08. The Life of Temptation

The Life of Temptation "And when the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from him for a season." Luke 4:13. IN the preceding studies of the temptations of our Lord we have endeavoured to realize the fact that they were not acts in a great drama, the issue of which had been arranged and determined beforehand, but a most real and deadly attack by the prince of this world on Him who had come " to destroy the works of the devil," and to redeem mankind from his authority and rule; an attack made on the Saviour at the commencement of His redeeming work, and before that work had fully begun, in hope of overcoming the Redeemer Himself, and so of overthrowing His kingdom before its foundations had been laid among men. We have further seen that the three temptations with which the forty days of fasting and of temptation in the wilderness close, and of which alone the details are preserved in the Gospels, were essentially typical of all possible temptations of man by the evil one. They embrace in their essence the whole compass of human peril and human temptation. The first temptation began on the lowest ground, taking for its province the sphere of the physical nature of man. The words of the tempter, " Command that these stones become bread," point to the seductions of sense, and Christ’s victory over the temptation was the victory of the higher spiritual life over the fleshly appetites of the body. Whenever " the flesh " and " the spirit " meet in deadly antagonism, and these are always " contrary one to the other," we have, with whatever variation of form, a repetition in our own lives of the first temptation of our Lord. The second temptation passed from the region of sense into the lower realm of the spiritual life, and challenged Christ’s trust in God’s providential care by demanding that it should prove its own reality by a transcendent venture of faith. We have seen how Christ vanquished this assault of the tempter by declaring that a trust which presumes to break even the least of the Divine laws, and then to appeal to God for salvation from the penalties of its disobedience, is not trust, but its spurious counterfeit, the presumption of unbelief. The third and final temptation completed the cycle of possible assault. It led us into the highest region of the spiritual life, into the kingdom of Christ itself, and it warned us against the peril of using worldly means for the establishment and advancement of that kingdom, even though they promise, as they promised to Christ, a shorter road to the consummation of the kingdom, and deliverance from that cross which is the Divine way to the crown.

We see now the meaning of the words which stand at the head of this chapter, and with which St Luke concludes his account of our Lord’s temptation " When the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from Him." The circle of attack had been exhausted. All possible temptation had been summed up, and had failed, in these three successive assaults made on Christ. Creation, providence, redemption had each furnished the ground of attack; the body, the soul, and the spirit had each been assailed, but in vain; the triumphant Lord had " been tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin." But the words which immediately follow in the narrative of St Luke are of dark and ominous significance. "When the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from Him for a season? " For a season;" what do these words mean? To what further and future conflicts do they point? Where in the life of our Lord, as recorded in the four Gospels, is the account of any renewed temptation of Christ by the devil? It is the answer to these questions that we shall attempt in the present chapter.

There is a suggestive and pregnant contrast in the words with which St Luke closes his account of the temptations and the last words of their record in the Gospel of St Matthew. St Matthew closes his account thus " Then the devil leaveth Him; and behold, angels came and ministered unto Him." (Matthew 4:2) St Luke, on the other hand, as we have just seen, says, " And when the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from Him for a season." The difference in the close of the record is in profound harmony with the difference in the scope and aim of the two Gospels. [I owe this thought to Canon Westcott’s " Introduction to the Study of the Gospels," not the least precious and suggestive of the works of one to whose writings, for the rare union they afford of the most exact scholarship with the profoundest spiritual intuition, I gladly take this opportunity of confessing my deep obligation and gratitude. ] The Gospel of St Matthew is pre-eminently the Gospel of the King, the record of the founding of the kingdom of God among men, and it closes its record of the temptation of the Christ with " the ministry of angels to a Heavenly Prince," whilst the Gospel of St Luke, as the Gospel of the Son of Man, and of the suffering Saviour of the world, ends its record with " a dim foreboding of the coming sufferings of the Saviour." And this difference in the scope of the two Gospels will also account for the variation in the order of the second and third temptations in each Gospel. We have followed the order preserved in St Matthew in the course of this exposition, but in St Luke the second and third temptations, as recorded in the first evangelist, change places. "The preservation of the just relation of the Saviour to God occupies in St Luke the final place which St Matthew assigns to the vindication of Messiah’s independence of the world. In St Luke the idea of a temporal empire of Christ passes more clearly into that of mere earthly dominion, which is distinctly regarded as in the power and gift of Satan. The crowning struggle of Christ is not to repress the solicitation to antedate the outward victory of His power, but to maintain His human dependence upon His Father’s will. Before Messiah, the King, the temptations arise in the order of His relations to sense, to God, to man; before the man Christ Jesus, in his relation to sense, to man, to God." [" Introduction to the Study of the Gospels," p. 295. ] And now can we discover in the after narrative of the Gospels any light on the mysterious words with which St Luke’s account of the temptation ends: "When the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from Him for a season?" Four or five times, at least, in our Lord’s life did specific temptation recur, and it is remark able that on at least three of these occasions the temptation was the repetition of the last and greatest of these three temptations, the suggestion, to use Satan’s own words, "to fall down and worship " him, in order to secure " the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them." The first of these renewed assaults of the tempter of which any distinct record is preserved to us in the Gospels occurs in John 6:15. The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand had just taken place, and had made a profound impression on the multitude. For the first time Jesus had seemed to them to vindicate His claim to be " the prophet," greater than Moses, " whom the Lord God should send into the world. The miracle had recalled one of the most signal events in the history of the children of Israel in the wilderness. It was a new and more wonderful feeding of the people with food from heaven, and it was followed, we are told, by an instant revulsion of feeling in favour of the super natural mission of Christ. " When, therefore, the people saw the sign which He did, they said, This is of a truth the prophet that cometh into the world." (John 6:14)

They resolve at once to proclaim Jesus as their Messianic King. Little did they dream of the new and terrible temptation their ignorant enthusiasm was offering to our Lord. Little did they imagine they were fulfilling the words of St Luke, " the devil departed from Him for a season," in the earthly crown they were ready to lay at the feet of Christ. But so it was. Once more the former temptation was repeated: once more " the kingdoms of this world, and the glory of them," were offered to Christ: once more escape seemed possible from the dark and sorrowful way of the cross, and once more the possibility of the speedy advent of the kingdom dawned upon the Saviour. But how did Christ meet this new temptation? The words of St John alone are sufficient, even in their dim and mysterious suggestiveness, to hint to us both the keenness of the pain with which our Lord felt this new assault of the tempter, and the instant decisiveness with which He repelled it. "Jesus, therefore," St John says, "perceiving that they were about to come and take Him by force to make Him. a king, withdrew again into the mountain Himself alone." (John 6:15) But how immeasurably does the significance of the temptation, and of the solitary departure "into the mountain Himself alone," become heightened when we read the parallel passages in the Gospels of St Matthew and of St Mark. "And straightway He constrained the disciples to enter into the boat, and to go before Him unto the other side, till He should send the multitudes away. And after He had sent the multitudes away, He went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when even was come He was there alone." (Matthew 14:22-23) St Mark repeats (Mark 6:45-46), in other words, the same reason for Christ’s departure to the mountain. The offer of the kingship to Jesus by the people was a new temptation and a new crisis in the life of Jesus, and He vanquished the peril by instant retirement and prayer. A little later on in the life of our Lord a still more remarkable repetition of the same temptation, in which the tempter was none other than one of Christ’s own disciples, is recorded in the Gospel of St Matthew (Matthew 16:21-22). Christ had been un folding to His disciples, for the first time with fulness and explicitness of detail, the mystery of His cross and passion, and had been showing them "how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up." To Simon Peter, not yet weaned from Jewish prejudices and Jewish hopes, the thought of a suffering and crucified King was intolerable, and with characteristic impulsiveness and vehemence he "took" Jesus and "began to rebuke Him, saying, Be it far from Thee, Lord: this shall never be unto Thee." Here was Satan’s temptation over again. In the words of the disciple another than Peter had spoken to Christ. Satan had come again: and once more the awful temptation, twice vanquished already, rose up before the Lord; the temptation to accept the crown which the multitude and the disciples alike were ready to lay at Christ’s feet, to be a new Captain of the armies of Israel, to rally to Himself all the loyalty and patriotism of the nation; to do all this for the sake of the kingdom of God among men, and to avoid in doing it the shame and humiliation of the cross, and the execration and hatred of the very people He had come to save. All this in that single sentence of Simon Peter once more stated itself before the Lord, and the vehemence and holy indignation with which Christ instantly repelled the dark suggestion bore tragic witness to the pain and the peril which this renewal of temptation caused the Lord. " He turned," we read, " and said unto Peter," almost repeating the very words He had spoken to Satan at His third temptation, " Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art a stumblingblock unto Me: for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men." And then follow the words, so solemn and piercing, which told the disciples, as they tell Christ’s disciples in every age, that the only way to the kingdom of God on earth is the way of the cross: " Whosoever would save his life shall lose it: whosoever would lose his life shall find it" The third recurrence of this temptation took place nearly at the close of Christ’s earthly life, and just before the anguish in Gethsemane.

Every detail in the narrative is full of meaning. The first dim signs of the coming conflict begin on the day of the triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, when the air was rent with the Hosannas of the multitude crying, " Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord: Blessed is the kingdom that cometh, the kingdom of our father David: Hosanna in the highest" (Mark 11:9-10). Once more the earthly crown seemed within our Lord’s grasp, and " the kingdoms of this world, and the glory of them," spread themselves before His view, so that even the Pharisees "said among themselves, Behold, how ye prevail nothing: lo, the world is gone after Him!’ (John 12:19) Again, temptation was near. The conflict, however, did not fully begin until the day but one after this triumphal entry. " Certain Greeks " had desired, we are told, to " see Jesus." In them Christ sees the first fruits of His redeeming work among the Gentiles. " The hour is come," Jesus says, "that the Son of Man should be glorified." But the mention of His own glorification at once suggests the dark and sorrowful way through which alone His glory could be reached, and He adds, with that peculiar and marked solemnity and impressiveness which were always indicated by the prefixed " Verily, verily," " Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit." And then significantly follow the same deep and solemn words which, as noted, closed the account of Simon Peter’s temptation of Christ, " He that loveth His life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world, shall keep it unto life eternal."

Immediately after these words the conflict once more begins. " Now," exclaims the Lord, " is My soul troubled; and what shall I say." For one moment, and only for one moment, as the dreadful shadow of the cross cast itself over His path, and as the awful anguish of Gethsemane and of Calvary began almost to be tasted by Him who came " to bear the sins of the world," there was a human shrinking from the cup which His Father had given Him to drink. Could it be that there was no other way to the Crown but through the Cross? " Father," Jesus cried, "save Me from this hour." The next words check the natural shrinking from the Cross " But for this cause came I unto this hour." And the answer quickly came. Only in the greatest moments and crises of Christ’s life on earth, do we read of heaven being opened, and of the voice of God speaking to His Eternal Son; but such a moment and such a crisis were now pressing on the soul of Jesus, and instantly " there came a voice out of heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." The victory was once more won; and with new and triumphant joy Jesus cries, " Now is the judgment of this world: NOW SHALL THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD BE CAST OUT, AND I " for the division of the words of Jesus into verses hide from us the close connection of the Cross of Christ with the casting out of Satan " IF I BE LIFTED UP FROM THE EARTH, WILL DRAW ALL MEN UNTO ME."

He who had told His disciples of those who gained their life by seeming to lose it, would Himself gain the world by seeming to lose it. His Crown was His Cross, and His Cross was His Crown.

One final crisis in the life of Jesus is recorded in the Gospels. Hitherto each successive assault of the tempter had been triumphantly beaten back, and now the time of conflict was drawing to a close. There remained but one more opportunity to the prince of this world of tempting its Prince and Saviour before His death on the Cross, with which the victory would be finally won. Gethsemane still intervened between the struggle in the upper room and the crucifixion, and it is in Gethsemane the last conflict takes place. It is true, indeed, that the Gospels make no express mention of any temptation by the devil in the Garden of Gethsemane, but the same thing may be said of the three previous occasions which we have just been considering, and on which, as we have seen, there is no reason to doubt temptation was offered to Jesus. We shall find, moreover, that there are words spoken by Christ during this awful struggle in Gethsemane which seem to imply that to His mind there were present more than the bitter shame and anguish of the Cross, more even than the intolerable agony of bearing away the sin of the world; there was also present the dark and malignant work of one who, even in that awful hour, had not abandoned the hope of overcoming the Captain of our salvation. The narrative begins with words which plainly recognise the presence of the tempter in the betrayer. " And Satan entered into Judas," we read (Luke 22:3), "who was called Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve." The final assault of the devil is to be made once more through one of the disciples of the Lord. Judas is to repeat, in another form, the sin of Peter. Shortly after, the Passover feast begins, and hardly has it begun when for the first time in His intercourse with His disciples Christ makes open reference to the temptations He had endured. "Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations; " (Luke 22:28) and then He adds, connecting the coming kingdom in some mysterious way with His own endurance of, and triumph over temptation " And I appoint unto you a kingdom, even as my Father appointed unto Me, that ye may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom; and ye shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (Luke 22:29-32). But with the thought of His own temptations and conflicts with the devil still uppermost in His mind, He turns to Peter, and warns him of the conflicts through which he will have to pass before he enters the kingdom. "Simon, Simon," Christ says, " behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not: and do thou, when once thou hast turned again, stablish thy brethren." J The Passover meal is eaten; the disciples’ feet are washed by the Lord, thus silently rebuking their " contention " which of them was " accounted to be greatest; " the reference to the betrayer, who was still present with the twelve, grew more and more pointed, until at length, as if unable longer to endure his presence, and as if longing to terminate the dreadful suspense, Jesus openly turns to Judas and says, " That thou doest, do quickly." The institution of the Lord’s Supper, the Passover of the Christian Church, follows, when once again the dark shadow of the tempter crosses the path of Jesus. " The prince of the world," Jesus says, "cometh; and" sure of victory even before the last conflict begins, He adds " He hath nothing in Me." (John 14:30)

Gethsemane followed. No heart but the heart of Jesus Himself can ever measure the depth of its unutterable anguish and woe; none but those to whom God has revealed the meaning of that single word " sin " can so much as faintly understand the tremendous burden of human guilt which then began to rest on the sinless sin-bearer: but we may catch some distant vision of His woe if with unsandalled feet we follow our Lord over the holy ground.

Only once before during His life had Jesus ever spoken of His personal suffering, but now He cannot be silent. The pressure is too great, the anguish too awful to be self-contained. He begins, in the impressive language of St Mark, to be "greatly amazed, and sore troubled." (Mark 14:33) And then He turns to the three disciples whom He had taken with Him that they might " watch " with Him as if in the dread conflict on which He was now entering He longed for the succour of their vigilance as well as of His own and utters the pathetic words, " My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death." (Mark 14:34) Then He withdraws Himself a little way " about a stone’s cast " from them, and there alone with His Father pours out His soul in that sublime but awful prayer, every word of which quivers with agony, " Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee: remove this cup from Me: howbeit not what I will, but what Thou wilt." (Mark 14:36)

He returns to His disciples and finds them " sleeping," St Luke adds, " for sorrow," and once more He warns Simon Peter of the perils of those temptations of the devil of which Peter knew as yet so little, and Christ knew so much. " Simon, sleepest thou? Couldest thou not watch one hour? Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation’’ (Mark 14:38) A second time Jesus leaves the disciples and prays the same prayer. A second time He returns to them and finds them sleeping. A third time He leaves them this constant change of place being the reflexion of the agitation and conflict which were going on within and a third time He prays the same prayer, but now with such augmented intensity of anguish that " His sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground." (Luke 22:44) A third and last time He returns to the disciples, and once more repeats the solemn warning, " Why sleep ye? Rise and pray that ye enter not into temptation? (Luke 22:46)

It is as these words are being uttered that Judas with his band draws near. The last damning act of human ingratitude and sin is consummated in the traitor’s kiss, but as Jesus is " betrayed into the hands of men," the last words He utters in the Garden of Gethsemane disclose the presence of a vaster hostility than even the hatred of "the son of perdition:" " This is your hour," the Lord says, " AND THE POWER OF DARKNESS." (Luke 22:53) His own words were fulfilled, " The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in Me."

We shall consider later on the significance of that ministry of angels which followed the final victory over Satan in the wilderness, but it may be noticed here that it is not without the deepest meaning that in Gethsemane, and in Gethsemane alone, does this angelic ministry reappear in the life of Christ. The last great temptation is accompanied, as the first was, by supernatural succour, and the evangelist who closed his account of the temptation in the wilderness with the words, " The devil leaveth Him for a season," and who records the return of the tempter in the conflict in Gethsemane, with "the power of dark ness," records also at the close of the struggle the heavenly refreshment which was sent to our Lord; " there appeared unto Him an angel from Heaven strengthening Him."

We have already referred to the possible recurrence during the crucifixion of another of these three wilderness temptations of our Lord. It is, at least, remarkable that the very words Satan here uses, challenging Christ to prove His Divine Sonship by a miracle, are again heard in the scornful mockery of the crowd beneath the Cross, "If Thou art the Son of God, come down from the Cross: " (Matthew 27:40) and it can hardly be doubtful that He who was "made in all points like unto His brethren; " who was in very deed our Brother; who was conscious as we are of the natural shrinking of the body from pain; whose death, above all, as the Divine Sacrifice for the sins of the world, overwhelmed Him with a woe of which we can know but little, must have felt the natural and sinless longing to end in a moment, by His own Divine power, the torment of the Cross, and to declare by one last transcendent miracle that He who was crucified in weakness was in very deed the Son of God. But Christ’s triumph in the wilderness over Satan was only augmented in the voluntary obedience of the eternal Son "to death, even the death of the cross." He had come " to save others," and Himself He would not save. The last act of Christ’s human life if we may dare to speak of degrees of glory in that one all glorious life was the sublimest moment in His moral life. " Tempted in all points like as we are," He is tempted even in death; but sin less in death, as He had been sinless in life, He dies triumphant over sin, and in the hour of His apparent defeat wins His last and greatest victory over the empire of darkness and of Satan.

We have thus examined the principal crises in the life of our Lord which the Gospels record, and as we have seen the recurrence in each of them of special temptation. They lose, indeed, a great part of their significance if the infernal hostility of Satan to Christ which prompted the first temptation, and which reappeared in these subsequent assaults, be overlooked or for gotten. The wilderness did not and could not exhaust the "wiles of the devil." His antagonism to Him who had come to " destroy the works of the devil " did not cease with his defeat at the beginning of Christ’s ministry. His hope of vanquishing " the Captain of our salvation " was not destroyed by the failure of his first great attack on the kingdom of God which Christ had come to establish among men. One defeat does not lead the devil to abandon his assaults on us; nor did our Lord’s first defeat of the tempter end his temptation of Him. The life of Christ was a life of temptation, for it " behooved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren." But if this were so, it is impossible to believe that the instances of temptation which we have been considering were all the temptations which Christ endured subsequently to His temptation in the wilderness. His life, from first to last, was a tempted life, and as no day passes in our own experience in which we do not find some seduction to sin beset our path, so we may believe that He too found " occasions of stumb ling" at every step in His earthly life. Those " spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places " which never cease their warfare against the soul of man, did not, we may be assured, leave "the Son of Man" alone. Nay! they would be less likely to leave Him alone than to leave us alone, for victory over any one of us would only mean one more private soldier in the great army of the Lord fallen in the field, but victory over Christ if even in imagination we may conceive for a moment the inconceivable would have been the vanquishing of the " Leader and Commander of the people," the destruction of the kingdom of God by the con quest of its King. Was there no temptation to our Lord to take only a few illustrations from the life of Christ in the poverty of His earthly life? Do not the poor, the " dim and common populations " of our great cities, know too well that if poverty shuts some of the gateways by which sin finds access to the soul, it opens many which are closed to the rich. And can we doubt for a moment that He who "for our sakes became poor," who "had not where to lay His head," who lived all through His public life on the charity of those who "ministered to Him of their substance," chose that lot, not only because it was the lot of the vast majority of His brethren on earth, but because it enabled Him to encounter the same spiritual perils which beset the poor in every age? And they who are called to follow their Lord in the poverty of their earthly life, and are tempted to " curse God and die " because of the hardness of their lot, may remember Him who is "not ashamed to call them brethren," who lived a poor man’s life with unrepining submission to the will of His Father, and who is the One perfect example to " them that are poor in this world " of being " rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which God hath promised to them that love Him." (James 2:5) Was there no temptation to our Lord in the hopeless indifference and deadness of the people, in the bigotry and blindness of those who were "teachers in Israel," above all in the dullness and " slowness of heart to believe " of His own disciples? Do not those who with unworthy steps strive to follow Christ know how hard it is to be " kind to the unthankful and to the evil," and how easy it is to lose heart in work for God, worn out by the stolid indifference and ignorance and ingratitude of those whom they are seeking to lead to God? And this temptation does not diminish, but increases with the earnestness of our zeal for God and for the salvation of men. The follies and perverseness of the multitude most keenly affect those who are seeking to bless them, for the selfish and self-absorbed can know nothing of the temptation to lose faith in man, and all hope of his redemption, which is the daily experience of all who are seeking " to save the lost." But if we whose hearts are tainted with selfishness feel this, how much more keenly must He have felt the pressure of this temptation who never knew one selfish desire, who came "not to be ministered unto but to minister," who "pleased not Himself"? And yet He never yields to it. He is the same patient, gentle Teacher to the fro ward and ignorant, that He is to the simple and guileless. Not one hasty word, not one petulant expression, ever escapes His lips. He speaks, it is true, burning words of rebuke and anger against hypocrisy and self-righteousness and malignity of heart, but in the midst of the most terrible indignation with those who were "blind leaders of the blind," His love and forbearance are as unruffled by the ingratitude and obstinacy and sin of men as the depths of the ocean by the storms which lash its surface into fury and wrath. Was there no temptation to our Lord, to take only one farther illustration from the Gospels, in the activities of His public life activities so incessant that we read there was not, at one time, "leisure so much as to eat" to lose the intimacy and freshness of His communion with the Eternal and Unseen? We know, alas! how often a life of active and exhausting service for God in the world is unfriendly to devoutness of spirit; how quickly may we lose the spirit of prayer in the excitement and strain of spiritual work; how hard it is to be in the world and yet not of it, and how easily we excuse ourselves in remissness of prayer, or neglect of our own spiritual culture, by the plea of fatigue incurred in the work of God. But it was never so with Jesus Christ. Engaged, and ceaselessly engaged, in labouring for others, in " preaching the Gospel of the kingdom," in going about " doing good," He never loses the sacredness and nearness of His Father’s presence; at the end of the heaviest day of labour recorded in the Gospels, He rose up, we read, " in the morning a great while be fore day, and departed into a desert place, and there prayed." (Mark 1:35) His feet trod the roughest ways of our earthly life, but His face was ever turned up to heaven and touched with the light of God. He shared with us every experience of human weakness and weariness, but never once did He allow the pressure of the most absorbing work to interfere with His God. He was among us as " one that serveth," and yet, to use His own sublime words of Himself, He was ever " the Son of Man who is in heaven." The life of temptation was also a life of uninterrupted victory over temptation. "He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet with out sin." And it is in this light that the sinlessness of Jesus becomes so amazing. It has been asserted by a sceptical criticism that the miracles which the Lord Jesus is declared in the Gospels to have wrought are inconsistent with the " laws of nature," and are therefore unbelievable by " the modern scientific intellect," but that if the Christian Church would be content to accept the lofty ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, minus the miracles, no great difficulty in the way of faith would remain to the reason. No mistake can be greater. The miracles wrought by Christ are not the only, or the most startling miracles of the Gospel. Christ Himself is His own greatest miracle. His absolute sinlessness, His freedom from the least taint of human infirmity and folly, His pure and perfect life, are a far more wonderful exception to the so called " laws of nature " than the healing of the sick, or the stilling of the storm, or the raising of the dead. For not only was Jesus " without sin" in the outward acts of His life, but He was free from that consciousness of a sinful nature, of an inherited bias towards evil, which makes its appearance with the first dawn of consciousness in every other human life; and it is only when we remember that this sense of sinfulness is as truly a " law of nature " as any of the great laws of the physical universe that, to use the words of the late Professor Mozley, perhaps the profoundest thinker of the English Church since the time of Bishop Butler, " the sinlessness of Christ appears in its true light as a supernatural fact, an inward invisible miracle surpassing in wonder any of the visible miracles which He wrought." [ "Lectures and other Theological Papers," p. 147. ]

It is idle to imagine that it is possible to get rid of the supernatural in the Gospels by blotting out the miracles wrought by Jesus. The miracle of Jesus remains; the miracle of a human life, in all other respects like our own, save in this, that it was "without sin;" the miracle of a will ceaselessly assaulted by every temptation " common to man," but as ceaselessly victorious over each successive assault; the miracle of a character, from the first hour of life to the last, unconscious of evil; the miracle of a goodness touching, like the sunlight, the darkest and most festering pollutions of this world, and remaining as untainted as the sunlight by contact with impurity; and so long as this supreme manifestation of the supernatural meets us on every page of the Gospel history, it is worse than a waste of time to be discussing the possibility of the miraculous. Here it is, breathing, living, moving before our eyes, an Image too fair for the heart of man to have conceived if it had not seen its heavenly beauty in the flesh, and an Image the spell of which for eighteen centuries has enchained the wonder of foes as well as of friends, so that even unbelief has been compelled to exclaim, "If the life of Socrates was the life of a saint, the life of Jesus was the life of God."