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 truly estimated God's intolerance of any rivalry (Matt.
iv. 10), and he was true to God and to his own soul. Again, in this as in
the preceding temptations, Jesus conquered the evil suggestions by
appropriating to himself truth spoken by God's servants to Israel. Tempted
in all points like his brethren, he resisted as any one of them could have
resisted, and won a victory possible, ideally considered, to any other of
the children of men.

95. It is not idle curiosity which inquires whence the evangelists got
this story of the temptation of Jesus. Even if the whole transaction took
place on the plane of outer sensuous life, and Jesus was bodily carried to
Jerusalem and to the mountain-top, there is no probability that any
witnesses were at hand who could tell the tale. But the fact that in any
case the vision of the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time (Luke iv.
5) could have been spiritual only, since no mountain, however high (Matt.
iv. 8), could give, physically, 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 depict the
essential reality of his inner struggle. In any case the narrative could
have come from no other source than himself. How he came to tell it we do
not know. On one of the days of private converse with his disciples after
the confession at Caesarea Philippi he may have given them this account of
his own experience, in order to help his loyal Galileans to understand
more fully his work and the way of it, and to prepare them for that
disappointment of their expectations which they were so slow to
acknowledge as possible.

96. From this struggle in the wilderness Jesus came forth with the clear
conviction that he w