as Gotama found His wisdom, in desire to be delivered from it, but in the depth of His longing to save it, He gave Himself to it and for it, as for a joy that was set before Him. Again, the enlightenment of Gotama was the result of a painful struggle, first between inclination and duty, and then with great perplexities of duty, but in Christ it was painless and natural, like the growing of the dawn into the day. His pure and at first joyous life unfolded itself like a beautiful morning under the animating impulse of love to God and to all His creatures. As He grew in consciousness of the heaven within, He became more conscious of the disorder without, and more sensible of His isolation in regard to it. As year by year the sense not of the world’s misery but of its guilt increased within Him, there would also increase the longing that it should be taken away. Very early the conviction took possession of Him, that He was not here to win His own way to deliverance, but to be about His Father’s business. Gradually the Father’s business was revealed to Him, and when the preaching of the Baptist had made it clear, without any wrestle like Gotama’s, Christ, ever close to His Father, and ever clear in His duty, set Himself at once to fulfil it. It is often alleged that the temptation in the wilderness, which marked the close of our Lord’s long period of silent preparation, is an exact parallel to the fasting and temptation which preceded Gotama’s enlightenment at Bohimanda. There is doubtless an external similarity sufficient to arrest our attention, but the internal contrasts disclose experiences of quite different characters. In the light of their respective histories, these occurrences, though often referred to as miraculous, were in reality most natural. They represent experiences of which there could be no witnesses, and which, indescribable in plain words, could only be suggested by a kind of parable. The temptations are recorded not as they were presented to the persons tried, but in the character which they assumed when their drift was discovered and their aim was detected. Both were assailed by suggestions, raising in them a tumult of emotion, which, if unresisted or yielded to, would in Gotama’s case have been equivalent to abandonment of his quest for deliverance for the sake of sensual indulgence offered by Mâra and his daughters, and in the case of Christ, to refusal to live by obedience, to tempting the Holy One of Israel, and to worshipping the splendid majesty of wrong. The temptations were real, assailing the will, seeking to paralyse or to change it; and their force in each case would be in proportion to the depth and purity of the natures assailed. Gotama, though unmistakably a man of high spiritual aspiration, was attacked by sensual visions,[137] which could not possibly have been a temptation to a nature like Christ’s. He had “to repel as evil what to other men would