because a new humanity has been created out of the dust of the earth, inaccessible to temptation, and incapable of sin; but because this second Adam is the Lord from heaven.

The new Head of the human race was here revealed as its Redeemer ; and His baptism was, on His own part, His first public assumption of His office and work, with all its infinite obligations. We hear the Suffer it to be so now, which silenced the objections of man; but we do not hear the Lo, I come to do Thy will, which finally accepted the mission of God. But it was uttered; and the God-Man, the chosen Servant of God, yielded Himself up to the Spirit, to whom is ascribed in Scripture the whole conduct of redemption from the Conception to the final offering of the eternal Sacrifice. He it was who unfolded to the Redeemer His mediatorial work, and presided over the career through which it behoved the Christ to pass. He led Him-He drove Him-into the wilderness :that He might there bid defiance to Satan, and conquer the power of sin in his person, at the outset ;-that He might approve in temptation the spotlessness and perfection of the sacrifice which He should carry forward to the cross;—and, finally, that He might acquire, by a mystery of experience which we cannot fathom, a perfect sympathy with the infirmities of that humanity which He should to the end of time sanctify and save.

But it must not be forgotten that the Spirit, who led Jesus into the wilderness, was His own Spirit. He went up voluntarily, under the impulse of His own sacred zeal, to meet our enemy; just as afterwards the Lamb led to the slaughter was straitened in spirit until His baptism of death was accomplished. Satan was the aggressor in the garden when the first Adam fell; but the second Adam went up to challenge His foe in his own chosen wilderness. "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?" could have been the language only of Satan, confronted at length after having troubled the world for ages, invaded in his own stronghold, and conscious of his approaching doom. The Lord presents Himself as our Champion ; He will renew the contest of Eden in human nature, but in human nature reinforced by Divine strength. He will vanquish Satan, the lesser foe, by the word of His testimony, before He goes on to destroy our greater foe, sin and the curse of a broken law, by the blood of the Lamb.

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The PROCESS of the temptation, accordingly, illustrates its relation to the mediatorial work of the Redeemer. It was ordered, for the accomplishment of the purposes which have been mentioned, by One who was greater than Satan, who, in an important sense, led him up to tempt the Christ, even as He led up the Christ to be tempted. Satan had but one object in view, the thwarting, at the outset, of the work of redemption; but the Spirit designed that the subversion of Satan's plan should accomplish other purposes necessary to human salvation, of which he knew nothing.

It has not pleased the Lord to admit us to the mysteries of the wilderness itself, and His forty days' experience before the last assault. We see nothing, and hear nothing, until our Captain and our enemy meet face to face at the threshold of the desert, before they finally leave it. But the

few hints which are given invite, rather than forbid, the interpretation of our reverent thoughts. We may lawfully regard this wilderness, the abode of wild beasts, as symbolizing the dark and disordered wretchedness of the world where Satan's seat is-the perfect counterpart and contrast of paradise-the ideal region of the concourse of all the powers of evil. He who was afterwards permitted to throw his enchantment over the scene witnessed from the mountain, and idealize it into all the glory of the world, was permitted to make the natural horrors of the desert the groundwork of an infernal illusion which surrounded the Son of Man with all the horrors of the empire of darkness. In what manner the soul of the Redeemer was assailed during this agony,-an agony more protracted, though less severe, than the final one in Gethsemane,—we know not; because in this state we have no faculty to comprehend the whole subject. But the scene, the time, the fact itself, would not have been so definitely recorded, were it not permitted to us to shape in our thoughts, at least, what we may not be able to put into words. Let everyone do so for himself: bearing in mind the analogy of Moses and Elijah in their forty days' abstraction from the world; remembering that, after a preparation arranged by himself, and for the issue of which he had waited, the tempter at length came in person to Jesus; and that, according to the express testimony of two of the Evangelists, temptation was the characteristic of the whole scene, the conclusion of which alone came within the scope of practical application to ourselves. This "Prophet like unto Moses" ascended no Sinai of transfiguration to prepare Himself, in ecstatic communion with the Father, for His mission with the new law: here is, rather, the antitype of the second forty days, (Deut. ix.,) when Moses mourned in the anguish of unutterable intercession for the life of his people, who had broken the law. This Greater than Elijah wandered forty days in the wilderness, with a burden and oppression upon His soul, of which the desponding Prophet furnished but a faint type when he wandered hither and thither restless in the desert, feeling that he alone sustained the honour of Jehovah in Israel. Faint, indeed, and far distant, are these types. The wilderness in which Jesus spent this time was the meeting-place of all the hosts of evil, who beset the Redeemer of men as they had never beset the founder or the restorer of the ancient law. The communion of His pure spirit with the Father was, if not interrupted, yet distracted, by suggestions and visions to His mind such as we cannot conceive. His contemplation of His great work was fixed, during this season, on its most awful and to human sense unendurable aspect. The mission which, before He entered the wilderness, and after He emerged from it, was the object of His infinite desire, became to His tried spirit here a temptation ;-a temptation real, though no more to be understood by us than that which in Gethsemane caused His will and the Father's to seem for one moment to be at variance, before they were at one finally and for ever.

When those days were ended, (Luke iv. 2,) Satan bade his hosts retire, and met the Redeemer face to face, and alone. But at this point arise

certain questions which have sorely distracted expositors, and given full play to the subtilty of the schoolmen. These questions can never be dialectically solved; but they may be obviated, and rendered unnecessary for the most part, by establishing in our minds three things:-1. The Being who presents Himself here to the power of temptation is the eternal Son of God manifest in the flesh. His divinity is not left behind Him, or hovering over Him, or keeping aloof from His assaulted humanity. It was the Being who "thought it not robbery to be equal with God," who nevertheless "humbled Himself;" and His humiliation, as one Person in the indivisible two natures, is no more to be understood by us than the union of the Three Persons in the Godhead, and the descent of One into human nature. The humanity which was tempted in the wilderness could not sin not to try this proposition, but to approve its certainty, was the purpose of the temptation.-2. The enemy, like John the Baptist, "knew Him not." He knew not the nature of this new bond between God and man; he understood not, but would test, this new expedient of the Divine resources. (Compare Matt. xi. 27, latter part.) He had been a student of the Old Testament, but his knowledge went not beyond that of the Prophets. He had been an intent observer of the Lord's thirty years, but he was not prepared to understand the sublime attestation which sealed them on the banks of the Jordan.-8. Too much honour must not be put upon the tempter himself. He must not be regarded as only a crafty, skilled, and transcendently sagacious counterplotter of the Divine plan of redemption; but also as a proud, presumptuous deceiver of himself. It was the act of his consummate blindness, as well as of his consummate daring, to assault the Son of God; and this set the seal upon his eternal ruin.

But we can hardly suppose even such a tempter to have entertained the aspiring hope of entirely turning aside the Redeemer at the outset of His work. His object was, rather, to try if this new and wonderful Person was so accessible, at any one point of His human nature, to subtle temptation, as to afford ground of confidence in future assaults. This regulated, at least, the first and second suggestions; in the third he undisguisedly tempted the Redeemer to give up His redeeming work. In all of them his aim was to induce the Lord to separate His will from that of the Father.

In his first approach, the tempter made the evident weakness of our Lord's humanity the point of his assault. Whatever else he saw before him, he saw a perfect man,-the thoroughness of whose humanity was vouched by his keen sensibility to agony and hunger. He knew that Jesus of Nazareth encountered now for the first time the essential hardness of His mortal lot. During the long past of His life, He had been hedged round like Job, and shielded from the more direct assault of the enemy of man by the decree-Touch not Mine Anointed, until His hour is come. The thought in Satan's mind, as he now approached this holy Being in the disguise of sympathy and admiration, was this:-"Can He be induced, in the extremity of exhaustion and hunger, to yield to the

instincts of the nature which I see to be His with all its infirmities, and to provide here bread for Himself? If so, this act, however innocent in itself, will show me that He can take His cause, though but for a moment, out of the hand of His Father. And what consequences may result from this, in the career of misery through which I will cause Him to pass!" But all this is disguised: "If Thou be, as Thou art, the Son of God, these stones at Thy lightest word will become bread." The answer is at once given by One who speaks, as the New Man, the language which should have kept man faithful to God from the beginning: "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.' Though hungry in this wilderness, for man's redemption, I stand here the Representative of man's original perfection, to which I will restore him. Man liveth not by the will of his own heart, or the command of his own mouth, but in absolute dependence upon the will of God, and what cometh from God's mouth. I have no will for Myself, no word to command My own sustenance. In God I live; and His word, whether it glorify Me as His beloved Son, or send Me to the wilderness, is the only law of My being." This absolute reliance upon the breath of God, which Satan had ever hated in man as faith, and which he now witnessed in its absolute perfection, took from him all his hope of overcoming his Foe through the tribulations of His career.

The tempter now contemplated this Son of God in human nature, thus supremely relying upon His prerogative as living upon and sustained by the breath of God. He knew that in this lofty reliance He would go on to the performance and the endurance of all the will of God. And he thought, "Can this consciousness and trust be turned into a temptation? The first man presumed upon his glorious relation to God, when I tempted him ; and thought that nothing could be really denied to one so near to his Maker. So Israel, elect, and crowned with tokens of Jehovah's high regard, was tempted to exalt himself above restraint. Will this new Adam, this new Israel, by any suggestion of mine be ever induced to glory in His high vocation, and prematurely make His cause His own, and be lifted up as I once was? This is my fairest opportunity. The word to which He appealed has secretly sustained Him: let me now suddenly change the gloomy wilderness for a scene of dazzling grandeur, and see if He will spread the wings of His exultation, and triumph over me before the time." All this was disguised in the words of the second temptation, which were meant to suggest thoughts like the following :-" Thou art the Son of God! Thy sublime prerogative is to command the homage and the care of all the angels of God; as it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee.' Thou art perfect man; and Thy word hath rebuked my ignorance. Now then exult in Thy glorious prerogative. Look down upon the scene of Thy great enterprise. Leave me after the long horrors of the wilderness, and make speed to go on Thy appointed way. Fear not the dizzy descent; there is no danger beneath, as there shall never be danger before Thee from which Thy own will may not

command an immediate salvation. Jews, Romans, devils, will keep from Thee their hands, if Thou wilt, as Thou mayest, call legions of angels to Thy help!"-But the Lord's reply was instant. The sublime reliance which spoke in the answer to the first suggestion, became now the profound submission of obedient humility. "It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." These simple words confounded the assailant. They told him that the fundamental sin, common to devils and men, was not in this Man; they showed him in Christ the perfection of that which he had always dreaded in man as humble obedience; and proved to him that the Servant of God would never be turned from His career by any temptation to which the consciousness of infinite prerogatives might subject Him. Moses and Elijah had both been betrayed by the loftiness of their commissions to speak unadvisedly to man, and tempt their God: but Satan finds that he now tempts One who is not "of like passions with ourselves."

The tempter knew not (and some men speak as if they shared his ignorance) that there was nothing in the heart of Jesus that responded in any way to these suggestions; that they were not to Him temptations at all, in the strictest sense of the word. Else could he never have proceeded to the third assault. The third temptation, in its direct reference to the Person of the Christ, may indeed have been an appeal to any latent susceptibility of the blandishments of this world's glory, which Jesus might share with all the children of men whom Satan had ever tempted; but it was still more a direct and final attack of the enemy in his unmasked character. Exhibiting from the top of the mountain all the glory of the world as under his sway, he offered to relinquish it to Jesus, provided He would receive it with all its present attributes and character, and hold it of the prince of this world, instead of wresting it from him. To whatever was man in Jesus, this would be the utmost possible bribe that Satan could offer. To the Messiah, the Deliverer of the human race, whom Satan felt to be near him, it was simply a temptation to renounce the whole design of eternity, and receive the world without atoning for its guilt, and destroying in it the empire of sin. In this suggestion every attribute of Satan has its part: His pride-for thus only was it possible that his ancient dominion over the world could be retained; his cunning-for he thought that this Regenerator of the world might be persuaded to receive it, at the cost of a slight acknowledgment of another undoubted dominion, and pursue in His own way its regeneration, which Satan would know how to obstruct; but, most of all, his self-deceiving ignorance-for he speaks to One who had seen him once cast as lightning out of heaven, who was sent by the Father on purpose to disprove the assertion that "all this was given to him," and who could not, in the nature of things, pay such a being as he was the slightest honour, even to save the world. His suggestion was as maliciously ignorant as Simon's was innocently ignorant, when he unwittingly spoke in the tempter's tone, and received the tempter's rebuke. By this temptation Satan stood between the Lord and His cross: hence the unspeakable