That Satan should have appeared in a bodily form is, to my mind, opposed to the spirituality of all our Lord’s teaching. Such an appearance presents endless difficulties, not only physical but moral. If our Lord knew the tempter to be Satan, He was as I have said forearmed; if He did not know him, this introduces other difficulties. He must at any rate have been surprised at meeting a specious sophist in the wilderness. Milton deals with the subject with great skill, from his point of view, in _Paradise Regained_. Certain points he leaves unexplained, and those I believe to be inexplicable. They are these. I cannot understand that our Lord should suffer Satan to transport Him to the mountain top, or to the pinnacle of the Temple, or that the Evil One should propose to Jesus to fall down and worship him. I can however readily comprehend that our Lord should represent under this imagery and under these personifications what had passed within Himself. He could not indeed bring the lesson home to His hearers in any other way. To have represented mental emotions, to have spoken of the thoughts that had passed through His mind, would have been wholly unsuited to His hearers. We know how difficult it is to keep up an interest in a record of inward struggles and experiences. Men want something to present to their mind’s eye, and they soon weary of following an account of what has been going on within a man’s heart, void of outward incident. A recital of what had passed in our Lord’s mind would have taken no hold of men’s fancy and would soon have faded from their thoughts. But the figure of Satan would catch their eye, the appearance of contest would animate the hearers’ interest; while the survey of the realms of the earth, and the dizzy station on the pinnacle of the Temple, would take possession of men’s memories and minds. The Apologue was to Orientals a favourite vehicle for conveying moral lessons; and we have a familiar instance in English Literature of the attraction of allegory. Would Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_ have possessed itself, as it has done, of the hearts of whole sections of the British race, if, shorn of its human characters and its scenery, it had only analysed and depicted the inward conflicts, the mental vicissitudes and religious difficulties of a sorely-tried Christian youth? The use of the name Satan must be considered. This name, which means the enemy, occurs in the Old Testament, in the book of Job and elsewhere but not in the Pentateuch. The Jews we know had a dæmonology of their own. The gods of the heathen they regarded as devils, of whom the Sidonian deity Beelzebub was Prince. Our Lord never countenances these views. I believe that He uses the word Satan in a _generic_ sense to personify evil spiritual influences exercised upon earth.