This miracle, as we said in the last chapter, is one of instruction. The payment according to the received view was the half-shekel that every Israelite had to pay for providing victims for the Temple service. It gave the idea of a tribute to God which stood in the way of the conception of perfect sonship. It implied that Israelites alone had part or lot in the worship of the living God. Our Lord would have St Peter regard God as the Father of mankind and not only as the Lord and ruler of Israel. The whole point of the lesson lies in the words “then are the children free.” These words would be stamped on St Peter’s mind by the finding the stater in the fish’s mouth; and they would recur to him and bring their proper lesson with them when the right moment came. The circumstance is not in itself necessarily miraculous, but it was rendered so in this case by our Lord’s foreseeing that the coin would be found in the first fish that came. The Temptation on the Mount. Next comes a scene in which the Spirit of the World is represented as pointing out all the glories of the empire of the inhabited earth, and offering it to our Lord on the strange condition that He should fall down and worship him. This represents, in plain and very forcible imagery, a spiritual temptation to which those who have laboured to regenerate mankind have fallen victims over and over again. Those who have most nearly attained universal conquest, Mahomet, Zengis, Timour, and many great political leaders as well, have begun with a genuine wish to alleviate the ills of mankind, of whom eventually they became a scourge. I believe that what our Lord sets before us here is the temptation to aim at visible and comparatively immediate success, and to bring about our ideal by using the arts of worldly policy; which were to be supported in the case before us by superhuman power. We can conceive a Tempter, such as the Satan of _Paradise Regained_, saying as he does, “Great acts require great means of enterprise,”