When so clear an eye for reality is turned upon the great questions of man's life and of man's relations with God, it is apt here too to reach the centre. From the first, men lingered over the thought that Jesus had gone to the bottom of human experience and found in this fact his power to help them. He was made like to his brethren; he was touched with the feeling of our infirmities; he was "able to sympathize" (_dynamenon sympathesai_) for he was "tempted in all respects like us." In {127} the Gospel, as it is handed down to us, the temptation of Christ is summed up in three episodes set at the beginning of the story and told in a symbolic form, which may or may not have been given to them by Jesus himself. Then "the devil left him"--Luke adding significantly "till a time." The interpretation is not very clear. Strong men do not discuss their own feelings very much, but it is possible now and then to divine some experience from an involuntary tone, or the unconscious sensitiveness with which certain things are mentioned; or, more rarely, emotion may open the lips for a moment of self-revelation, in which a word lays bare a lifetime's struggle. It will add to the significance of his general attitude toward God and man's life, if we can catch any glimpse of the inner mind of Jesus. We have records of his being exhausted and seeking quiet. Biographers of that day concealed such things in their heroes, but the Gospels freely reveal what contemporary critics counted weaknesses in Jesus. He weeps, he hungers, he is worn out. He has to be alone--on the mountain by night, in a desert-place before dawn. Such exhaustion is never merely physical or merely spiritual; the two things are one. Men crowded upon Jesus, till he had not leisure to eat; he came into touch with a ceaseless stream of human personalities; and those who have been through any such experience will understand what it cost him. To communicate an idea or to share a feeling is exhausting work, and we read further of deeds of healing, which, Jesus himself said, took "virtue" (_dynamin_) out of him, and he had to withdraw. When the Syro-Phoenician woman called for his aid, it was a question with him whether he should spend on a foreigner the "virtue" that could with difficulty meet the claims of Israel, for he was not conscious of the "omnipotence" which has been lightly attributed to him. It was the woman's brilliant answer about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs that gained her request. The turn of speech showed a vein of humour, and he consented "for this saying."[14] If human experience goes for anything in such a case, contact with a spirit so delicate and sympathetic gave him something of the {128} strength he spent. The incident throws light upon the "fluxes and refluxes of feeling" within him, and the effect upon him of a spirit with something of his own tenderness and humour. For the moment, though, his sense of having