wise the creature he had been. Humanity is what it is, in all its characteristics, from the bottom to the top, because of laws, both physical and spiritual, which have operated from the first. He who expects that it will become different without the serious application of rational and natural and adequate means, and acts upon the expectation, is guilty of presumption. His methods lead to spiritual pride, in so far as he deludes himself into the belief that he is having success. Many reformers fail to observe this; and their reforms, while seeming to flourish for a time, surely come to naught, while they themselves are either puffed up with pride or presumption, or cast into a reaction of bitterness and despair.

The tempter found that Jesus would not put his conviction that he was the Son of God to the test of acting as though he were not a son, and disobeying presumptuously either the higher or the lower laws of his Father's universe, but that he was determined to establish his kingdom by actions wholly within the range of the human, and that it was to be a human kingdom. Then following still, as it has hitherto, the law of association of ideas, and hence with a psychological probability that goes far to prove the truthfulness of the story, the temptation proceeds to suggest that, since it is to be a purely human kingdom, the way to establish it is the way such kingdoms have been established hitherto. If he is not to found his kingdom upon

miracles high or low, then what need is there that he should recognize himself as the Son of God? What is God for, except miracles, privileges to set aside ordinary modes of procedure? The average unspiritual thought of the world then and now regards God as nothing if not a miracle worker. It will be as though it had no God unless He performs miracles. The average son of royalty acts as though he prized his position chiefly because it seems to entitle him to defy even the laws of decency if he happens to choose. If Jesus is to depend for the founding of his kingdom upon his inherent human powers, why not cut loose from God? If he did not expect God to perform miracles for him, what use had he for God? Why not set up for himself like other kings? He was to do the work himself, why not pay the homage to himself?

Such suggestions came from without. All history puts them forward. Man has been the architect of his own fortunes, therefore the supreme man must be a self-made man. Jesus himself had seen and asserted as much; for whatever miraculous power, that is, power outside his legitimate human power, he believed himself to have, he did not at this time believe he had a right to use, either in sustaining, protecting, or advancing himself. His self-respect as well as his unselfishness required him to submit to all the laws of the republic of humanity, of which he was to be the

first citizen. All the power he was to employ he was to employ as a man. And yet he had been acting on the assumption that all power was given unto him in heaven and in earth; for he had set before himself the mightiest achievement of all the history of the universe, and he had resisted two temptations to call in an outside power which he believed he had at his command.

The first two temptations, for we follow the order of Matthew as the truest to life, were temptations to do that which would either destroy or belittle his belief in his own sonship. The third is calculated to lead him so to exalt his sonship as to ignore God and put himself wholly in God's place. This was a temptation to the worst form of apostasy. But there was that in Jesus which was quick to detect what was the mystery of the evil that thus stood before him. He saw that what was proposed was nothing else than unfilial conduct; it was that the son should gather together the portion of goods that falleth to him, his own goods, of which the father cannot rightfully deprive him, and turn away from his father, as though no other relations henceforth subsisted between them. If any man had offered a true son such an insulting suggestion as that he turn his back upon his father, could we think the right answer would be much else than a blow in the face? And if the suggestion came from no individual man, but from the whole evil concourse of

that "world power that makes for unrighteousness," could the Son of God have been worthy of himself if any belittling philosophy had in any way unfitted him for delivering with unreserved energy the personal retort, "Get thee behind me, Satan?"

While, therefore, the Son of God overcame the lower and lesser temptations out of loyalty to his brother men, and to what he believed to be the laws of his father's material and spiritual universe, the last and supreme temptation he conquered by virtue of the quick instinct of filial devotion which resents insult to the person of that father. There came a moment when the noblest conceivable of human-divine motives was needed. Such a motive did not fail the Son of Man, because he had lived his life all these thirty years in obedience to it. To each one of us will surely come, once at least in our careers, such a crisis of temptation as that nothing but that noblest and humanest and divinest instinct, which instantaneously resents insult to a loved one, can avail to save us from apostasy. Are we living such lives as shall nurture in us the spirit of divine sonship against that day? For it is not the ideal, the theory, the doctrine, that can mobilize the forces of personality quickly enough to resist the onset of temptation. The spirit alone can do it. Except a man be born of the spirit of divine sonship he cannot be ready for the supreme crisis.

V.

PRAYER.

After this manner therefore pray ye, Our Father. — MATT. vi. 9.

PRAYER may perhaps be regarded as that which is most distinctively human. It is almost the only human function which is not claimed, in its rudiments at least, for some lower animal. But unless the cringing of the dog or the bleating of the sheep for the shepherd be a case in point, which can hardly be admitted, man alone prays. With men prayer is practically universal, those who do not pray being exceptional products either of degradation or of culture. "There have been cities," says an ancient historian, "without walls, cities without armies, without kings or governments, cities without markets or commerce, or books or arts. there have been no cities without places of prayer.' This accords with the modern assertion that only where the religious sentiment has done its part has man progressed from the animal to the human. The race has been so nurtured in prayer from time immemorial that if it be an irrational thing, founded upon error, the folly and the falsehood

But