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ark i. 9-13; Luke iii. 21,

d in conscience; outcasts who came in penitence, and devout souls in consecration. The wonder of the new message was carried throughout the land and brought great multitudes to the Jordan. Jesus in Nazareth heard it, and

conception of the Messiah such that he would look for its fulfilment in one like Jesus (Matt. iii. 10-12). One thing, however, was clear as soon as they met,--John recognized in Jesus one holier than himself (Matt.

no sin" (I. Pet. ii. 22; compare John viii. 46; II. Cor. v. 21), this silence of Jesus would offend the religious sense. Jesus, however, had no air of self-sufficiency, he came to make surrender and "to fulfil all-righteousness" (Matt. iii. 15). It was the positive aspect of John's baptism that drew him to the Jordan. John was preaching the coming of God's kingdom. The place held by the doctrine of that kingdom in the later teaching of Jesus makes it all but certain that his thought had been filled with it for many years. In his reading of the prophets Jesus undo

secret (Matt. vi. 1, 6). As the transfiguration followed the prayer on Hermon, so this initial consecration was answered from heaven. A part of the answer was evident to John, for he saw a visible token of the gift of the divine Spirit which was granted to Jesus for the conduct of the work he had to do, and he recognized in Jesus the greater successor for whom he was simply making preparation (Mark i. 10; John i. 32-34). To Jesus there came also with the gift of the Spirit a definite word from heaven, "Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased" (Mark i. 11). The language in

he was different from his fellows. That in him which made a confession at the baptism unnatural and which led to John's word, "I have need to be baptized by thee," was ready to echo assent when God said,

er the leading of this Spirit (see Matt. xii. 28 and John iii. 34). The temptation which followed the baptism, and in which he faced the difficulties in his new task, was the first result of the Spirit's control. Its later influence is not so clearly marked in the gospels, but they imply that as the older servants of God were guided and strengthened by h

the man he was, could not have thought that his call was a summons to an entire change in his ideals and his thoughts about God and duty. Yet he must have been conscious of the wide differences between his conceptions of God's kingdom and the popular expectation. Those differences, by the measure of the definiteness of the popular thought and the ardor of the popular hope, were the proof of the difficulty of his task. The call meant that the Messiah could be such as he was; it meant that the kingdom could be and must be a dominion of God primarily in the h

b. v. 7-9), but they also depict clearly the reality of these initial testings. The account as given in Matthew and Luke represents the experience with which the forty days' struggle culminated. The absorption of Jesus' mind had been so complete that he had neglected the needs of his body, and when he turned to think of earthly things he was pressed by hunger. A popular notion at a later time, and probably also in Jesus' day, was that the Messiah would be able to feed his people as Moses had given them manna in the wilderness (John vi. 30-32; see EdersLJM. I. 176). He had just been endowed with the divine Spirit for the work before him; it was therefore no fantastic idea when the suggestion came that he should use his power to supply his own needs in the desert. Nor was the temptation without attractiveness; his own physical n

s of prudence,--as heedless as if, trusting God's promised care, he should cast himself down from a pinnacle of the temple to the rocks in Kidron below? A fanatic would have yielded to such a temptation. Many another than Jesus did so,--Theudas (Acts v. 36), the Egyptian (Acts xxi. 38); and Bar Cochba (Dio Cassius, lxix. 12-14; Euseb. Ch. Hist. iv. 6). Jesus, however, showed his perfect mental health, repudiating the temptation by declaring that while man may trust God's care, he must not presumptuously put it to the test (Matt. iv. 7). The after life of Jesus was a clea

ed. If he would own the evil inevitable for the time, and accommodate his work to it, he might then be free to lead men to higher and more spiritual views of God's kingdom. His knowledge of his people's grossness of heart and materialism of hope made a real temptation of the suggestion that he should not openly oppose but should accommodate himself to them. Jesus did not underestimate the opposition of "the kingdoms of the world," but he

cally, that wide sweep of view, suggests that the whole account tells in pictorial language an intensely real, inner experience of Jesus. This in no respect reduces the truthfulness of the narratives. Temptation never becomes temptation till it passes to that inner scene of action and debate. Since Jesus shows in all his teaching a natural use of parabolic language to set forth spiritual truth, the inference is almost inevitable that the gospels have in like manner adopted the language of vivid picture as alone adequate to de

to do his work fearlessly, but prudently, seeking to win men in his Father's way to acknowledge that Father's sovereignty. There is no evidence that, beyond such firm conviction and purpose, he had any fixed plan for the work he was to do, nor that he saw clearly as yet how his earthly career would end. The third temptation, howeve