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fast.1 But we can find no difficulty if we take the fasting of Christ in the strictest sense. Often deep thinkers, contemplative devotees, sorrowing penitents, ecstatic enthusiasts, or persons under morbid excitement," have fasted for an extraordinary length of time. But Christ is also in this respect the Prince of men, who in the highest heroic measure comprehends the particular possibilities of this class. In Him the power of the deepest contemplation co-operated with the power of the deepest sorrow, and these with the highest inspiration, in order to sustain a disposition so free from wants and so super-mundane, and which was perfected by means of the highest sympathy which His soul now felt for the entire morbid state of His generation. In truth, His fasting, according to its deepest significance, was the specific, redeeming counteraction against the malady of the world, as far as it consisted in a mad, false idealizing. To that insane chiliastic idolizing of the world which would fain have deluded and fettered Him, He opposed the counterpoise of His perfected sober-mindedness, of which the outward form appeared in His fasting. It should never be forgotten that Christianity was born into the world with a plenitude of the Spirit, which showed the freest exaltation above nature in the fasting of Christ. And this characteristic it retains through all time. In this heroic sobriety of soul it overcame and rescued the RomanGrecian world in that wild debauchery which would have been its ruin. And thus, hereafter, the Church by the power of a spirit-like sobriety will overcome the jovial banqueting of those who will be eating, and drinking, and amusing themselves at the end of the world (Matt. xxiv. 38, 39). But what specially supported our Lord during those days in the energy of His life, was the creative vital power which gave Him copious supplies of nourishment and vigour, and refreshed His inmost soul. He

1 Of John the Baptist Christ says (Matt. xi. 18) he came neither eating nor drinking, although he lived on locusts and wild honey, the bread of the wilderness. [Meyer, in his thorough, unflinching way, says the fasting here 'is to be understood absolutely,' and refers to the convincing passages, Ex. xxxiv. 28, and 1 Kings xix. 8.-ED.]

2 Spinoza supported himself for several days on four sous.

3 Niklaus von der Flüe.

Saul, Acts ix. 9.

5 See W. Hoffman, das Leben Jesu, p. 315. Many examples of this sort have occurred in modern times.

lived by depending on the mouth of God, while He retired with ecstasy into His innermost principle of life.'

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In the great movements of His exalted consciousness, the forty days might pass away as a single day, or an hour. It has been observed, that in the lives of Moses and Elijah,* periods of forty days occur as fast-times in critical junctures; and the narrative of the sojourn of Jesus in the wilderness has brought to mind the forty years' wandering of Israel in the wilderness. Some have made this remark in order to find out traces of fiction in the history; others, in order to comfort themselves with the thought, that the number of forty days is not to be taken too rigidly. But this rhythmical recurrence of forty days in similar junctures of the Theocracy rather points to a more general mysterious law of life. The forty days' fasting of Moses also forms a contrast to the preceding rebellion of the people, who ‘eat, and drank, and rose up to play,' and showed their preference for a false religion. Elijah in like manner presented a spiritual antagonism to the hankering of his people after the fantastic pleasure of the worship of Baal. The common labour of man is comprised in the cycle of a week, and his spiritual labour in the cycle of a week multiplied into itself, in a period of about seven weeks of labour. The spiritual labour by which Israel, as a people, were obliged to purify themselves for the temperate enjoyment of the glories of Canaan, required forty years. But why should not the theocratic history, the innermost essence of which is poetry, be carried on, like poetry, in rhythmical relations? In Christ's life also, this law of life must be fulfilled, according to which the psychical relations stand in living affinity to the earthly relations of time.

But when the forty days were fulfilled, then He hungered. He became vividly conscious of His destitution. He hungered not only after bread, but also after man, and after living intercourse with the world. This was the moment in which all the tempting He had withstood was concentrated, and at the same time unfolded, in most distinct single temptations; the moment in which the tempter, whose spiritual influence He had up to

1 Stier, Words of the Lord Jesus i. 37 (Clark's Tr.).

2

Strauss, Leben Jesu i. 450.

3 Exod. xxxiv. 28.

41 Kings xix. 8.

Neander, Life of Jesus Christ, p. 73 (Bohn).

that time experienced, came before Him in a more defined form. We are able to distinguish exactly these two stadia of the temptation: the secret whispers of the tempting spirit during the forty days, and its final concentration in the three assaults at the close. Matthew has condensed the whole temptation of Christ into those final assaults. Mark has simply noticed the temptation in its duration of forty days. Luke has specified the two constituent parts of the temptation. As soon as we have ascertained the significance of the whole transaction, no real contradictions can be imagined. But we must now endeavour to set in a clear light the distinction between the two forms of the temptation.

During the forty days Christ was tempted in this way, that He was met by the Messianic ideal of Israel in its corrupted chiliastic form, sustained by all the morbid fanatical excitement then existing in the world, and by the powers of darkness. But this temptation was probably not an internal process, as it is often represented in order to explain the history of the temptation.1 Christ could not in an idle manner brood over the possibilities of sin, or imagine them in darkness by spreading out the allurements of the false ideal of the world before His own spirit. On this supposition, one part of His consciousness would have been the tempter, and the other the conqueror. Such a selftempting of the consciousness can hardly be imagined, without involving sin. The totality of the soul's life will not allow us to separate the voluntary imagination of the tempting evil from an accompanying movement of evil desire. And apart from this psychological law, another law of life forbids our regarding

1 Transient illusions' (Fluchtige Vorspiegelungen) the temptations of Jesus, according to this view, are called by Fleck (die Vertheidigung des Christenthums, p. 225).

2 Particularly according to the representation of this transaction by Weisse (die evangelische Geschichte ii. 21).

3 ['I could as soon accept the worst statements of the most degraded form of Arian creed, as believe that this temptation arose from any internal strugglings or solicitations,-I could as soon admit the most repulsive tenet of a dreary Socinianism, as deem that it was enhanced by any self-engendered enticements, or hold that it was aught else than the assault of a desperate and demoniacal malice from without, that recognised in the nature of man a possibility of falling, and that thus far consistently, though impiously, dared even in the person of the Son of man to make proof of its hitherto resistless energies.'-Ellicott's Hist. Lect. p. 111.-ED.]

the temptation of Christ as a fact of His consciousness isolated from His people's life. It belongs to the order and soundness of the inner life to indulge in no idle brooding anticipations of the future. The soul can and should anticipate the outward experience, but only in proportion as it comes in contact with the spiritual prognostics of the experience, as the collision with experience begins to fall upon its ear; as therefore it is congruous with a human life which must be always prepared and led through the inward to the outward, and with its essential superiority to time. But if beyond this necessity it indulges in arbitrary anticipations, it gets out of its historical rhythm. This arbitrary exercise of the imagination would be in itself sinful, even should there be nothing sinful in the nature of its imaginings. But Christ could not disturb the order of His life. in a morbid manner. His battle with the evil one was, therefore, not the result of a fiction. It was a genuine historical collision with him, though a spiritual one. The whole soul of Christ stood firm in the absolute rejection of the temptation, which was not in the least degree the offspring of His own fancy. But not the less was His soul moved and agitated by temptation, in consequence of the sympathy which bound Him closely to His own people and to mankind. In the element of this sympathy He beheld all the images of temptation standing clearly before Him-He heard all the tones of its allurements. Christ's living impulse to manifest Himself to His people placed Him incessantly opposite to temptation, which was continually meeting Him in new forms. The repulsion with which He continually put it away from Him was His victory.

In consequence of this repulsion, Christ must always have remained in the wilderness, unless in some particular moments of His conflict the possibility had not been developed and displayed to Him of entering among the people, and thus fulfilling the mission of His life. The struggle of Christ with temptation was at the same time to secure and determine the complete carrying out of His calling in all its distinguishing traits. And since, on the one hand, in the life of His free love the necessity of manifesting Himself to the people moved Him, and, on the other hand, He felt the necessity of concealing and withdrawing Himself from the people, the plan of His Messianic ministry required to be clearly and distinctly unfolded under the painful

reciprocal action of this apparent contradiction. At the end of His conflict He had a fully developed solution of the difficult problem, how He could surrender Himself as the true Messiah to the people, who were carried away by a false Messianic image. The completion of this determination of His calling coincided with the completion of His victory over temptation, and therefore with the completion of the festal repose of His spirit.

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But it would be contrary to all general and individual experience if we were disposed to admit that the temptation of Christ was ended and completed in a merely spiritual and ideal form. Actual fact shows us that the moral conflicts of man cannot possibly remain spiritualist combats. The tempting opportunity always meets the susceptible disposition, and converts the ideal conflict into a historical one. The solemnity of the divine superintendence demands it, and the thoughtfulness of life and the truth of victory. How many a flaming inspiration of idealist valour has become to 'rude reality a prey!' The victory of Christ over the tempter would not have been perfectly certain if the latter had not appeared to Him in historic reality. But how did he appear to Christ ?? We need not explain at length that Satan could not become a man, and assume flesh and blood, like the Son of God. Such a supposition would expose any one to the charge of Manicheism; it would be condemned for its dualism. But if it were imagined that Satan showed himself to the Lord in a spectral appearance, it can hardly be granted that Christ would let Himself be disposed of by such a spectre of hell on the soil of this earth's reality, and be led through the world in all directions. Nothing is gained, if it is attempted to render the supposition easier, by supposing that Satan transformed himself into an angel of light; for never could he appear more detestable and repulsive in Christ's eyes than under this mask. It is perfectly unchristological to regard these temptations as a series of juggling tricks by the

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1 [This view seems to receive confirmation especially from our Lord's own experience in His last trial, when He had first to endure the ideal and spiritual conflict alone in the garden, and then the actual historical sufferings and death.-ED.]

2 Ebrard, in his Gospel History, admits a visible appearance of Satan, without any further explanation.

'See Ullmann, The Sinlessness of Jesus, p. 160 (Clark's Tr., 2d ed.).