His boast, like all his wiles, is a little truth and a great lie.  It is true that his servants do often manage to climb into thrones and other high places.  It is true that beggars and worse than beggars on horseback, and princes and better than princes walking, is often the rule.  It is true that the crowned saints of the world might be counted on the fingers.  But, for all that, the Father of lies was like himself in this promise.  He did not say that, if he gives a kingdom to one of his servants, he takes it from another.  He did not say that his gifts are shams, and fade away when the daylight comes.  He did not say that he and his are, after all, tools in God’s hands.

What was it that he thought he was appealing to in Christ?  Ambition?  He knew that Jesus was destined to be King of the earth, and he blunders to the conclusion that His reign is to be such as he could help Him to.  How impossible it is for Satan to penetrate the depths of that loving heart!  How mole-blind evil is to the radiant light of goodness!  How hate fails when it tries to fathom love!  If all that Satan meant by ‘the glory’ of the world had been Christ’s, He would have been no nearer His heart’s desire.

The temptation was not only to fling away the ideal of His kingdom, but to reverse the means for its establishment.  Neither temptation could originate within Christ’s heart, but both beset Him all His life.  The cravings of His followers, the expectations of His race, the certainty of an enthusiastic response if He would put Himself at their head, and the equal certainty of death if He would not, were always urging Him to the very same thing.

‘There is nothing weaker,’ says an old school-man, ’than the Devil stripped naked.’  The mask is thrown off at last, and swift and smiting comes the gesture and the word of abhorrence, ’Get thee hence, Satan,’—­now revealed in thy true colours.  Jesus still couches His refusal in Scripture words, as if sheltering Himself behind their broad shield.  It is safest to meet temptation, not by our own reasonings and thoughts, but by the words which cannot lie.  As He had held unmoved, by His filial trust and His filial submission, now He clings to the foundation principle of all religion,—­the exclusive worship and service of God.  His kingdom is to be a kingdom of priests; therefore to begin it by such an act would be suicide.  It is to be the victorious antagonist of Satan’s kingdom, because it is to lead all men to worship God alone; therefore enmity, not alliance, is to be between these two.  Christ’s last words are not only His final refusal of all the baits, but the ringing proclamation of war to the death, and that a war which will end in victory.  The enemy’s quiver is empty.  He feels that he has met more than his match, so he skulks from the field, beaten for the first time by having encountered a heart which all his fiery darts failed to inflame, and dimly foreseeing yet more utter defeat.