Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. TEMPTED. T T is a hard saying. Who can hear it ? We say, " Lead us not into temptation." Yet we are told here, according to our argument, that man is led up by the Spirit, which is the Spirit of God, into the wilderness of life and time, for the express purpose of being tempted of the Devil! The Prayer is the human instinct uttering itself to God, a right childlike, trembling, timid prayer which the tender Father hears and answers in His own wise, pitiful, fatherly way. " Do not let it be too hard for me. Remember I am but a child. The road is rough, the sand is bare, the sun beats hard, and my feet bleed on the sharp flints. Do not lead me into temptation and leave me. Stand by me. Help me. Lead me through. Expose me not too much, seeing what I am." The Prayer is that, perhaps, or that is part of what the Prayer means. I do not know. Itmeans far more than I can understand, as all the Lord's words do. I know, however, that while I pray the prayer with all my heart, and know the prayer is answered and is divine, it is also the fact that I am tempted, and that temptation is the law of life. Now, the revelation or the discovery of a Law does not make the Law. The Law is there all the same, whether one know it or not. Whatever difficulty may be in the Law, let us not foolishly blame him who shows it us as if he created it of his own caprice. The plain fact is, when we look carefully, that the world is so ordered that it is a trial place, a testing place, a tempting place for this unique being Man, who finds himself led up into it by some will stronger than his own. All trial, test, and tempting involve the possibility of failure. They lead to failure again and again. That is the law of the case too. We have to accept that. It is terrible and it is myst...