He had never
understood His own nature, nor the work He was to do. And it is not to
be wondered that the talk among the Essenes caused Him to ponder
carefully over the idea expressed by them. And then the wonderful
event of the dove, and the Voice, upon the occasion of His baptism,
seemed almost to verify the idea of the Essenes. Was He indeed the
long-expected Deliverer of Israel? Surely He must find this out--He
must wring the answer from the inmost recesses of His soul. And so, He
sought refuge in the Wilderness, intuitively feeling that there amidst
the solitude and desolation, He would fight His fight and receive His
answer.

He felt that He had come to a most important phase of His life's work,
and the question of "What Am I?" must be settled, once and for
all,--then and there. And so He left behind Him the admiring and
worshipful crowds of John's following, and sought the solitude of the
waste places of the Wilderness, in which He felt He would come face to
face with His own soul, and demand and receive its answer.

* * * * *

And up in the inmost recesses of the Heart of the Wilderness,
Jesus wrestled in spirit with Himself for many days, without
food or nourishment, and without shelter. And the struggle was
terrific--worthy of such a great soul. First the body's insistent
needs were to be fought and mastered. It is related that the climax of
the physical struggle came one day when the Instinctive Mind, which
attends to the physical functions, made a desperate and final demand
upon Him. It cried aloud for bread with all the force of its nature.
It tempted Him with the fact that by His own occult powers He was able
to convert the very stones into bread, and it demanded that He work
the miracle for His own physical needs--a practice deemed most
unworthy by all true occultists and mystics. "Turn this stone into
bread, and eat" cried the voice of the Tempter. But Jesus resisted the
temptation although He knew that by the power of His concentrated
thought He had but first to mentally picture the stone as bread and
then _will_ that it be so materialized. The miraculous power which
afterward turned water into wine, and which was again used to feed the
multitude with the loaves and the fishes, was available to Him at that
moment in order to satisfy the cravings of His body, and to break His
fast.

None but the advanced occultist who has known what it was to be
tempted to use his myst