only relieved by the prese nce of such 'disciples' as, learning the same hope, would gather

around him. What he had seen and what he had heard threw him back upon what he had

expected and believed. It not only fulfilled, it transfigured it. Not that, probably, he

always maintained t he same height which he then attained. It was not in the nature of

things that it should be so. We often attain, at the outset of our climbing, a glimpse,

afterwards hid from us in our laborious upward toil till the supreme height is reached.

Mentally and spiritually we may attain almost at a bound results, too often lost to us till

again secured by long reflection, or in the course of painful development. This in some

measure explains the fulness of John's testimony to the Christ as 'the Lamb of God,

Which taketh away the sin of the world,' when at the beginning we find ourselves almost

at the goal of New Testament teaching. It also explains that last strife of doubt and fear,

when the weary wrestler laid himself down to find refreshment and strength in the

shadow of those prophecies, which had first called him to the contest. But during those

forty days, and in the first meetings with Jesus which followed, all lay bathed in the

morning- light of that heavenly vision, and that Divine truth wakened in him the echoes of

all those prophecies, which these thirty years had been the music of his soul.

And now, on the last of those forty days, simultaneously with the final great Temptation

of Jesus9 which must have summed up all that had preceded it in the previous days, came

the hour of John's temptation by the deputation from Jerusalem.  10 Very gently it came to

him, like the tempered wind that fans the fire into flame, not like that keen, desolating

storm-blast which swept over the Master. To John, as now to us, it was only the

fellowship of His sufferings, which he bore in the shelter of that great Rock over which

its intenseness had spent itself. Yet a very real temptation it was, this provoking to the

assumption of successively lower grades of self-assertion, where only entire self-

abnegation was the rightful feeling. Each suggestion of lower office (like the temptations

of Christ) marked an increased measure of temptation, as the human in his mission was

more and more closely neared. And greatest temptation it was when, after the first

victory, came the not unnatural challenge of his authority for what he said and did. This

was, of all others, the question which must at all times, from the beginning of his mission

to the hour of his death, have pressed most closely upon him, since it touched not only his

conscience, but the very ground of his mission, nay, of his life. That it was such

temptation is evidenced by the fact that, in the hour of his greatest loneliness and

depression it formed his final contest, in which he temporarily paused, like Jacob in his

Israel-struggle, though, like him, he failed not in it. For what was the meaning of that

question which the disciples of John brought to Jesus: 'Art Thou He that should come, or

do we look for another?' other than doubt of his own warrant and authority for what he

had said and done? But in that first time of his trial at Bethabara he overcame, the first

temptation by the humility of his intense sincerity, the second by the absolute simplicity

of his own experimental conviction; the first by what he had seen, the second by what he