressed and urged on his belief the other branch of the alternative. Was it not possible that he was a deliverer sent to Israel, not, indeed, to break the Roman yoke, save by the power of the spirit and the force of a righteous will?

Fit

Reflection was necessary; and for reflection, retirement. Under the Divine guidance, therefore, was Jesus led up from the Jordan into the wilderness which stretches out in the mountainous region lying between Jericho and Jerusalem. solitude for religious meditation; fit soil for the growth of a high and stern resolve which set the face of Jesus against a whole nation, and brought him to the ignominy of the cross!

Thither he went. Had not Moses found God in the wilderness (Exod. xxiv. 18, xxxiv. 28); and Elijah (1 Kings xix. 8)? And where does man disappear, and nature sink, and God rise in the mind with his due exclusiveness—where but in the desert? The desert has been the birth-place of all forms of monotheism. The spirit is there one and alone. Up, then, into that bare and rugged solitude was Jesus led, assured he was the Messiah, yet desiring light and strength; and there he,

Sole, but with holiest meditations fed,
Into himself descended, and at once

All his great work to come before him set;
How to begin, how to accomplish best

His end of being on earth and mission high.

Such was probably the desert into which Jesus was led, though the evangelists omit to mention its name. It is a district of lofty, broken, precipitous, and barren rocks, with here and there scanty vegetation on which life could be barely sustained, and affording lurking-places for beasts of prey and men scarcely less savage, so that the road through it received the ill name of the 'Bloody Way,' and to this hour is it the most difficult and most dangerous in all Palestine.

On the west rises the highest of those white jagged mountains. It bears the name of Quaranta'nia (quarante, forty'), for on its summits the forty days of temptation are held to have been passed by our Lord. Surrounded by caverns, difficult of ascent, in parts threatening danger at every step, with many a view that makes the head giddy, yet commanding a prospect over the whole surrounding country, Mount Quarantania well corresponds with the general import of the statements and impli cations of the gospel. One spot, near its foot, has an historical interest which could scarcely have been absent from the mind of Christ. There is 'the Fountain of Elisha'-still bearing the name—the water healed by the prophet (2 Kings ii. 19—22). At present, near the brook stands a fig-tree, so large as to overshadow the fountain, keeping the water cool, and affording most grateful shelter to the wearied traveller. When the eye of Jesus fell on the spot, he may have remembered these words: 'Thus saith Jehovah, I have healed these waters: there shall not be from thence any more death or barrenness.' How apt an image may thus have been presented to Jesus of the yet more important healing of man's soul, full of sin, bitterness, and death, yet soon to become pure, limpid, and ever-flowing, like that stream!

What bears the name of the Mount of Temptation,' is exceedingly precipitous on its eastern front, and contains many natural and artificial caverns, great and small, in which of old hermits passed their days. On the summit are the ruins of some

buildings. It was formerly a work of great merit in pilgrims to reach its top, but few now make the attempt. Dr. Wilson, having been on the spot, says, 'Milton's reference to this mountain, the adjoining scenery in the plain watered by the Jordan, and the streamlets of Elisha and Jericho, and the other ancient cities of the vale, is peculiarly happy :'

It was a mountain at whose distant feet

A spacious plain, outstretched in circuit wide,
Lay pleasant; from his side two rivers flowed,

The one winding, the other straight, and left between
Fair champaign with less rivers intervened;
Then meeting, joined their tribute to the sea;
Fertile of corn the glebe, of oil and wine;

With herds the pastures thronged, with flocks the hills;
Huge cities high-towered, that well might seem
The seats of mightiest monarchs; and so large
The prospect was, that here and there was room
For barren desert, fountainless and dry.

While in the wilderness, Jesus underwent the temptation, accounts of which may be read in Matt. iv. 1-11, and Luke iv. 1-13. The general import of the event is, with his usual brevity and point, given by Mark (i. 13): 'He was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered unto him.' In these narratives two things must be distinguished-the substance and the form. The substance, which lies in the facts, is to this effect :that a temptation proceeding from without was overcome by Jesus, so that at its close he triumphed in angelic communion. The temptation was real, so was the conquest. The form is to be observed in two particulars-the structure of the narrative, the imagery. In structure the account is an historical dialogue; such was the shape which it was most likely to receive at the hands of unlettered Orientals like the apostles. The imagery involves, with other inconsiderable particulars, the person of Satan (compare the Book of Job). The origin of this feature may be thus set forth. The account of his temptation, in its essentials, must have been communicated to his disciples by Jesus himself. As to these essentials there can be no doubt, and there is no difficulty. That account the narrators would put into a shape most congenial with their own beliefs and mental habits. Jesus had ascribed the temptation to Satan (Matt. iv. 10), probably in the same sense in which he applied the term 'Satan' to Peter, because that apostle 'savoured not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men' (Mark viii. 31, seq.). It is worthy of notice that this term was applied by Christ to Peter in a conjuncture of an import similar to the temptation itself, for Peter had rebuked his Lord because he foretold his approach. ing sorrows and death. If, however, Jesus used the word 'Satan'

as generally descriptive of the source of evil, the evangelists appear to have understood it in the vulgar acceptation of a proper person. Persian sages, in reflecting on the good and evil that seem to exist in the world, not being able to refer both to the same Being, conceived of two divinities-Ormuzd, the source of the good, and Ahriman, the source of the evil. This conception was received by the Jews while in captivity, and transplanted by them to the banks of the Jordan. In the time of Christ it was the popular belief, only that for Ormuzd and Ahriman, the Jews put Jehovah and Satan.

Such a being, however, as the devil is commonly painted, could have occasioned no effectual temptation to the pure and high mind of Jesus. Even to ordinary men, evil in its own shape ceases to be evil. If the temptation was real, it must have proceeded from a presentable source. That source is found in the spirit of the day-an influence to which even the mind of Christ could not be wholly sealed. The Satan of the temptation was the Jewish sacerdotal worldly spirit, which had full power in the minds of the apostles, and to which Peter gave expression on more occasions than that to which reference has just been made. It was the spirit that savoured of the things of men more than those of God, and which was environed and recommended by all the apparent claims of patriotism, all the gentle pleadings of home and kindred, all the fascinations of dominion and opulence, and, more still, by all those deep and very powerful instincts of the heart-such as the sense of life, the love of ease, the desire of good, admiration of this our now sublime, now lovely abode of earth and sky-to which Jesus was by no means insensible. In a word, the great alternative rose in full force before the mind of Jesus when tempted-the great alternative, God or man? heaven or earth? duty or pleasure? the spirit or the body? immediate honour or undying glory? We know the result. In this great struggle, Jesus decided for God and duty. Let it, however, be well observed that the temptation proceeded from an outer source-from 'the evil that is in the world;' from Satan, its representative; from the world of which Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate, were the rulers. It came not from, though it passed through, the mind of Jesus.

A reference to the particulars of the temptation will add light to these explanations. The first trial was that when, after forty days of fasting, Jesus was hungered, the devil suggested that, if he were the Son of God, he should employ his divine power in order to supply himself with food. The reply was a refusal. Jesus relied on God's providence, and would not use his miraculous power to supply his own personal wants. The conclusion was a general one, exemplified throughout his life, and specially in his enduring death itself rather than ask martial aid even from angels (Matt. xxvi. 53). Thus was the Saviour kept pure from every pos