The marking of uniformities in Christ’s conduct, and in His modes of conveying instruction, is serviceable in this way. We perceive the Laws (defined as in p. 2) by regarding Christ’s career as a whole; and in return, the Laws, when perceived, help us to grasp its unity and completeness in a more thorough way; and, besides this, we strengthen our critical faculty, and arm it with a new criterion which may become an effective weapon in arguing on questions of internal evidence. For if we find in any newly-discovered fragment, or even in the Gospels themselves, that which runs counter to what we think we have established as a Law, then we have to ask ourselves whether it is likely that the passage is spurious or imperfect or put out of its right place; or, on the other hand, whether our Law has been framed too narrowly, and ought to be restated or enlarged. Again, when we find a Law constantly observed, and are sure that the narrative cannot have been written up to the Law, because the narrators knew nothing of such a Law; then we come on a new variety of internal evidence. If, in matters which only a student would observe, our Lord is found to adhere to certain ways, this favours the view that the materials for the portrait came from life; for an artist drawing from description or following an idea of his own must have missed these delicate details now and then. This consistency uniformly observed forms a sort of undesigned coincidence ramifying through the mass, and holding it all together. The notion of Laws underlying our Lord’s action, and shewing their traces on the surface from time to time, will be best illustrated by an example. I shall take the rules which our Lord observes in the working of Signs and Wonders; and so I must here anticipate something of that, which I shall make the subject of a whole chapter further on. Our Lord is set apart from all other teachers by His use of Signs and Wonders. We shall enquire, how He regarded them? What use He designed to make of them? And, what more especially concerns us now, what Laws He observes when He employs them? These Laws we shall find—wrapped up as it were—in our Lord’s answers to the Tempter in the wilderness. The narrative of the Temptation, which seems, at first sight, to be a fragment unconnected with the course of the action of the Gospel History, becomes, when the Laws are noted, the key to the interpretation of much. Isolated phenomena fall into system. I will relate the Temptations in the order given by St Luke, and briefly state the Laws indicated in the Tempter’s suggestions together with our Lord’s replies. I. Christ will not turn stones into loaves to appease His hunger in the wilderness. This refusal contains two principles to which our Lord will be found to adhere. (1) He will not use His special powers to provide for His personal wants or for those of His immediate followers.