What we find in St Mark may have been generally known to our Lord’s disciples from the earliest period of the ministry. But the account of the Temptations themselves, which we find in St Matthew and St Luke, can only have come from our Lord Himself. Assuming this to be the case, the passage before us is singular in two respects. First, Because the Evangelists have here, and here only, altered the form of what our Lord delivered, and changed into a narration in the third person what must, in the first instance, have been expressed in the first. Secondly, Because this is the only instance in which our Lord breaks through His reticence as to His own personal history on earth. Here and here only does He give us a glimpse of what had befallen Him or of what had passed within His breast. St Matthew and St Luke differ as to the order of the second and third Temptations. I have adopted that given by St Luke. According to my view, our Lord in the one rejects the use of physical violence and in the other that of moral compulsion. It is more after our Lord’s way to proceed from what is concrete to what is abstract, than in the reverse order. I feel strengthened in this view by some of the characteristics of the Gospel of St Matthew, in the form in which it has come down to us. This Evangelist has always _the Kingdom_ before his eyes. He would therefore be inclined to account the rejection of “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” as the highest possible instance of the renunciation of self; and as he accounted it the most severe of the temptations he would naturally place it last. St Matthew moreover throughout his Gospel often puts together the discourses of our Lord according to their subject-matter, and not in the order in which they were spoken. He would therefore have no scruple about changing the order of the account of the Temptations which may have come before him as a detached document. On the other hand we do not know of any bias of St Luke which should lead him to prefer one order of events to another. Another slight variation may be noticed. St Matthew tells us that He was “led up of the Spirit _to be tempted_ of the devil.”(58) The words imply that He was led up with a view to undergoing temptation. But in St Mark and St Luke we have “being tempted” without any intimation of purpose. Grave difficulties attach to the view that our Lord went into the desert with the set purpose of seeking and confronting temptation. Moreover it is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares. If we know that endeavours are about to be made to persuade us to a particular course, we close our ears to all that pleads for it—being forewarned, we are forearmed; so that, as regards these words, and indeed throughout the passage, I place more confidence in the version of St Luke than in that of St Matthew, or, to speak more accurately, that of his translator from Hebrew.