The words “Get thee hence,” at the close of St Matthew’s relation of the temptation on the mount, have been supposed to indicate the final banishment of the Tempter, and therefore to shew that this temptation came last. The force of the argument rests on our supposing, as no doubt the author of St Matthew’s Gospel did, that the events here related formed three distinct visible scenes, occurring in close succession, towards the end of the forty days. Whereas I hold that we have here a representation of our Lord’s inward conflicts, clothed by Him in a garb of outward imagery, that they might be the better understood. If this view be taken, the trials may have gone on simultaneously throughout the forty days, and may have been so far like our own inward troubles that one harassing perplexity may well have been most pressing at one moment and another at the next. But if these struggles are represented by visible occurrences, these occurrences must necessarily be related one after the other. The words “Get thee hence” might refer not necessarily to a final banishment, but only to the end of one assault. St Luke’s version is reconcileable with the view that he understood our Lord to be speaking figuratively and personifying the voices that tempted him. It may be asked, “At what period of His ministry did our Lord give the disciples the account of what passed in the desert?” We can only guess, but the guess is worth making. We do not know whether the account which we possess was contained in what critics call “the original document,” on which the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark are supposed to be based. Its omission by St Mark rather favours the supposition that it was not. It may have been, in the first instance, put down in writing by one who heard the recital from our Lord’s lips, and may have come into the hands of the evangelists as a separate “parchment.”(59) This document might contain no note of the time and place at which our Lord delivered the account—and, in the absence of information on this point, the compiler of the gospel might have made the alteration from the first person to the third, if it had not been made before, and have inserted the account in the place belonging to it in the order of events. I conjecture that the communication was made near the end of the ministry, possibly after the feast of the dedication,(60) at the time when “He went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John was at the first baptizing; and there he abode.”(61) The place would recall what had happened after He had been “driven” from that spot by the Spirit into the wilderness about two years before. Other considerations also lead me to this conjecture.