glimmer, then the dawn, then the growing light. It consisted with a perfect human consciousness. The sense of manness, of humanness, never left him. It was as present to him as it ever was to any other human being. His whole history shows that; and from a review of his whole life we must recall that fact in the study of his preparation for his life-work. He had an increasing conviction that he was set in the universe for some unique work. He had a growing ability for that work. "He grew in wisdom." As he approached the hour in the world's history and his own when his mission was to be ostensibly and operatively begun, he felt within himself the keen and mastering desire to enter upon and accomplish his work. Jesus at his baptism. The baptism was a crisis. John was to have therein a sign of the Messiah, the Sent One, the real Man of Destiny, the Anointed Deliverer. If he were that One, and his belief One,-and Excitement of must have grown with his growth,-what should occur when he presented himself to John would settle the question definitely. It would also be his own voluntary dedication to the loftiest and the largest work ever enterprised by man. The phenomena at the baptism conspired with his own sentiments to produce in him the most in tensely exciting and exalting state of feeling consistent with the continuance of life. Through that state he had just passed. It was his Rubicon. It was his voluntary devotion to what he never could afterward abandon without spiritual shipwreck and selfruin. Every other great soul has passed through precisely in kind that crisis of the mind and spirit proportioned to each man's soul and work. Jesus is admitted by all healthy minds to have been the greatest soul in all our human brotherhood, and the work he was about to undertake, whether he should succeed in accomplishing it or not, to be the greatest of all the enterprises known in the record of holy daring. He was making for himself an investiture of himself with the office and dignity of royal rule over all humanity. The excitement had been indescribably be cause inconceivably intense. Then followed in his what has followed in every other known human history,-a collapse, a depression, an awful desolation, a plunge from the altitudes of human sensations, The collapse. perceptions, and spiritual conditions to the depths hat lie separated by thin and weak flooring from the bottomless pit of despair. Every man that has gone upon a huge work has had these alternations, transitions from the high excitement of emprise to the depths of doubts and misgivings, that dread interval of chill between commitment to a cause and the first blow, -the season, brief by the clock but long by the heart, which the soldier passes through between the formation of the line of battle and the roar of the first artillery discharge which announces the beginning of the action which must then be fought through to the result of victory or defeat. Jesus. Such seems to have been the passage of the temptation. Full of the Holy Ghost, Jesus returned from Jordan, where he had been baptized, and was led by God's Spirit into a wilderness, where he was to endure another trial Peccability of and have shown whether he could as well preserve his unsinningness in depression as in exaltation, when hell mocked him as well as when heaven eulogized him. This was absolutely necessary for him. It was possible for Jesus to sin:* quite as possible as for Adam, or Moses, or you, or me, or any other man. Any other view reduces this portion of his history to such a fable or parable as would be more ridiculous than any farce we ever read; for even in the fable Jesus would be represented as liable to a spiritual lapse, which is inconsistent with any dogma of his impeccability. He might have attempted an indulgence of himself in what was attractive but sinful. It would have ruined him. But if he could not, then he was no man in any reasonable sense of that word; then he had no freedom of will, and could not have been even virtuous; then his history is of no kind of moral significance or spiritual import to any man whatever; then he was a monster, being not God, not angel, not demon, not man, an anomalous drift, floating lawlessly and disorderly among the things of God, an entity having no reference to God whatever. This is not to be supposed. Jesus was tempted just as any other man, and tells the story of his temptation just as any other intelligent person would narrate the fearful passage of his supreme spiritual trial. His narrative • The old distinction is of the non po peccare and the posse non peccare; the former, the inherent inability to sin, belongs to God alone; the latter, the inherent ability to keep from sinning, to Adam and to Jesus. Neither had any traditional bad blood. That is their chief human distinction from other men. This is the scholastic view. His narrative given humanly. follows known psychologic laws. "Immediately," he tells us, the Spirit which had led him to John, to the parting Jordan, to the opening heaven, to the descending dove, to the divine benediction, compels him, "drives" him into the wilderness "to be tempted of the devil.” Just so any autobiographer would state it. It was the actual conflict of Jesus' with the Power of Evil. days. The excitement of the Jordan scene was followed by a fast of forty days and forty nights. We are not prepared to say that this was literally a period of forty times twentyFast of forty four hours. "Forty days" is a Hebraism for an indefinitely long time. We have no record, outside the Bible, so far as I know, of any fast having been continued this long and life retained. And if Jesus was miraculously sustained, it takes much from the power of moral instruction which this passage otherwise contains. As in the cases of Moses (Exod. xxxiv. 28) and Elias (1 Kings xix. 8), this period was filled with a spiritual ecstasy and a trial of his powers which suspended the ordinary wants of the body. When at last hunger broke through upon him, and exhaustion ensued, Satan is represented as having come to him presenting the tests of his virtue which searched him through all those openings of the human being as yet discovered on the side of desire, namely, the desire of pleasure, the desire of praise, and the desire of power, an approach through the body, through the intellect, and through the soul, to the inner man, the spirit, the real I,—or, as the writer of the First Epistle General of John (ii. 16) classifies them, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life." The temptation through fear was reserved. Satan. In the history of Jesus we shall come upon some other teaching in regard to Satan. Here, for the first time in that history, this name is assigned to a personal being. In advance, there is nothing preposterous, nothing ridicu lous, nothing unreasonable, we may even say nothing improbable in the supposition that there is an entity Nothing prepos- endowed with intelligence and moral qualities, specially and actively evil; intelligently and persistently evil; thoroughly and ceaselessly evil. The probabilities, apart from any special revelation from Almighty God, are in favor of the existence of such a person, although it is mani terous. festly out of the power of the human reason to determine the conditions of his existence or the modes of his action, while probable characteristics could be reasonably conjectured. Undesigned pres sure on the soul. Every intelligent inan who devotes any time to self-inspection finds that his violations of any code, which he believes to be the moral law, come either from certain emotions of his own inner nature-excited he cannot tell how, spontaneous so far as he knows-acting upon his will, making such a pressure upon that will as amounts to a temptation; or, that such excitation of the emotions and such pressure upon the will is from something without. In the latter case it is some perception of some object which he sees, or of some sound which he hears, or some report of some of the senses, unde signed, coming incidentally upon him, or designed, brought to bear upon him by some intelligent being. Among the undesigned seductions to evil, or what may at least be called evil influences, are these attractions or repulsions created in the individual man by the "spirit of the age," a general air and temperature generated by all the intellectual and spiritual motions about him, and coming upon his soul not from any individual's design to be specially hartful to him, but just as deleterious air destroys where no man is attempting to poison another. Designed pres sure. But we are conscious of sinister and wicked designs upon us encocted and operated by wicked men. Some men are adroit, Some skilful, some surpassingly influential for evil. Some of these are really so acute in their perceptions, so rapid in their motions, and so persistent in their efforts, that to speak of them as compassing sea and land seems hardly an exaggeration. Artists of the pen sometimes paint these far-sighted, near-sighted, telescopic, microscopic, almost ubiquitous weavers of the webs of deceit and treachery, and paint them with a power that appals us. The body is at once a help and encumbrance to these spirits. We easily reach the probability that there are spirits without the clog of flesh who operate upon one another, and upon the spirits of men, having learned the Approaches to the soul through the flesh, some of them having probably been in the flesh. As among men there are those who gain the mastery, and "get the start," and take the lead in the * 'Perhaps Sue's Le Juif Errant might be cited as furnishing an example. 490770 march "of this majestic world," so among them it is not difficult to believe there may be spirits ambitious of chieftainship and capable of lifting themselves over the masses to a throne of power, and of establishing principalities in spiritual places. Whoso could reach the czarship in this rule, or secure and keep skill to hold the general's post in this Propaganda, would be The Devil, Satanas, Satan. Rational probabilities of the existence of Satan. These are merely the probabilities reached by reasonings on the facts of human nature and society; but are not proofs of the existence of a Personal Spirit of Evil. That is one of those subjects upon which men can have no positive knowledge beyond what the Father of all spirits should choose to reveal. But if there be such a being, the probability is that some revelation of his existence would be made, if God ever reveals anything to man. The statement that Jesus employed the superstition of his countrymen to advance his own good and praiseworthy design of acquiring influence over them for their benefit--a very unworthy course for any great man to pursue-is especially inappropriate to the case before us. Ilis narrative of his temptation, together with his other teachings, actually made a revelation to the Jewish mind. They had no conception of such a being as the Satan of the New Testament. Satan of New not Jewish idea of Satan not obtained in the Captivity. The statement that the Jews obtained their idea of Satan from the East during the "Captivity," is wholly unsustained by any thing known of their literature. Their conception of Satan was wholly unlike the Persian idea of the Prince of Sin. That old Manichæan doctrine traced the existence of evil to one creator, as it did the existence of good to another, and these creators were equally powerful; their Satan was always as grand and influential a person as their God. No man can read Jewish sacred literature without seeing how totally absent is this idea. It seems never to have had a place among them. Among the writers of the Old Testament the name seldom occurs, and the word not very frequently. Where the name is used the person so designated has no attribute of grandeur or terribleness or extensive power. He is always at the control of Jehovah. This is quite different from the doctrine of Ahriman and Ormuzd, the Persian co-ordinate deities |