How unaccountable to Mary must have appeared that silence! It was as if God had forgotten his promises. The son of her cousin Elisabeth, too, grew up and lived the life of an anchorite in the desert. It appears from his testimony afterwards that he kept up no personal acquaintance with Jesus, and "knew him not," so that a sign from heaven was necessary to enable him to recognize the Messiah. From the specimens of the village gossip at the time of Christ's first public teaching in Nazareth, it appears that neither in the mother of Christ nor in Christ himself had his townsfolk seen anything to excite expectation. In his last prayer Jesus says to his Father, "O righteous Father, the world hath not _known_ thee." In like manner Nazareth _knew_ not Mary and Jesus. "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world _knew_ him not." At last comes the call of John the Baptist; the wave of popular feeling rises, and Jesus leaves his mother to go to his baptism, his great initiation. The descending Spirit, the voice from heaven, ordain him to his work, but immediately the prophetic impulse drives him from the habitation of man, and for more than a month he wanders in the wilderness, on the borders of that spirit-land where he encountered the temptations that were to fit him for his work. We shall see that the whole drift of these temptations was, that he should use his miraculous powers and gifts for personal ends: he should create bread to satisfy the pangs of his own hunger, instead of waiting on the providence of God; he should cast himself from the pinnacles of the Temple, that he might be upborne by angels and so descend among the assembled multitude with the pomp and splendor befitting his station; instead of the toilsome way of a religious teacher, laboring for success through the slowly developing spiritual life of individuals, he should seek the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and spread his religion by their power. But, in all the past traditions of the prophetic office, the _supernatural power_ was always regarded as a sacred deposit never to be used by its possessor for any private feeling or personal end. Elijah fasted forty days in his wanderings without using this gift to supply his own wants; and Jesus, the greatest of the prophets, was the most utterly and thoroughly possessed with the unselfish spirit of the holy office, and repelled from him with indignation every suggestion of the tempter.