THE UNIVERSALITY OF TEMPTATION
I. The Common Lot
"So long as we live in this world we cannot be without tribulation and temptation. Whence it is written in Job,[[1]] 'The life of man upon earth is a temptation.'"[[2]]
Man did not have to wait for the full revelation of God in His Son before knowing this truth. Holy Job testifies to it out of his own experience, and the Son of Sirach gives the warning, "My son, if thou come to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation."[[3]] The constant and definite warning and promise of our Lord and His Apostles were to the same effect. In the only prayer He taught His disciples, a prayer He commands us to use daily, they are taught to say, "Lead us not into temptation";[[4]] and on the night in which He was betrayed, full of tender solicitude for their souls, He warns them, "Pray that ye enter not into temptation."[[5]]
In all His teaching He takes it easily for granted that temptation is an inevitable factor in the life of those who would follow Him. In the parable of the Sower He assumes, without so much as making the statement, that temptation must come to every heart in which the seed of the Word is sown.[[6]]
Everywhere His Apostles give us the same teaching. St. Paul testifies to the presence of temptation in his own life, and warns and comforts his converts concerning it, telling them of the sweetness and loving care of God in it all: "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able."[[7]] And further, God reveals to us the depth of our Lord's temptation as a source of comfort and encouragement: "In that He Himself hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted";[[8]] and again, He "was in all points tempted like as we are."[[9]]
So likewise is it through the writings of all the Apostles. St. James assumes the universal fact, and points out the way of temptation as the way of joy;[[10]] St. Peter shows how temptation leads on to "praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ";[[11]] and the Epistles of the Beloved Disciple, tender and full of all gentleness as they are, ring with the suggestion of the Satanic antagonism, the warfare and the victory. What a trumpet call there is to the elect lady and her children: "Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things which we have wrought."[[12]] It is like an echo of the revelation on Patmos, the message to the faithful Philadelphians, "Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown."[[13]]
II. Enduring Hardship
It is a part of the temptation itself that, as we contemplate the fact of its universality, the question should arise in the soul, weary with the battle, sore with long buffeting, "Is there no rest, no cessation from the strain and stress of the warfare?"