between his conceptions of God’s kingdom and the popular expectation.  Those differences, by the measure of the definiteness of the popular thought and the ardor of the popular hope, were the proof of the difficulty of his task.  The call meant that the Messiah could be such as he was; it meant that the kingdom could be and must be a dominion of God primarily in the hearts of men and consequently in their world; it meant that his work must be religious rather than political, and gracious rather than judicial.  These essentials of the work which he could do contradicted at nearly every point the expectations of his people.  How could he succeed in the face of such opposition?  His long meditation during forty days doubtless showed him the difficulty of his task in all its baldness, yet it did not shake his certainty that the call had come to him from God, nor his faith that what God had called him to do he could accomplish.

92.  The gospels show no hesitation in calling the experience of these days a temptation, nor had the Christian feeling of the first century any difficulty in thinking of its Lord as actually suffering temptation (Heb. ii. 18; iv. 15).  A temptation to be real cannot be hypothetical; evil must actually present itself as attractive to the tempted soul.  A suggestion of evil that takes no hold concretely of the heart is no temptation, nor is the resistance of it any victory.  The sinlessness of him who sought baptism with no confession on his lips nor sense of penitence in his heart offers no barrier to his experience of genuine temptation, unless we think him incapable of sin, and therefore not “like unto his brethren.”  Not only do the gospels repeatedly refer to his temptations (Luke iv. 13; Mark viii. 31-33; Luke xxii. 28; compare Heb. v. 7-9), but they also depict clearly the reality of these initial testings.  The account as given in Matthew and Luke represents the experience with which the forty days’ struggle culminated.  The absorption of Jesus’ mind had been so complete that he had neglected the needs of his body, and when he turned to think of earthly things he was pressed by hunger.  A popular notion at a later time, and probably also in Jesus’ day, was that the Messiah would be able to feed his people as Moses had given them manna in the wilderness (John vi. 30-32; see EdersLJM.  I. 176).  He had just been endowed with the divine Spirit for the work before him; it was therefore no fantastic idea when the suggestion came that he should use his power to supply his own needs in the desert.  Nor was the temptation without attractiveness; his own physical nature urged its need, and Jesus was no ascetic who found discomfort a way of holiness.  The evil in the suggestion was that it asked him to use his newly given powers for the supply of his own needs, as if doubting that God would care for him as for any other of his children.  There was more than distrust of God suggested; the temptation came with a hint of another doubt,—­“If