It was usual for the great prophets of His people to discover their mission in some such moment of clarified inward sight. Isaiah saw the Lord with His train filling the temple, felt his lips cleansed, and heard the call “who will go?” Ezekiel saw the indescribable living creature with the hands of a man under the wings of the Spirit and heard himself called to his feet for his commission. So here, there was a sudden invading consciousness from beyond. The world with its solid hills appears only the fragment, which it is, and the World of wider Reality floods in and reveals itself. The sky seems rent apart, the Spirit, as though once more brooding over a world in the making, covers Him from above, and gives inward birth to a conviction of uniqueness of Life and uniqueness of mission. He feels Himself in union with His Father.[1] This experience of the invading Life, awakening a consciousness of unique personal mission, brought with it, as an unavoidable sequence, the stress and strain of a very real temptation. The inner world of self-consciousness has strange watershed “divides” that shape the currents of the life as the mountain ridges of the outer world do the rivers. No new nativity, no fresh awakening, can come to a soul without forcing the momentous issue of its further meaning, or without raising the urgent question, how shall the new insight, the fresh light, the increased power be wrought into life? The deepest issues turn, not upon the choice of “things,” but upon the choice of the kind of self that is to be, and the most decisive dramas are those that are enacted in the inner world before the footlights of our private theater. The temptation is described by the Evangelists in such conventional language and in such popular and pictorial imagery that its immense inner reality is often missed by the reader. This oriental, pictorial way of presenting the drama of the soul catches the western mind in the toils of literalism. The picture is taken for the reality. What we have here in the temptation, when we go into the heart of the matter, is the momentous choice of the kind of Person that is to emerge. It is the immemorial battle between the higher and the lower self within. It was the line of least resistance to accept popular expectation, to go forth to realize the dream of the age. A person conscious of divine anointing, fired with passionate loyalty to the nation’s hopes, gifted with extraordinary power of moving men to new issues would feel at once that he had only to put himself forth as the expected Messiah in order to carry the enthusiastic people with him. Let him but come with the spectacular powers of the Messiah that was eagerly looked for, the power to turn stones to bread, to leap from the pinnacle of the temple without injury, to break the Roman yoke and make Jerusalem once again the city of God’s chosen people—and success was sure to follow. God’s ancient covenant was an