It is strange that no allusion is ever made to so important a record: and this would be far more strange if the knowledge had lain in the minds of the Apostles all through the period of our Lord’s ministry, than if they had only obtained it when the close was at hand. Moreover, the absence of any account of the circumstances under which the relation was made inclines me to think that this must have taken place at a time of which our records are scanty; and there is no time in the sacred history of which the narrative is less full than the period at which I place the communication, viz., the early spring preceding the Passion of our Lord. There is also this consideration of a different kind. In all education there are two elements, that which is communicated by the teacher ready made, and which the pupil has only to register, and that which the learner elicits by turning over in his mind the matter which gives food for thought. In our Lord’s teaching of the disciples the proportion of the latter element to the former steadily increases from first to last. At first, sayings are given them to remember; latterly, they receive mysteries on which to meditate. In the Sermon on the Mount men are told plainly what it was desirable for them to know; afterwards, the teaching passes through parables and hard sayings up to the mysteries conveyed by the Last Supper. The lessons of the Temptation have the form of the later teaching of our Lord: they contain hard matters and only yield their fruit by being long laid to heart. Not only would the lessons of the Temptation have been more intelligible to the Apostles towards the end of the ministry than at the beginning; but, turning as they do on the use of superhuman powers, they would suit the time when the Apostles were about to exercise similar powers themselves. Now comes the great question of all: In what sense is the narrative to be taken? Many writers accept it as literal history and suppose the Tempter to have appeared in bodily form and to have conveyed our Lord, also in the body, both to the mountain top and the pinnacle of the Temple. Others have regarded it as a vision; and intermediate views have been adopted by many. On one point fortunately we may be pretty confident. The substance of the history came from our Lord. The most unfavourable critics allow this, from the extreme difficulty of referring it to any other source. It cannot have been introduced in order to make the Gospel fall in with Jewish notions of the Messiah, for there are no traditions that the Messiah should be tempted: and if the passage had been devised by men, the drift of it would have been plainer, and the temptations would have been such as men would feel might have come upon themselves. We have many accounts, in the legends of the saints, of the sort of trials which present themselves to the imagination of human writers; and they differ totally from these.