better for talking of Him, and may boast of our superiority to people who do not know Him, till all meekness and gentleness depart from us-till we become like the Jews, who said, 'We have Abraham to our father'? Will any soft, sentimental faith purge out the sectarianism and the money-worship from our English nation, from our English church? Must there not be One with a fan in His hand, to accomplish for us what no outward baptism, no preaching of repentance, has been able to accomplish? Is there such an One? I think there is, for I accept this as a true sentence. 'Now when the people were baptised, it came to pass, that Jesus also being baptised and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in Thee am I well pleased.'

Here I find the commencement of that Kingdom of Heaven which John declared to be at hand. Here is the revelation of a Name which had been implied in every revelation, but which had never yet been spoken. He who is and was and is to come, is never forgotten; but the Father is discovered in the Baptism. The Word who said, 'Let there be light, and there was light,' is never lost sight of. But this Baptism declares a Son who is to do nothing of Himself, who is to shew forth the will whence all blessing and restoration proceed. And the Baptism reveals the Spirit, not as moving on the face of the waters, but as possessing the whole heart and mind of a man, as directing the thought and purposes of a man, as uniting the highest rule with the most perfect obedience. All that follows is the living exposition of Christ's baptism.

LECTURE V.

THE TEMPTATION OF THE KING.

And when the devil had ended all his temptation, he departed from him for a season.-ST. LUKE iv. 13.

THE story of the Baptism of Jesus is followed, in this Gospel, by a genealogy ascending to Adam. He who has been declared to be the Son of God, we are reminded is emphatically the Son of Man. He is connected not merely with the family of Abraham, though His descent is traced through that. He is marked out as the Head of the race. If the ordinary succession from father to son has been interrupted, in His case, to assert a higher principle, to denote the express relation of the Lord of man to God, that succession has not been dishonoured. It has acquired a new sacredness from the interruption. Each birth into this world has a dignity which it must want, if the message at the Baptism was a fiction. If you dwell on this use of the genealogy, and compare it with the words of St. Paul, which must have been so familiar to St. Luke, respecting the first and the second Adam, you will not, I think, be disposed to occupy yourselves with minute questions about special links which may appear or may be wanting in the series. The discovery that there are difficulties in it which we cannot explain, has, I doubt not, been

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of great use, in forcing us to seek more for the sense and purpose of the Divine narratives. Whilst we are slaves to the letter, as I shall often have occasion to shew you in these lectures, the force of the letter escapes us; we continually pass over or pervert the plainest and broadest statements. To emancipate us from this slavery, to make us honest students of God's Revelations, to give us some adequate feeling of their grandeur, He may use many methods. That of confounding our ingenuity, and of obliging us to see inconsistencies which we cannot account for, is perhaps the one which humbles us most, and therefore for which we have most cause to be thankful. At all events, I have no solutions to offer of any difficulties which have been raised about this list of names; if I had, I hope I should not trouble you with them, knowing that you are busy men, and have not time for trifles.

It is quite otherwise with the next passage in this record. That, I believe, you need ask no leisure to understand. Work-the commonest work-will interpret it better than leisure. You have tests by which you can try what I say of the Temptation. I trust you will apply these tests strictly, that I may not fritter away, by any theories of mine, what you and all people require for the practice of every day.

'And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. And the devil, taking him up

into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine. And Jesus answered, and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan; for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God cast thyself down from hence; for it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering, said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season.'

What is this a part of the Gospel which I dare to claim as belonging to the business of life, as appealing to the sympathies and consciences of human beings? Is not this just one of those supernatural additions which mingle so strangely with the common history, and which all who are trying to extricate that common history from its environment, instantly cast aside? No doubt. The Temptation is treated by a number of those who accept, no less than by most of those who reject, the Evangelical narrative, as standing outside of it as having, perhaps a doctrinal, perhaps a traditional value, but as altogether distinct from the records of our Lord's journeys and of His moral teaching. This separation I cannot make. I can understand no part of the subsequent history, if I omit the scene in the wilderness. All appears to me incoherent and

fantastical. The Gospel loses its interest for me as a commentary on my own life and the life of my fellowcreatures. Perhaps I ought to receive it because it is written, but why it should have been written, what it has to do with us, I cannot discover. It is this preliminary struggle of the Spirit of God with the spirit of evil which shews me what our Lord's struggle was with the Jewish people, what is the struggle of every nation and age, what is going on in every one of us.

And this has been the conviction of different periods -of those periods which have been most energetic, and have left the deepest marks of their energy on the world's history; this has been the conviction of those men who have fought the stoutest battles, and done most for mankind. You may expect me to begin with warning you not to think of the Temptation as Dante and the men in the middle ages thought of it, or as Luther and the men at the time of the Reformation thought of it, or as Milton and the Puritans thought of it. I shall do no such thing. I believe they all thought of it imperfectly; that they impaired the beauty of the clear, sharply-chiselled marble, by colouring borrowed from their own fancy and the fancy of their times. But they have shewn with what intense reality this record has come to them in the most terrible moments of their existence. If they have seen it through a mist, it has not created the mist; it has done more than all other lights to dispel the mist. Truth and falsehood, good and evil, have stood out before them in their unchangeable opposition; not as abstractions engaged in a shadow-fight, but as powers of life and death grappling in that fight on which the condition of the universe and of each person in it depends. We may learn something from