She made me feel--would that His ministers had made me feel it before,
since they say that they believe it--that He had passed victorious through
my vilest temptations, that He sympathized with my every struggle.
She told me how He, in the first dawn of manhood, full of the dim
consciousness of His own power, full of strange yearning presentiments
about His own sad and glorious destiny, went up into the wilderness, as
every youth, above all every genius, must, there to be tempted of the
devil. She told how alone with the wild beasts, and the brute powers of
nature, He saw into the open secret--the mystery of man's twofold life, His
kingship over earth, His sonship under God: and conquered in the might of
His knowledge. How He was tempted, like every genius, to use His creative
powers for selfish ends--to yield to the lust of display and singularity,
and break through those laws which He came to reveal and to fulfil--to do
one little act of evil, that He might secure thereby the harvest of good
which was the object of His life: and how He had conquered in the faith
that He was the Son of God.
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