This, then, is the drift and meaning of it all. The answer is taken verbally from the gospel.
“‘Thou shalt worship
The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.’”(P. R. iv. 176–7.)
That is to say, Thou shalt submit thyself to God’s commands and God’s methods and thou shalt submit thyself to no other.
Omitting the Athenian and philosophic episode, which is unnecessary and a little unworthy even of the Christian poet, we encounter not an amplification of the Gospel story but an interpolation which is entirely Milton’s own. Night gathers and a new assault is delivered in darkness. Jesus wakes in the storm which rages round Him. The diabolic hostility is open and avowed and He hears the howls and shrieks of the infernals. He cannot banish them though He is so far master of Himself that He is able to sit “unappall’d in calm and sinless peace.” He has to endure the hellish threats and tumult through the long black hours
“till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray,
Who with her radiant finger still’d the roar
Of thunder, chas’d the clouds, and laid the winds,
And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais’d
To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire.
But now the sun with more effectual beams
Had cheer’d the face of earth, and dri’d the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds,
Who all things now beheld more fresh and green,
After a night of storm so ruinous,
Clear’d up their choicest notes in bush and spray
To gratulate the sweet return of morn.”(P. R. iv. 426–38.)
There is nothing perhaps in Paradise Lost which possesses the peculiar quality of this passage, nothing which like these verses brings into the eyes the tears which cannot be repressed when a profound experience is set to music.
The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem. Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise and good man could do.
“Now show thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, ‘He will give command
Concerning thee to His angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”(P. R. iv. 554–9.)
The promise of Divine aid is made in mockery.
“To whom thus Jesus: ‘Also it is written,
Tempt not the Lord thy God.’ He said, and stood:
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.”(P. R. iv. 560–2.)