between the baptism and the temptation.  The latter followed necessarily on the former.  ’Of the Spirit’—­then God does lead His Son into temptation.  For us all, as for Christ, it is true that, though God does not tempt as wishing us to fall, He does so order our lives that they carry us into places where the metal of our religion is tried.  ’To be tempted’—­then a pure, sinless human nature is capable of temptation, and the King has to begin his career by a battle.  ’Of the devil’—­then there is a dark kingdom of evil, and a personal head of it, the prince of darkness.  He knows His rival, and yet He knows him but partially.  He strides out to meet him in desperate duel, as Goliath did the stripling whom he despised; and both hosts pause and gaze.  To a sinless nature no temptation can arise from within, but must be presented from without.

We leave untouched the question as to the manner of this temptation, which remains equally real, whether we conceive that the tempter appeared in bodily form, and actually carried the body of our Lord from place to place, or whether we suppose that, during it all, Christ sat silent, and apparently alone in the wilderness.  We only divert attention from the true importance of the incident by giving prominence to picturesque or questionable externals of it.

I. The first assault and repulse, in the desert.

Unlike John the Baptist, whose austere spirit was unfolded in the desert, Jesus grew up among men, passing through and sanctifying childhood and youth, home duties, and innocent pleasures.  But ere He enters on His work, the need which every soul appointed to high and hard tasks has felt, namely, the need for seclusion and communion with God in solitude, was felt by Him.  As it had been for Moses and Elijah, the wilderness was His school; and as the collective Israel, so the personal Son of God, has to be led into the wilderness, that there God may ’speak to His heart.’  So deep and rapt was the communion, that, for forty days, spirit so mastered flesh that the need and desire for food were suspended.  But when He touched earth again, the pinch of hunger began.  Analogous cases of the power of high emotion to hold physical wants in abeyance are sufficiently familiar to make so extreme an instance explicable.

We have to distinguish in the first temptation between the sphere in which it moves, the act suggested, and the true nature of the act as dragged to light in Christ’s answer.  The sphere is that of the physical nature.  Hunger has nothing to do with right or wrong.  It asserts itself independent of all considerations.  In itself neutral, it may, like all physical cravings, lead to sin.  Most men are most tempted by fleshly desires.  Satan had tried the same bait before on the first Adam.  It had answered so well then, that he thinks himself wise in bringing it out once more.  Adam, in his garden, surrounded by all that sense needed, had yielded, and thereby had turned the garden into desert; Christ,