The Wilderness

Beautiful were the bowers where man woke up to existence, and nothing could be lovelier than the scene destined to prove the decisive battle-field of human history. The representatives of our race had great advantages. They were strong in spirit. To one another they were bound by fondest affection, and their Creator was their companion and friend. They had not the least cloud on their conscience, nor the slightest infirmity in their frame. They were healthy, and holy, and happy. The stake was immense, and the interests involved were enormous. The stake was two worlds, and the depending interests were a hundred generations. But though all was so favourable; though every motive was so urgent, and the means of resistance so great, no defeat could be more dire and disastrous. Heaven was forfeited, and earth was enslaved. The vanquished combatants became the prey of the victor, and all their descendants were thenceforward the captives of Satan, given over to the bondage of corruption. —

An overthrow which was mainly owing to the tremendous power of the adversary. Originally one of the mightiest of created beings, he had fallen from his high estate, and, retaining most of his strength and intelligence, he had become the enemy of God and all goodness. For the ends of Infinite Wisdom, along with his associate angels, allowed a temporary range, he was devoting the interval to the perpetration of all the evil which malice could suggest or craft could carry through; and in the progenitors of a new and noble family he found a target on which he resolved to spare no arrows — a specimen of the Creator’s handiwork, which he hoped and vowed to demolish. His plans were skilfully laid; and, partly by a cunning ambush, and partly by a stroke of astounding audacity, he conquered, first the one and then the other; and, as he retreated from the scene, a momentary exultation swelled his fiendish breast; for snakes were hissing and beasts of prey were roaring; there was poison in the streams, and sulphur in the air; there was mildew on the flowers, and a creeping death through all the garden; whilst — rarest joy to his devil’s heart! — the joint-partners of Paradise were upbraiding one another, and as, in anger, and shame, and terror, they skulked into the shade, those to whom their Maker had so lately been their chiefest joy, were wishing that there were no God at all.

“For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” To spoil the spoiler, to destroy destruction, and to lead captive captivity, was His God-like enterprise; and we are now come to the first of those conflicts which are to end in overturning the empire of Apollyon. Adam was a champion, and so was Christ. Each represented a race. Adam represented mankind; Christ represented His Church, or humanity redeemed. And just as in the old heroic times, it was not unusual for the leaders of opposing hosts to challenge one another, and fight out the quarrel in single combat, whilst either army looked on; so now, in the history of redemption, we are arrived at another of these single-handed encounters, which makes the opening of the Gospels as solemn and eventful as the outset of the Bible.

No sooner was Jesus baptized than the Spirit bore Him away to the desert, and on very purpose that He should engage in this combat. “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted of the devil.” For this the time was the fittest, when He was newly designated to His high office, and before He had entered on its manifold engagements; and, we may add, no time of spiritual preparation could be fitter, than when the voice of complacent Deity still lingered in His ear, and His soul wa3 still rejoicing in that oil of gladness with which He had been anointed above all His fellows.

Wherever the desert was, it must have been a very lonely place; for Mark tells us, “He was with the wild beasts.” What a contrast to the lot of the first Adam does this single coincidence suggest! Here are the wild beasts, and here is one in God’s own image — and these dumb creatures know Him. It is the lion’s den and the mountain of leopards, but night by night the pilgrim lays Him down and takes His quiet sleep fearing no evil: and in the day-time, assured by His mild aspect, the conies of the cliff gambol at His feet, and the rock-pigeon circles in fond gyrations round that attractive gentleness on whom the celestial dove so lately rested. But except this homage of the mute creation, there is nothing that looks like Eden; no fragrant alcove, no woodland songsters, no murmuring rills, no ripe clusters dropping into earth’s green lap: but the dry ravines, and the staring precipices, and the burning sand, pinnacles blasted by the sirocco and glazed by the lightning — the haunt of the satyr and the nest of the vulture — arid, calcined, hot — the embers of a world in ruin, the skeleton from which the paradise has been torn off and hurled away.

But here, amidst the silence, Jesus found a sacred occupation for the six successive weeks. Keleased from the toils of Nazareth, and from its interruptions, He had continuous leisure to meditate on the work given Him to do, and the Son of man became familiar with those high thoughts which had ever been habitual to the Son of God. Doubtless, prophetic Scripture extended its panorama to His eye, and one by one He pondered those things concerning Himself which must now have an end; and for the work given Him to do He fortified His willing soul by every consideration which the joy set before Him — the glory of God and the salvation of man — could supply. Without intruding too far into the seclusion of this long Sabbath, we believe the tuneful theologian has not greatly erred in saying: —

“Through that unfathomable treasury
Of sacred thoughts, and counsels, and decrees,
Built in the palace of eternity,
And safely locked with three massy keys,
Whereof Himself by proper right keeps one,
With intellectual lightness now he ran.

•’ And there He to His human soul unveil’d The flaming wonders of Divinity; A sea through which no seraph’s eye e’er sail’d, So vast, so high, so deep those secrets be.

(God’ 8 nearest friend the soul of Jesus is,

Whom he admits to all his privacies).

“There in an adamantine table, by
The hand of goodness fairly writ,
He saw his Incarnation’s Mystery,
The reasons, wonders, and the ways of it:
Then freely ranged His contemplation, from
His scorned cradle to His guarded tomb.” *

For most of the period, the absorption of His mind marie llim independent of flic body; but “when he Beaumont’s “Psyche,” (1702) canto ix. 145-7.

had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.” He found Himself weak and exhausted, and had there “been a field of standing corn, or a fig-tree — nay, had there been the Baptist’s locusts and honey — He would doubtless have taken food and sustained His fainting soul. And just at this instant there joined Him a stranger — the first He had seen in this desolate spot — and made a suggestion. Not improbably in the guise of a holy hermit, possibly assuming to be one of John’s disciples, who, in the eagerness of his devotion, had followed the Messiah into His retirement, and was at last rejoiced to overtake Him; he pitied His emaciation, and said, “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” It was the devil in disguise. He had his doubts whether Jesus were indeed the Son of God, and the fiery dart was barbed at either end. If Jesus were not the Son of God, He would be very apt to try; and failing to make loaves from the stones, Satan’s anxiety would be ended; the Prince of Darkness still might keep his goods in peace. On the other hand, if Jesus were indeed God’s Son, what could be a simpler expedient? Surely His heavenly Father had forgotten Him. No manna had fallen from the sky; no raven had brought Him bread and flesh; — no, never once all these forty evenings. If not speedily relieved, He must sink and die; and then what would become of ali I i is projects? If He was to be the Saviour of others, it was His first duty to preserve His own life; and how could He do this in a way more innocent or more worthy of His own exalted origin? See these stony fragments — these petrified cakes of bread; they invite you to transform them; you have but to say the word, and lo! you have instantly spread for yourself a table in the wilderness.

Nothing could have been easier; but that simple thing would have stopped the world’s salvation. It would have been the tragedy of Eden re-enacted — the story of the Forbidden Fruit repeated. Nothing could have been easier; and He who a few days after made water into wine, could have given the command, and nectar would have foamed from the crag, and a board laden with the rarest viands would have risen from the ground. But, in that case, the bread which came down from heaven would have been recalled, and this world of empty hungry souls must have been left to pine and perish. In doing it, in using for His own relief those miraculous powers which He held for a specific purpose, He would have renounced the form of a servant, and would have violated a great law, on which the whole of His incarnate history proceeded. That law left all the circumstances of His outward lot to be determined by His Father’s good pleasure; and just as He never used for His own comfort those urccs which were the constant enrichment of others — as in subsequent days He never bade fountains gush for the assuagement of His thirst, nor overcanopied with a miraculous shelter His own houseless head — as He did not, when surrounded by priestly myrmidons, give the signal to angelic legions, nor startle the mocking crowd by descending from the cross — so now He would neither astonish the tempter, nor outrun the course of God’s Providence by summoning a repast from the dust of the desert. Recalling that passage where Moses tells Israel how, in regions where corn never grew and flock never fed, the Most High had regaled them with feasts from the firmament, He reminded His specious adviser that the fiat of Jehovah is sustenance as sure as the produce of the fields. Like the dexterous and scarcely perceptible movement of the skilful swordsman, the text at once transfixed the temptation, and the adversary reeled back when reminded, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

Such was the first temptation, and such was its success — a success very different from that subtile insinuation which opened the fatal parley under the Tree of Knowledge, “Yea, and hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree?” Here, there was no surprise, no hesitation, no encouragement to follow up the hinted doubt by a bold denial; but like a flaming missile whJch drops into a vacuum, and instantly expires, that fiery dart found nothing in the holy sod of Jesus; and before it had time to smoulder into a wrong desire, or the smallest spark of sin, the fire was out, the dart was dead — the temptation never tempted. This first incident may teach us the subtilty of Satan. There can be little doubt, we think, that in the first instance the tempter came, if not as an absolute angel of light, at least in some harmless form, and with friendly professions. Whether “the aged man, in rural weeds,” whom our great bard has pictured — or the “old man his devotions singing,” whom an earlier poet* represents as “lowting low with prone obeisance and curtsey kind” — or, as we have ventured to suggest, some modest and ingenuouslooking inquirer — there was assuredly nothing in his aspect to alarm suspicion, or draw from the horrified beholder, a “Satan, avaunt!” And if his mien was plausible, his speech was smooth. Along with his desire to identify the Saviour, he wished still more to stagger His faith; and such is the audacity of him, who, if possible, would deceive the very elect, that on this occasion. he sought to make the very Christ an infidel. “If thou be the Son of God!” Jf that was a true testimony which you received at Jordan — if you believe that voice which you so lately heard from heaven, though present appearances, metl links, belie it — if you really believe yourself to be the beloved Son of God, command these stones to be made Giles Fletcher.

bread.’ And yet, though the blasphemy was so bold that you would fancy it must have affrighted its author, it did not disturb his composure, nor did it agitate his mind so as to interfere with his cunning. And although to the Prince of Darkness it was a critical moment, and not impossibly might hurl him into an instantaneous and deeper perdition, such self-control had long practice in all atrocities given him, that he was able to enter on the awful experiment without any visible tremor, and could put forth his suggestion with all the naivete of innocence, and all the kindness of anxious compassion.

And not to say that the villany is worst which is the most graceful and accomplished, the temptation is, to a religious or respectable man, the most dangerous, which solicits him to the doing of some little thing. Dr A. Clarke had a very attentive hearer, who was often much affected by the Word, but who never could find peace in believing. At last he turned ill, and after many interviews, Dr Clarke said, “Sir, it is not often that God deals thus with a soul so deeply humbled as yours, and so earnestly seeking redemption through the blood of His Son. There must be a cause for this.” The gentleman raised himself in bed, and fixing his eyes on the minister, told how, years ago, taking his voyage to England, he saw some merchants of the place give the captain a bag of dollars to carry to a correspondent. He marked the captain’s carelessness in leaving it rolling on the locker day after day, and, for the purpose of frightening him, he hid it. No inquiry was made, and on arriving at their destination, the merchant still retained it, till it should be missed. At last the parties to whom it was consigned inquired for it, and an angry correspondence commenced; hearing of which the gentleman got frightened, and resolved to keep his secret. The captain was thrown into prison, and died. “Guilt,” added the dying man, “had by this time hardened my mind. I strove to be happy by stifling my conscience with the cares and amusements of the world — but in vain. I at last heard you preach; and then it was that the voice of God broke in on my conscience, and reasoned with me of righteousness, and of judgment to come. Hell got hold upon my spirit: I have prayed; I have deplored; I have agonised at the throne of mercy, for the sake of Christ, for pardon; but God is deaf to my prayer, and casts out my petition: there is no mercy for me; I must go down into the grave unpardoned, unsaved.” The captain’s widow was still alive, and to her and her children Dr Clarke was the medium of paving over the sum, with compound interest, obtaining an acknowledgment, which he kept till his dying day; and soon after, the conscience-stricken penitent died in peace, having obtained the hope of pardon. But the incident illustrates the subtilty of Satan,

The man was respectable, and had it been put t6 him, “Are you capable of stealing? Do you think you could commit a murder? Are you one that could allow an innocent man to languish in prison for your crime, and go down to the grave covered with infamy, for a fault which, not he, but you committed?” “Is thy servant a dog?” would have been the indignant reply to the revolting suggestion. But for fine-grained timber, for oaks and cedars, the devil has sharp wedges, as well as coarser instruments for ignoble natures; and here the edge was very fine: a trick — a practical jest — a frolic — but a frolic which, like many fools’ firebrands, ended in a sad conflagration; in theft and murder, in orphanage and widowhood, in the ruin of a reputation, and in the misery and remorse of the perpetrator.

As a set-off, we may mention a simple incident in the life of a pious servant. She was in a family where next to nothing was given for religious or charitable objects; and one morning, in arranging one of the rooms, she found a bag containing a number of guineas. The temptation instantly occurred, “Should not I take two of these gold pieces? I could get silver for them, and I know several poor people who stand in great need of some assistance. But if I do not give it to them, I am sure that not One farthing of the money will ever go that way.” It was a plausible suggestion — for her object was benevolent; and as she went on with her work she still thought of the gold pieces and the shivering poor, till she made up her mind that to take them was perfectly right. With this view she was returning to the bag, when these words of God rushed into her memory, “I hate robbery for burnt-offering;” and, scared away by this opportune scripture, the temptation fled, and the poor servant escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler.* She had the advantage of being not only respectable but religious, and He who on this occasion rescued her from the snare of the devil, kept her by His mighty power to an honoured old age and a joyful departure. For her escape this humble disciple was indebted to the self-same weapon which the Captain of her salvation wielded in the wilderness — that sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God.

Jesus greatly needed bread, but the tempter dared not hint to Him to procure it by means of fraud or violence. The utmost he could hope was that, wearied out with long waiting, lie might be induced to help Him -elf, and, instead of trying to live any longer on the Father’s mere promise, that He might adopt a suggestion which would appease His hunger and injure no one. And as it is this u bread “which forms our great necessity, so it is to unbelieving and unchristian ways of procuring it that we are mainly tempted. “Jean Smith.” By the Rev. J. Morison, Port-Ghvsgow.

The devil does not say to us, “Drill a hole in yonder jeweller’s shutter: forge a bank-note: knock down a passenger and steal his purse;” but he says, “You must live, and in order to live you must have bread. You have tried every way, but God has done nothing for you. This waiting won’t do — you must see to yourself. Suppose you take a ticket in the lottery, or try your luck at cards or billiards? Or what would you say to open a public house, or take shares in a Sunday tavern? You have a fine voice; you might sing in the choir of a Popish chapel. You have a turn for recitation; I have seen many a worse actor on the stage.” And in this way, by making the bread that perisheth the prime necessity, and the soul a thing quite secondary, many have been tempted to gamble, to borrow from their employer’s till, to open shop on Sunday, to use the balances of deceit, to forge, to purloin, to peculate — till at last, entangled by snare upon snare, they sank down reprobate and reckless, disgusted with this world, and despairing of the next one, scarcely caring, and never hoping to burst that bond of iniquity in which the devil leads them captive at his will.

Foiled in one stratagem, the tempter instantly tried another; and that other was not only necessitated but was most likely suggested by the failure of the first. In his dealings with mankind, the devil had so often found virtues leaning to frailty’s side — he had reaped so many of his greatest successes by pressing good points to an inordinate extreme, that he hoped to extract some sin from the excessive faith of Jesus. It would appear the greatest delight of the incarnate Son to depend on the love and power of His heavenly Father; might He not be induced to carry that dependence too far, and so render it not devout but presumptuous? Was there no fine stroke which would convert this faith into fanaticism? Accordingly, the scene was changed; and no longer in the waste and howling wilderness, they found themselves in the Holy City and on the battlements of the Temple. Looking down from the dizzy elevation, they had a full view of all the worshippers; and His assiduous attendant at once suggested to the Saviour that He should cast Himself down into their midst. 1 You are the Son of God? You are about to begin your ministry? Where more fitly can you commence it, than here in God’s own house? And in what manner more striking can you make your first manifestation to Israel, than just by floating down, from the clouds, as it would look, into the centre of that throng? The Messenger of the Covenant would then, indeed, be suddenly come to His temple, and instant acclamations would welcome the Heaven-descended Messiah.’ Further, having in the previous encounter not only detected Jesus’ faith in God, but His fondness for Scripture, with wonderful adroitness the tempter turns it to his purpose — not merely assailing what he suspected to be the weak point, but plying that point with what he deemed the most effective weapon. l Your trust in God is wonderful. Such is your confidence in His promises that you would not help yourself to food, for fear of shewing doubt or impatience. You spoke as if you could subsist on these promises. If they will do for food, they will surely do for wings. Here is an opportunity of shewing your sincerity. 2” say to you, cast Thyself down; and God says He shall give His angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear Thee up. There is no escape. If you be the Son of God, you must give me this sign. The promise is buoyant. The air teems with angels; and up-borne in their hands you will not hurt your foot on the pavement.’

Need we say how alien from the entire genius of Christ’s procedure such a demonstration would have been? Radiant with Divine energy as He was, He veiled His glory, and reserved His resources; and even when in after days a wonder was wrought, the most wonderful tiling was the simplicity with which it transpired. 80 little was done for effect, so little of scenic glare or intentional display was there in the miracles of Jesus, that His familiar attendants saw Him constantly opening blind eyes, healing incurables, and raising the dead, without feeling as if aught very strange were taking place. Not only had they come to regard Him as one from whom such things proceeded spontaneously, and very much as things of course, but He had a way of doing them which, although it added to their eventual sublimity, lessened their eclat at the moment. Like Himself and His kingdom, Christ’s miracles came without observation. There was nothing dramatic or explosive about them. No trumpet sounded beforehand — no flush of exultation followed; but whilst the lame man was yet leaping, and the crowd was still gazing, Jesu3 went on Hia w ay. 1 1 ip mighty deeds were not the rare efforts borrowed power, but the forth-letting of a familiar and redundant omnipotence; and being wrought by a Divine Personage in a holy disguise, He had rather to restrain than exhibit His resources. Convincing and endearing, they did not dazzle nor excite; and, in short, like the flat of the Creator, which might any moment add a new lily to the field, or a new lamp to the firmament, the mighty deeds of Jesus were neither noisy portents nor ostentatious prodigies, but miracles — the stately emanations of that mighty Will which does nothing for display, and to which the hosannahs of a crowded temple, or the shouts of Morning Stars, would be alike a poor requital.

To introduce Himself to the Jewish people by a flight from on high, would have been to commence on a key-note entirely out of unison with His lowly ministry; and, besides, it would have pandered to that taste for the marvellous, which prefers to a Godlike miracle a vulgar prodigy. Satan knew this, and so knew the Saviour. But instead of arguing the question, the Captain of salvation fell back on, “Thus it is written.” Scripture is the interpreter of Scripture; and just as one Divine perfection may set limits to another — as God’s wisdom may be the limit of His power — as His truth or holiness may be the limit of His benevolence — so, in Scripture, one truth may be the limit of another; or, as in the case before us, a precept may be the limit of a promise. It is true God gives to His angels a charge concerning His saints, but then He gives his saints a charge concerning themselves; and if the angels are not to forget the saints, neither are the saints to tempt the Lord their God. Observe the condition, and the result is infallible. Fulfil you the precept, and God will fulfil the promise. But to leap from this pinnacle when there is no end to be answered — to spring into the air when it is not God, but Satan, who gives the command — this is to tempt Jehovah; and God’s will must be done, even although the doing of it should look so pusillanimous as to provoke a sneer from the devil.

A most instructive incident, teaching us the importance of comparing Scripture with Scripture. A text may be wrested — witness the tempter’s quotation; but the Scriptures cannot be broken — witness the Saviour’s retort. Some people split the Bible. They set aside all the precepts, and appropriate all the promises; they cull out all the doctrines, and do away with all the duties; and in this one-sided fashion they never become the blessed and beautiful characters which that Bible could make them. Like those fjuadrumanous mimics of mankind whose hand lack-; an opposable finger, their thumbless theology goes on all fours, and it bears the same relation to reveals! religion as the ape or the satyr bears to hulty. Others, again, select from the Bible a series of ethical maxims; and, ignoring all which it reveals

«6 f ABLY INCIDENTS.

of sin and the Saviour, they treat it as a manual of excellent morality. Their model has all the form and features which go to constitute ethical symmetry or ideal perfection; and like the strings or clock-work which bends the limbs and opens and shuts the eyes of such a figure, it may not be without impulses and motives of its own j but, as long as it lacks a soul, after all, it is only an automaton. That character is alone complete where life developes in symmetry — where love to God inspires the heart, and His revealed will decides the conduct.

An instructive incident, further, as shewing the difference between faith and fanaticism. Faith listens to God’s voice, and follows where Scripture leads it by the hand. Fanaticism has inward lights, and mystic voices, and new revelations, and scorns the sober ways, the good old paths of the written record. Faith compares Scripture with Scripture, and with docile patience gathers from its sundry places the entire mind of the Spirit. Fanaticism, when it deigns to consult the Word at all, is proud and precipitate, and pouncing on the text which serves its turn, has no tolerance for any other which would restrict or expand its meaning. Faith has a creed of many articles, and its decalogue has ten commands. Fanaticism resolves morality into a solitary virtue, and its orthodoxy is summed up in a single tenet. Such a fanatic, had he heard on the temple-roof a whisper in his ear, “Cast thyself down hence,” would scarcely have waited to ascertain whether the voice came from a good spirit or a demon; or had he paused for a moment, and then been reminded of the promise, “For he shall give his angels charge concerning thee,” he would have felt it a crime to hesitate. But he that believeth will not make such haste; and after hearing both the suggestion and the Scripture proof, that great Believer to whom it was addressed held up to the proposal the torch of truth, and declared it presumptuous and Heaven-provoking. Reader, try the spirits. Error is often plausible, and the most ensnaring errors are those which have an obvious resemblance to truth. Even though the outside coating is not brass but real gold, the leaden coin is none the less a counterfeit; and, like the devil’s temptation, wrapped up in a Scripture saying, many false doctrines come now-a-days with a sacred or a spiritual glamour round them — quoting texts and uttering Bible phrases. But the question is not, Who has got a text on his side? but, Who has got the Bible? — not, Who can produce certain sentences torn from their connexion, and reft of the purport which that connexion gives them? but, Looking at [iture in its integrity — having regard to its general drift, as well as to the bearing of these special passages — who is it that makes the fairest appeal to the statute-book of Heaven?

A second time baffled, there remained another bolt in the grim archer’s quiver. The Son-like confidence of Jesus had never faltered; and neither to the left hand of distrust, nor to the right hand of presumption, had the fiercest shocks been able to bend His columnar constancy. The tactics were, therefore, changed. Sudden surprise had failed, stratagem had failed, and plausible hypocritical suggestion had failed. If the devil himself had doubted the Sonship of the Saviour, these doubts were at an end — for there is no conditional “If thou be “in the last temptation; and if he had hoped to make the Saviour for a moment question His own paternity, that hope was over — for he now leaves the point in abeyance. But Lucifer remembered the temptation which had prevailed with himself, when u he fell from service to a throne;” and surmising that the nobler the nature the more likely it was to feel the attractions of glory, he thought he knew what would deflect from His orbit the Sun of Bighteousness Himself. Borne away to some lofty hill, a magic prospect rose up. They saw the river which bears the wealth of mysterious mountains to Egypt’s green valley, and on whose banks the Pharaohs sleep grandly in their sphinx-guarded sepulchres. They saw the bright isles of Greece, on whose summits white temples sparkled, and on whose strand the bounding billows clapped their musical cymbals.

They saw the Seven Hills, and the proud capitol, like an Atlas, bending under its mountain of marble. They saw the pearls still deep in the ocean, and the diamonds not yet dug from the mine. They saw the Indian pagoda rainbowed with gems, and the Peruvian sun-temple with its mirrors of flashing gold. And a mist of music came floating up from the glory; and as its murmur waxed clearer and resolved into a thousand tones, along with the note of the nightingale came pulses of the lyre from fragrant Italy; from yonder Attic groves a flow of silvery sweetness, and from that swarming forum words of sharp and ringing energy: whilst wafted from those red Parthian fields, and louder than far-off Niagara, rent the air a long loud shout of Roman victory. u All that is mine; and one obeisance will make it yours,” cried the tempter: and as he spake, a diadem flamed on his brow, and he stood forth every inch a king. The costliest bait ever flung at the feet of Innocence — the Man of Nazareth looked at it with an eye that did not sparkle, and a heart that did not flutter: then turning to the princely tempter, He exclaimed, “Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” Oh, what a smile from the heart of the

her burst in at these words on the soul of the lpc loved Son; and what a sob of triumph relieved the

.ended breath of spectator angels! It was the first great victory of the Second Adam. It was the turning of the tide in the history of our defeated and enslaved humanity. It was a triumph where the gain was all on the side of goodness; and from which the azure banner of the Eternal Law came back without one speck on its lustre, or a moment’s recession of its planted sign. It was the great enslaver and tyrant defeated, and the earnest of paradise regained. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. I hope to see these kingdoms and all their glory my own: but I shall earn them, not by doing homage to the usurper, but by obedience to my Father — by worshipping the Lord my God.’

It was a glorious victory, and, reader, it was ours. It was the victory of our Head and Representative. It was the Second Adam doing what the first should have done, and so far undoing the evil which he did. It was the scene in the garden reversed; it was the crime of another Fall escaped, and the curse of Eden read backwards. It was the embodiment of all evil encountered and overcome by the Church’s great Champion: encountered in those successive forms of temptation which had so often proved fatal; as the sympathising visitor with a friendly suggestion — as the scoffing spectator with a taunting challenge — as the gross and open seducer with the most splendid lure ever offered to ambition; and overcome, not by the mere might of Omnipotence, but by those weapons which all along had lain ready for such exigencies in the Church’s armoury.

Blessed Jesus, we thank Thee! We could not have done it. But Thou hast broken the snare of the fowler, and along with Thee our silly souls are escaped. 0 Lion of the tribe of Judah, our adversary still goeth about seeking whom he may devour. Make us aware of his devices. Bruise him under our feet. Succour us when tempted. Touched with a feeling of our infirmities, Thou who wast in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin, let us fight beneath Thy buckler, and teach us how to wield Thy sword — that sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from eviL Amen.