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introduces us to ; or a denial of God such as science sometimes leads us to.
But the temptation to Jesus was nobler, we do not doubt, and more subtle than the temptation to the mind has ever been to any other man. He saw the kingdoms of the world at a glance, and the glory of them. He was offered them as His own. Now, He desired to have the kingdoms of the world as His own. All the difference seemed to be that the Devil offered them at once without the agony of winning them — the agony to Him or to us. He was offered them without the agony to Himself. Some think that He did not know yet what that agony was. He did not know that He was to be despised and rejected of ijaen. He did not know that He was to lose the sense of the Father's well-pleasing. He did not know what the Garden was to be or what the Cross. They say so. But how can they tell ? One thing is sure. He knew enough to make this a keen temptation.
But He was also offered the kingdoms of the world without the agony to us. That temptation was yet more terrible. For when the Cross was past, the agony to us was but beginning. And He felt our agony more keenly than He felt His own. What a long-drawn agony it has been. Two thousand years of woe! and still the redemption is not complete. To be offered the homage of the human heart, to be offered its love — such love as it would have been where there was no choice left — to end the poverty and the sickness and the blindness and the leprosy and the death, not by an occasional laying on of the hands in a Galilean village, but in one world-embracing word of healing ; to end the sin without waiting for the slow movements of con- science and the slow dawnings of faith — it was a sore temptation. But it must not be. To deliver from the consequence of sin without the sorrow for it, to accept the homage of the heart of man without its free choice of love, is to leave the Serpent master stilL The world is very fair to look upon as He sees it in a moment of time from that mountain-top; but it cannot be His until He has Buffered for it, and until it has suffered with Him.
3. The Third Temptation. — The third temptation was a
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temptation to the spirit. Eye saw "that the tree was to be desired to make one wise." Jesus was invited to cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, trusting in God and in the promise that no harm should befall Him. The "wisdom" which Eve was promised was spiritual wisdom. It was the wisdom of God. "Ye shall be as gods," said the Serpent, "knowing good and evil." And this wisdom became hers when she had eaten. " Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil." It was such wisdom as God has. And God is a Spirit. It was spiritual wisdom. Man is both spiritual and material. As a spiritual being he has certain spiritual experiences. But as long as the spirit is in touch with the body its experiences are limited in their range. God is a Spirit, and His experience knows no bounds. When man attempts to pass the bounds of human experience and enter the experience of God, he sins.
Eve was so tempted and felL Jesus also was so tempted, but He resisted the temptation. As God He can throw Himself from the pinnacle of the temple with impunity, just as He can walk upon the water. And the Devil reminds Him that He is God. But this is His temptation as a man. As a man He cannot, as a man He has no right, to tempt God by casting Himself down. To Eve and to Jesus it was the tempta- tion to an enlargement of experience beyond that which is given to man. And it lay, as it always does, in the direction of the knowledge of evil. There are those who, like Eve, still enter into evil not from the mere love of evil or the mere spirit of rebellion, but in order to taste that which they have not tasted yet. They wish to know " what it is like." There are men and women who can trace their drunkard's lifelong misery to this very source.
To Eve the sharpness of the temptation lay in the promise of larger spiritual experiences. Let us not say it was a vulgar curiosity. The promise was that she would be as God, that she would know what God knows. Perhaps she even felt that it would bring her into closer sympathy with God, the sympathy of a larger common experience. To Jesus this also was the sharpness of the temptation. He was God, but He was being tempted as a man. It was not merely, as in the first temptation,
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that He was invited to use His power as Eedeemer for His own human advantage. It was that He was invited to enter into the experience of God, to enter into the fulness of knowledge which belongs to God, to prove Himself, and to feel in perfect sympathy with the whole range of experience of the Father. It seemed like trust: it would have been presumption. We sometimes enter into temptation saying that we will trust God to deliver us. No one ever yet entered into temptation, unsent by God, and came forth scathless,