When the Apostles returned safe after being sent through the cities, our Lord regards this as an augury of their success in the great conflict and says that He “beheld Satan fallen as lightning from Heaven.”(62) We have clearly impersonation here. He says also “If Satan hath risen up against himself and is divided,”(63) a supposition which excludes the idea of an individual being, and agrees with the collective meaning I attribute to the term. When St Peter rebukes our Lord for declaring before His followers that He would be “rejected and killed and after three days rise again,” our Lord says “Get thee behind me, Satan.” St Peter, by saying of the suffering of which our Lord spake “this shall never be unto thee,”(64) unwittingly had acted as the ally of those who would tempt our Lord from yielding implicitly to His Father’s will, and our Lord therefore calls him Satan. On the whole then I lean to the view that the communication, or discourse of our Lord, which has been preserved in the form of the narrative of the Temptation, was delivered by Him in the form of an _apologue_ or species of parable, in which our Lord, after Eastern fashion, introduced Satan as an embodiment of the powers of evil. It must not be supposed that by giving up here the personality of the tempter we are making an abatement of what is superhuman in the Gospel, in order that, in virtue of having so done, we may hope to win this or that section of doubters over to our side—the whole question of evil remains a mystery, and in mystery there can be no degrees. It is of no use endeavouring to make infinity a trifle less infinite. Whether the word Satan be here used collectively or personally is altogether a different question from the existence of intermediate intelligences, and is quite an open one even for the most orthodox. Temptation to turn stones into loaves. I now come to the Temptations themselves. As these trials were mental, we can only realise them by imagining what, consistently with our history, _may_ have passed in our Lord’s mind. What _actually did_ so pass is of course beyond our knowledge altogether. We are however justified in supposing that, as our Lord was “tempted as man,” the thoughts and feelings which actuated Him would be such as men might follow and more or less understand.