power to the people was intended. Oosterzee decides in favor of the lofty structure above the Kedron, but thinks the angels were not only to arrest the fall of Jesus, but to bear him around to the other side, and there exhibit him in the air to the multitudes. Beecher is less ingenious; he locates the pinnacle in the same place, and he interprets the temptation as an intended exhibition to the populace; but he provides for no aerial journey into the city; he apparently forgets that there could have been no gazing crowd in the dim gorge beneath. These assumptions of an intended exhibition are, however, quite gratuitous; the text has no hint of such a design; the temptation was one of presumption rather than ambition. The wilderness was chosen as the scene of the fast and the first temptation possibly in part because it is peculiarly the haunt of demons. Trench refers to "the old Persian religion," in which "Ahriman and his evil spirits inhabit the steppes and wastes of Turan;" and to the Egyptian mythology which makes "Typhon the lord of the Libyan sand-wastes." "This sense of the wilderness as the haunt of evil spirits," he says, "is one the Scriptures more or less allow." He refers to Matthew xii. 43: "When the unclean spirit is gone out from the man, be goeth through dry places seeking rest;" and to Isaiah xiii. 21: "And satyrs shall dance there," compared with Revelation xviii. 2: "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils." It may possibly be that Satan delights in scenes of desolation, the fruit of his victory over our first parents. If this is the significance of the desert in the history of the temptation, then Jesus went to meet the adversary on hostile ground, amidst the very fortifications of the foe. But if we admit this view, we must combine with it that other and more forcible conjecture which regards the wilderness as the contrast of paradise. Trench reminds us that Adam was vanquished in a garden; and that thus the world was turned into a wilderness; bringing forth briars and thorns. Jesus takes up the battle where Adam left it, in the wilderness, and so by his victory, converts the wilderness into a paradise. Luke and Mark assure us that Christ was forty days tempted of the devil, and Matthew does not at all contradict their statement; he is only silent concerning the mysterious conflicts of this protracted period. Meyer misses the full meaning of the history when he bases on the mere silence of Matthew the statement that the temptation began at the close of the forty days. temptations of this period consisted. the closing movements of the battle. We know not in what the We are permitted to see only Bushnell would place the real temptations in those mysterious days passed over so lightly by the evangelists, and in the three dramatic situations sketched more fully, he finds merely the visions of ordinary hunger-fever, the phantoms of exhaustion. Graul and De Wette, with keener insight, discover in these closing scenes of the conflict its most terrible struggles. If it be asked why forty days were allotted to this conflict, the best answer is that which regards the number forty as the signature of sorrow and punishment for sin. Already Tertullian had gained an obscure glimpse of the true explanation when he made these forty days the contrast of Israel's forty years of wandering for national transgressions. The elder Monod pushes the parallelism between Christ and Israel yet further, and finds in it the reason that all our Lord's citations of Scripture are taken from the book of Deuteronomy, the memorial of the wandering in the desert. But it was reserved for Trench to more broadly illustrate the meaning of this sacred number. Forty days did the waters of the deluge prevail. The offender received forty stripes under the law. Ezekiel predicts that Egypt shall suffer forty years of desolation. Moses interceded forty days for his sinful people. The Ninevites fasted forty days. Ezekiel bore the transgression of Judah forty days. We have but to transplant ourselves among the types and shadows of the Old Testament, and into Hebraistic modes of thinking, in order to understand the significance of the period during which our Lord was struggling against the kingdom of darkness. During this protracted fast our Lord was not sustained by any miraculous agency, as, for example, the strength which Bengel thinks was supplied in baptism; for his subsequent refusal to avail himself of miraculous power, in the reation of food, forbids such an hypothesis. Nor must we say with Lange, that he may have fasted, and yet eaten lightly of perhaps locusts and wild honey, just as John is said to have come, neither eating nor drinking, and yet feeding on such coarse food; for we are assured by Luke, who uses language with more scientific precision than any other evangelist, that "in those days he did eat nothing."'Alford, and nearly all conservative expositors, rightly make the fast a total abstinence. Nor did Christ feel hunger till the forty days were ended. His wonderful endurance must be referred to his mental preoccupation. But as his employment at the well of Samaria took away all desire for food, so here the 1 We hesitate to term his state, with Alford, one of "ecstacy; " for this word, when applied to a condition of conflict or sorrow, has in it an implication of weakness. Christ was selfpossessed, though preoccupied. conflict of his mind robbed him of all sense of earthly want. Bushnell has well observed that it is by no means certain we have not, in the records of medical science, instances of fasts equally long. If they are exceedingly rare, it is, perhaps, because such a perfect organization as that of Jesus, and such mental preoccupation as engaged him during these days, are unknown among men. Mark, brief as is his history of the temptation, gives us a glimpse of Jesus during the forty days of fasting which the other evangelists have omitted. "He was with the wild beasts." Thomas Aquinas quotes1 Chrysostom as saying that the beasts are mentioned only to show that the wilderness was a wilderness indeed, a pathless stranger to the presence of man. Meyer and Alford find in these words merely a hint of the perils by which our Lord was surrounded. Bushnell sees deeper; in the word WITH,2 he finds an intimation of affectionate companionship; and in the supremacy of Jesus over the ferocious animals of the desert, he finds the return of this one holy man to the primitive dominion over the lower orders lost in the temptation of Adam, and a prophecy of the paradisic state to which, through the victory of Christ, his followers shall attain. What was the nature of the temptation to which Jesus was exposed? 1. The theory that the temptation was a mere vision has the support of distinguished names. Origin, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, regard it as a vision presented by the devil.3 Farmer' regards it as a vision presented by God. Paulus regards it as a vision called forth by natural causes; and in this he has a large following, though everyone now rejects his general system of interpretation. Our reply is that a temptation in vision, when the will must necessarily be under the control of external or abnormal forces, would be no trial at all. This hypothesis reduces the history to a fairy tale, or a psychological curiosity, without the least moral purpose or value. 2. Rosenmüller finds in the Satan of the inspired record a deputation from the Sanhedrim similar to that which visited John about the same time. Lange adopts this suggestion, modifying it, however, by the sup1 The quotation cannot be verified. 2 μera with the genitive, as here, means WITH in the sense of companionship. See Robinson, in verb. Win. 51, h., makes it express, also, dependence of the associates on the person of whom it is used. 3 Lange, on too little authority, attributes the same view to Cyprian. See Ellicott, Life f Christ, note, in loco. 4 Farmer's Inquiry, page 7. 5 He claims the support of Bengel, but he errs as to Bengel's meaning. Bengel only conjectures that Satan appeared in the form," the disguise, of a scribe," a ypaμμarevs, basing his conjecture on the fact that Christ uses so often in his replies the word written." Schaff, the American editor of Lange's Matthew, has a note in which he attempts to γεγραπται, "it is course. position that the messenger was the special agent also of a personal Satan, as was Judas at a later date. Meyer rightly dismisses the theory as simply absurd. 3. The temptation has been regarded, again, as a mere conflict of the Saviour's mind. Ullman considers the conflict as one between true and false ideas of the Messiah, between the higher intuitions of Jesus' spirit, and those popular expectations of a temporal deliverer in which he had been educated. In this he is followed at a little distance by Prof. Seeley and by Bushnell. It is difficult to determine, however, how, without the agency of an external tempter, the soul of a sinless being could become the field of a conflict with evil. Such a person may, of his own will, pause to consider which one of two ways is right; but having decided the question of duty, he cannot pause forty days, or even an hour, debating his future If Jesus was merely engaged in deciding his duty, then there was no temptation to forsake his duty, and the Scriptures misname the struggle a temptation! If, on the other hand, his own inclination. solicited him to depart from the path of duty, and if he retired to seriously debate the question of obedience to duty, and only subdued his wandering desires after a protracted struggle, he had a sinful nature. This is, indeed, the conclusion Bushnell boldly adopts; he accepts Irving's theory that Jesus inherited a broken and tainted nature. Once more: If we interpret the struggle of Jesus as a mere debate concerning his duty, an effort to see aright and follow the Father's will, we shall greatly impair its value to our own souls; in that case it was no real temptation; our temptations are of another and a darker sort; and we could no longer feel that he was tempted in all points like as we are. If, on the other hand, we represent his struggle as an inborn indecision whether to obey or to disobey his Father, we utterly destroy its value to our souls; for we cannot feel that he was tempted "yet without sin"; we have no longer a Redeemer. Yet farther; it is singular that the history of the temptation, which must have come from the lips of Christ himself, contains not a hint of a struggle between Messianic ideas. In justifying the spirituality of his kingdom to his disciples, who were actuated by carnal anticipations, he could scarcely have refrained from speaking of the temptation as the struggle in which he had learned the true character of his work, had it been such a struggle. And Matthew, writing for the Jews, who were offended 1 Lange wrongly attributes this to Neander; and Schaff, his translator, makes no correction. soften the language of Bengel; but he has evidently not taken the trouble to refer to the passage in the Gnomon, and so is not able to correct Lange's error; but, rather, he falls into an error quite as curious. N at the spirituality of the divine kingdom, would certainly have given some hint of such a purpose in the temptation, had it existed. And, finally, ALL these attempts to explain away the simple terms of the sacred narrative do violence to the doctrine of inspiration, by assuming that the record is grossly unsatisfactory. Many of these theories have been formed in order to avoid the doctrine of evil spirits; their advocates do no not usually believe in the existence of Satan, or of demons. Bushnell cannot admit the existence of Satan, a ruler over a realm of darkness, because evil tends to anarchy, and not to governmental order. But the history of the world shows us that sin tends to despotism as well as to anarchy; indeed, the most despotic governments, the most perfect organizations, are found among the worst classes, and are used for the worst purposes; we need but instance the Papacy as an example. It is urged that the existence of such an evil realın as that over which Satan is said to reign, is inconsistent with the holiness, the power, and the benevolence of the Supreme Being; but manifestly they are not more repugnant to the perfections of God than are the evils among men which we daily witness. It is said that the doctrine of evil spirits is a late addition to Judaism, a thought borrowed during the Babylonish captivity and we reply that revelation is a gradual unfoldment of truth, that the kingdom of GOD, no less than the kingdom of SATAN, is more fully described by the later than by the earlier writers of the Old Testament, and that the arguments which are used to prove the heathen orgin of Scriptural demonology may also be used with equal force to prove the heathen origin of all Messianic anticipations. The canons of interpretation which must be applied to the Scriptures in order to extrude from them the doctrine of evil spirits, will permit us to set them wholly aside as a collection of fables, or to reject in detail such portions of them as may offend our prejudices; for there is no doctrine more clearly stated or more often reiterated. If we say there is no Satanic agency in the world, then we must conclude that man is the author of his own sin, without the solicitation of a tempter. It will follow either that his guilt is aggravated, perhaps beyond the hope of redemption, or else that there is no such thing as sin; that what we call sin, is but such imperfection as is a necessary phase of human development and progress, and that, hence, we can find no redemption from it, except such as time and our own efforts may bring us. On either supposition we cast doubt upon the plan of redemption. And it is to be observed that those who reject the doctrine of evil spirits do in fact usually reject the Bible, or such vital portions of it as their whimsical tastes may oppose. They |