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A Series of Lessons in Mystic Christianity980
idea expressed by them. And then the wonderful event of the dove, and
the Voice, upon the occasion of His baptism, seemed almost to verify the
idea of the Essenes. Was He indeed the long-expected Deliverer of Israel?
Surely He must find this out—He must wring the answer from the inmost
recesses of His soul. And so, He sought refuge in the Wilderness, intuitively
feeling that there amidst the solitude and desolation, He would fight His
fight and receive His answer.
He felt that He had come to a most important phase of His life’s work,
and the question of “What Am I?” must be settled, once and for all,—then
and there. And so He left behind Him the admiring and worshipful crowds
of John’s following, and sought the solitude of the waste places of the
Wilderness, in which He felt He would come face to face with His own soul,
and demand and receive its answer.
* * *
And up in the inmost recesses of the Heart of the Wilderness, Jesus
wrestled in spirit with Himself for many days, without food or nourishment,
and without shelter. And the struggle was terrific—worthy of such a great
soul. First the body’s insistent needs were to be fought and mastered. It
is related that the climax of the physical struggle came one day when the
Instinctive Mind, which attends to the physical functions, made a desperate
and final demand upon Him. It cried aloud for bread with all the force of its
nature. It tempted Him with the fact that by His own occult powers He was
able to convert the very stones into bread, and it demanded that He work
the miracle for His own physical needs—a practice deemed most unworthy
by all true occultists and mystics. “Turn this stone into bread, and eat” cried
the voice of the Tempter. But Jesus resisted the temptation although He
knew that by the power of His concentrated thought He had but first to
mentally picture the stone as bread and then will that it be so materialized.
The miraculous power which afterward turned water into wine, and which
was again used to feed the multitude with the loaves and the fishes, was