accommodate himself to them.  Jesus did not underestimate the opposition of “the kingdoms of the world,” but he truly estimated God’s intolerance of any rivalry (Matt. iv. 10), and he was true to God and to his own soul.  Again, in this as in the preceding temptations, Jesus conquered the evil suggestions by appropriating to himself truth spoken by God’s servants to Israel.  Tempted in all points like his brethren, he resisted as any one of them could have resisted, and won a victory possible, ideally considered, to any other of the children of men.

95.  It is not idle curiosity which inquires whence the evangelists got this story of the temptation of Jesus.  Even if the whole transaction took place on the plane of outer sensuous life, and Jesus was bodily carried to Jerusalem and to the mountain-top, there is no probability that any witnesses were at hand who could tell the tale.  But the fact that in any case the vision of the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time (Luke iv. 5) could have been spiritual only, since no mountain, however high (Matt. iv. 8), could give, physically, that wide sweep of view, suggests that the whole account tells in pictorial language an intensely real, inner experience of Jesus.  This in no respect reduces the truthfulness of the narratives.  Temptation never becomes temptation till it passes to that inner scene of action and debate.  Since Jesus shows in all his teaching a natural use of parabolic language to set forth spiritual truth, the inference is almost inevitable that the gospels have in like manner adopted the language of vivid picture as alone adequate to depict the essential reality of his inner struggle.  In any case the narrative could have come from no other source than himself.  How he came to tell it we do not know.  On one of the days of private converse with his disciples after the confession at Caesarea Philippi he may have given them this account of his own experience, in order to help his loyal Galileans to understand more fully his work and the way of it, and to prepare them for that disappointment of their expectations which they were so slow to acknowledge as possible.

96.  From this struggle in the wilderness Jesus came forth with the clear conviction that he was God’s Anointed, and in all his after life no hesitation appeared.  The kingdom which he undertook to establish was that dominion of simple righteousness which he had learned to know and love in the years of quiet life in Nazareth.  He set out to do his work fearlessly, but prudently, seeking to win men in his Father’s way to acknowledge that Father’s sovereignty.  There is no evidence that, beyond such firm conviction and purpose, he had any fixed plan for the work he was to do, nor that he saw clearly as yet how his earthly career would end.  The third temptation, however, shows that he was not unprepared for seeming defeat.  The struggle had been long and serious,—­for the three temptations of the end are doubtless typical of the whole of the forty days,—­and the victory was great and final.  With the light of victory as well as the marks of warfare on his face, he took his way back towards Galilee.