WHAT a wonderful and comforting thing it is that we have in the Gospels such a clear account of some of the temptations which Jesus resisted, so that we may thereby gain a clear insight into his method of dealing with error! It was immediately after Jesus had taken his stand as a prophet, and had been publicly baptized by John, that the Spirit drove him into the wilderness —a symbol of mental loneliness and of harassing doubts and fears, suggestions of the carnal mind typified by the wild beasts which inhabited its fastnesses.
We read that for forty days Jesus fasted—abstained from admitting the claims of the material senses. We may assume that he was night and day in communion with Spirit, overcoming the appetites of the flesh by keeping his thoughts filled with Truth and Love. Jesus was not an ascetic, and doubtless did not go into the wilderness on purpose to see how long he could refrain from eating. He was impelled to seek solitude by his hunger for spirituality, his longing for a higher understanding of the power of Spirit. This was very different from the method of the hermits. These men, in their earnest search for holiness, also went into the wilderness, but they magnified the material and literal signification of Jesus' temptation. They tried to overcome the flesh—material sense—by material means.
Thinking about the body and how to subdue it keeps bodily conditions before the thought. The scientific way to overcome material appetite is to feed thought spiritually. Elijah proved this when he underwent a somewhat similar experience. He was sustained by angels, or spiritual messages from God, and he "went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights," till he was purified and spiritually strong enough to go up to Horeb, the mount or high place in consciousness, where God was further revealed to him.
