II. Angelic consolation follows retirement: the angels ministered to Christ in the wilderness. It follows victory over temptation: the angels ministered to Christ when the temptation was ended. III. Conflict with Satan does not lead to conquest: Christ took no spoils by His triumph. It is rather the victory of successful defence, of having _lost_ nothing in the struggle, not of having gained aught. Now I ask any candid person whether this is not a marvellous sermon, abounding in thought, overflowing with suggestions? Having read it, will he take up Scott, or Matthew Henry, or D’Oyly and Mant, and see what those luminaries have to say on the passage of Scripture thus wrought out by the Jesuit preacher? I have not the least doubt as to the opinion he will form on the contrast. We may truly say of the majority of Protestant commentators, that—_Their minds are blinded: for until this day remaineth the veil—upon their heart—in the reading of the Old_, or New, _Testament_. This is more applicable, of course, to foreign reformed theologians—if I may use the term theologian of those who are ignorant of the first principles of theology—than to our own divines. The English Church has always studied the Fathers, and has loved them; there is no great gulf fixed between us and the Mediævals, as there is between the Church and Protestant sectaries, and gleams of patristic light are reflected in the pages of our great divines. But there are commentators among us, such as Scott, who, scorning the master-expositors of early and Mediæval days, go to the study of God’s Word with the veil of their self-sufficiency on their hearts, and become hopelessly involved in heresy. Scott affords us a melancholy example of a mistaken vocation. A commentator on Holy Scripture should be a man of profound theological learning, and of great intellectual power. Scott, a most amiable and pious clergyman, was neither a well-read man, nor were his abilities at all above par. His voluminous Commentary is accordingly, though overflowing with pious sentiment, of small theological value. Protestant clergy commenting on Scripture, amidst the bustle of their ministerial avocations and their connubial distractions, without referring to the great works of early and Mediæval theologians, whose whole lives were spent in prayer and Scriptural studies, stand the chance of blundering as grossly as would a farm labourer if he undertook to excogitate, for himself, a system of astronomy, without reference to any treatises on the science already existing, or qualifying himself for the study, by a mastery of the rule of three, but regarded with unmitigated contempt all the discoveries made by those who have spent their lives in the exclusive study of the stars, and rejected as useless all the appliances of art invented to facilitate this investigation. FOOTNOTES