To these questions we at once reply, that our blessed Saviour was really and properly man, possessed of the same nature as those whom he came to redeem; yet, that he was always holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. There are, however, some persons who have shown a disposition to argue, that unless the Lord assumed our nature in that unholy, sinful, and disordered state in which it is possessed by us, his temptations could not have been real, nor, in fact, the same as ours; and that, therefore, they could not have afforded such a ground for sympathy with us on the Lord's part, as would allow us to draw comfort from a contemplation of his having been tempted. But in reply to this, we ask, would not the principle of reasoning which is here laid down, lead us much farther? is not comfort a blessing to be enjoyed separately and individually by the Lord's believing people, as a sacred balm for the peculiar sorrows of each? and is it therefore enough, according to this mode of reasoning, to show that the Lord's temptations were, in a general point of view, addressed to a sinful nature such as ours? should it not likewise be shown that they included every possible case, however different and contradictory, in which every individual believer can at any time be tempted?—so that thus, he who is tempted to the gratification of covetousness, or avarice, or any other evil passion, should have a particular and special proof, that the Lord was tempted in precisely the same way, before he can have any comfort in believing that he was tempted at all. And, indeed, we may go much further than this; for if complete similarity, in every respect, were requisite between the sufferings of Christ and ours, as a foundation for sympathy on his part, then might we not argue that Christ should have been actually a sinner, in order that he may be able to sympathize with his people in all the unhappy disquietude and remorse which follows after the commission of sin?

The fact is this, the Lord assumed our nature with all its essential properties attached to it with reason, conscience, will, affections, desires, senses, and appetites; and în a body which was literally the woman's

of which we are composed. But is moral corruption and sinfulness an essential attribute of our nature? is it not, in reality, an accidental and adventitious appendage, which has been fastened upon his nature by man's own transgression, and which it is one of the great designs of divine grace to remove? And if sin be not an essential quality of our nature, it cannot of course follow that the Saviour did not assume our nature, because he did not assume that sinfulness which is now associated with it, but which did not originally, and does not properly belong to it.

Let us quietly and soberly reflect upon the account which the Bible gives of our nature as it has been injured and degraded by sin, and then ask ourselves, can it be possible that our blessed Saviour assumed our humanity in such a state?" The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?" "The carnal mind is enmity against God." "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." The reasoning faculty of man has been prostrated and weakened; his conscience deadened and deposed from its proper sphere of authority; his will perverted and debased; his affections have been set on earthly things, and, in fact, the properties and feelings of his nature have been disorganized and deranged; his whole moral constitution tarnished and defaced by the fall; the constituent elements of his nature have been brought out of a state of well-balanced harmony, into a state of disorder and confusion; the higher affections subjected to the lower, the lower ruling and bearing sway, and the whole man governed by principles of selfishness, instead of love to God.

And is this an exaggerated and overdrawn picture of the state of man in consequence of sin? Surely those who take the Word of God as their guide will never say

harmless, and undefiled, and separate from sinners?" How could the Everlasting Father, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, have twice proclaimed-" This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased?" How could the Devils have cried out- "I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God ?" It is to be feared, that those who have represented our Saviour as having taken our nature upon him with all its moral corruption and sinfulness, have not imbibed at the fountain-head of eternal truth, sufficiently deep and solemn impressions of the awful state of that depravity into which man has been brought by sin.

Let those who argue for the sinfulness of our Lord's humanity reflect on this, whether, by so doing, they do not destroy his ability as a Saviour. Might not, in fact, the resemblance between Christ and us be too close, - so close, as to disqualify him from effecting redemption for us? and may it not have been in consequence of a persuasion of this, that Christ felt it necessary to speak of himself, in such strong contrast with the Jews who surrounded him, as he is represented in the eighth chapter of St. John to have done?" Ye are from beneath, I am from above; ye are of this world, I am not of this world;" and again" Ye are of your father, the Devil, and the works of your father ye will do;" after which he immediately adds this challenge" Which of you convinceth me of sin?" He that undertakes the office of Saviour, must not stand in need of a Saviour and a sacrifice for himself; he that would open the prison doors to set the prisoners free, must not be incarcerated within the same prison walls; the angel of mercy that would assist the impotent man into the Pool of Bethesda, must be free from the same impotency himself. And, indeed, we may go further than this, and say, that the Saviour's capacity to sympathize with us would have been impaired, if not destroyed, by his assumption of our sinfulness. It is as man that he sympathizes with us; but how could such pure sympathy as would give us confidence and comfort exist in the breast of one who was not perfectly holy? Sinfulness more or less impairs the vigour and deadens the sensitiveness of our feelings, and prevents us from sharing in another's woe.

And let not any man argue, that the fact of Jesus having suffered, and having been a

man of sorrows, is any proof of his having taken our nature upon him in a sinful state. True it is, that this is the general rule that prevails in our world, that sorrow is the consequence of sin; but the great mystery of godliness consists in the one exception to this rule which the love of God has created, that he who knew no sin had sorrow, that he who had no guilt endured suffering, that he who never violated a single command, and never, in any instance, opposed his Father's will, underwent that death which is the penal wages of disobedience. But the Prophet solves the mystery: "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him...... The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."

But, indeed, the account which the Bible gives of the character of Jesus should at once set this question at rest. He assumed our nature, with all its essentially distinguishing faculties and attributes, rightly harmonized and adjusted; each occupying its proper position, and exercising its legitimate influence; the higher affections ruling the lower, the lower being duly subordinated to the higher, and all under the guidance of such principles as a sinless and holy being should be governed by, the principle of love to God-of complete subjection to his will-of always seeking those things which are pleasing in his sight-of endeavouring to promote his glory in everything. The man Christ Jesus was, in fact, from the very commencement, a pure and perfect model of that holiness, to which it is his object to raise his people, through faith and sanctification.

Nor let it be supposed that we deny the doctrine which teaches that Christ assumed our real and proper humanity, because we deny that he assumed it in a sinful and polluted state. It is a precious, an important, and indeed an essential truth of our holy religion, that Jesus was really and truly a man such as we are; and so far from opposing this great and valuable truth, we should rather be disposed to question whether many Christians have not, in their great zeal for maintaining the Godhead nature of the Saviour, forgotten, or at least not sufficiently attended to, the important doctrine of his real humanity. But the question is thisDoes a denial of the Saviour's having assumed a sinful humanity, amount to a denial of his

and violent, and require as much moral resistance, if not more, as a temptation to gratify a desire for what is decidedly sinful, addressed to an unholy being. The temptation addressed to the Saviour to gratify his desire for food, by turning stones into bread, was a much stronger temptation than that which was addressed to Ananias and Sapphira, inducing them to lie against the Holy Ghost. It is, in short, a very great error to suppose that the strength of temptation depends upon the sinfulness of the person who is tempted. The fact is often directly the reverse, as we shall see when we come to examine, separately, the temptations of our blessed Lord; for the principles to which Satan appealed in him, were such as must have existed in the greatest

of Adam having fallen, because he wanted this superior help, as of Christ having triumphed in the full preservation of his moral uprightness, because he was supported by the Spirit of God.

The human nature, therefore, of our blessed Saviour, was in all essential points precisely the same as that which we possess, and the temptations which he sustained were similar to ours, or, as the apostle says, "He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin."

2. And when he had fasted

forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.

3. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son

of God, command that these stones be made bread.

him to the commission of, were such as it

was obviously possible for him to perform. To say that Jesus did not possess a capability to comply with the solicitations of the devil, is, in fact, to deny the reality and force of his temptations; but it no more implies sinfulness in him, than it would have implied sinfulness in Adam, to say of him, before the fall, that he might have yielded to Satan. Indeed, the previous possibility of the Saviour's yielding, in the sense in which we have just explained it, is not less clearly shown by the fact of his having been tempted at all, than was the antecedent possibility of Adam's yielding proved by the fact of his having actually yielded. Jesus, possessing, as a man, a finite and created nature, which, though pure and holy, was necessarily weak and limited in its own powers and resources, might have given way, had he not been preserved on this as in other cases, by the power of the Holy Spirit, which was given to him without measure. There were two great problems which the temptations of both the first and second Adam were intended, amongst other purposes, to solve the intrinsic weakness of our nature, and its necessary dependence upon the divine; problems which have been impressively illustrated by both events as well by the fact

In these verses we have a very concise, but very clear and distinct account of the first of the three open and avowed temptations with which Jesus was assaulted by the devil in the wilderness. We should, however, carefully observe that he was tempted during the entire forty days and forty nights that he is said to have remained there, before Satan appeared to him to urge him to turn the stones into bread; for so we are informed by St. Luke, in the second verse of his fourth chapter. During this period, the tempter remained invisible, and probably carried on his attacks by endeavouring to suggest unholy and improper thoughts to the Saviour's mind, in resisting which, he had recourse to strong supplications and prayers to Him that was able to save him from death. It is also very likely that his fasting, during this time, was adopted as an additional remedy against temptation. If this be the case, we have here an instance of Satan converting the means which our Saviour employed for repelling his attacks, into a groundwork and occasion of a more violent and determined assault. Although

there was no food in the wilderness, we are certainly not to suppose that the Saviour fasted against his will. There could have been no impropriety in his having had recourse, during the forty days and forty nights referred to, to some miraculous means of supplying himself with food, before Satan made the proposal that he should turn the stones into bread. Besides, his fasting must have been voluntary, as it was an important portion of his meritorious sufferings in behalf of man: and hence we are taught to pray, that Christ would deliver us by his "baptism, fasting, and temptation," as well as" by his agony and bloody sweat."

It is also extremely probable that the Saviour did not sleep during this period, for the words of Matthew seem to imply that there was no difference between the days and nights, but that Satan carried on an uninterrupted attack, which the Saviour withstood by a constant and uninterrupted resistance. If this be true, and there is every reason to believe that it is, what a tremendous and fearful view does it give of the sufferings of Jesus! We are fully convinced, that we can never form anything like a correct estimate of their awful intensity. Were it even possible to accumulate into one mass all the sufferings of man from the time that sin first entered into the world, we should not, even then, have an adequate representation of what Jesus endured in the days of his flesh. How can we, who know so little of our own sinfulness, know much of the agonizing violence of those sufferings, of which that sinfulness has been the cause? With what force, too, should the Saviour's command, "to watch and pray, lest we enter into temptation," address itself to the mind of every believer, since it is not only the direction of infinite wisdom, but is likewise suggested by his own experience of suffering in the days of his flesh?

The fasting of the Saviour consisted in his total abstinence from food, for St Luke says, that "in those days he did eat nothing." To this we have no complete parallel in Scripture. We are informed, indeed, in the 28th verse of the 34th chapter of the book of Exodus, that Moses fasted for the same period; but he was with the Lord on mount Sinai, far removed from the reach of temptation. We are also told in the 8th verse of the 19th chapter of the first book of Kings, that Elijah fasted forty days; but

the food which he had eaten at the commencement of that time, continued to support him by some miraculous extension and continuance of its strengthening power. The fastings, however, of Moses who gave the law, and of Elias who restored it, were typical of the fasting of Jesus, who is the end of the law for righteousness, to every one that believeth. Of Christ it is simply stated, that he fasted forty days and forty nights, during which time he ate nothing. There is no foundation whatever for supposing, as some have done, that he was miraculously supported during this long abstinence from food. It may indeed be asked, how could his human nature have been sustained without miraculous support, if he ate nothing? We reply, that we do not think that the human nature of Christ required any such miraculous support; but that, on the other hand, it was necessary that he should abstain from food for this length of time, in order to produce in him the sensation of hunger in a sufficiently intense degree, to afford opportunity for the temptation to turn the stones into bread; for so we argue from what St. Matthew says" he was afterward an hungered." In consequence of the sinless purity of our Saviour's human nature, it may have required this time to produce in him so strong a sensation of hunger. With us it is otherwise. Our physical constitution is so distempered and impregnated with sin, that we are much more readily susceptible of this, as well as of other animal sensations and desires.

But let us attend to the important connexion which the Saviour's hunger had with the temptation which followed. Satan employed it as the platform on which to erect his first open assault. "When the tempter came unto him he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." It is probable that Satan assumed a human form on this occasion. But in whatever form he appeared, he was still "the tempter." So constant and uniform is his character in this respect, that he may be easily distinguished by this name. Jesus is not more easily recognised by his believing people by the designation of "the Saviour," than Satan is by that of "the tempter." There is this difference, however, which we should carefully observe, that when Satan comes to us as a tempter, he generally appears under some insidious and deceptive