Luke 4:5

And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain Probably "the devil" and "into a high mountain" are added from St Matthew. How the devil took Him up we are not told. Scripture, to turn away our thoughts from the secondary to the essential, knows nothing of those journeys through the air which we find in Apocrypha and in the -Gospel of the Hebrews."

It is remarkable that St Luke (whom Milton follows in the Par. Regained) here adopts a different orderof the temptations from St Matthew, perhaps because he thought that the temptation to spiritual pride (which he places third) was keener and subtler than that to temporal ambition; perhaps, too, because he believed that the ministering angels only appeared to save Christ from the pinnacle of the Temple. That the actualorder is that of St Matthew is probable, because (1) he alone uses notes of sequence, "then," "again;" (2) Christ closes the temptation by "Get thee behind me, Satan" (see on Luke 4:8); (3) as an actual Apostle he is more likely to have heard the narrative from the lips of Christ Himself. But in the chronology of spiritual crises there is little room for the accurate sequence of -before" and -after." They crowd eternity into an hour, and stretch an hour into eternity.

of the world See above on Luke 2:1.

in a moment Rather, in a second; comp. 1 Corinthians 15:52, "in the twinkling of an eye" in the sudden flash of an instantaneous vision. The splendour of the temptation, and the fact that it appealed to

"the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,

The last infirmity of noble minds,"

might seem to Satan to make up for its impudent, undisguised character. He was offering to One who had lived as the Village Carpenter the throne of the world.