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J. Prescott Johnson

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THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

DELIVERED AT THE GROSVENOR-STREET CHAPEL,

MANCHESTER.

July 25th, 1871,

IN CONNECTION WITH THE ASSEMBLING OF THE

WESLEYAN-METHODIST CONFERENCE.

BEING

THE SECOND LECTURE ON THE FOUNDATION OF

JOHN FERNLEY, ESQ.

WITH THE HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST'S PERSON, AND NOTES.

BY THE REV. W. B. POPE,

TUTOR IN THEOLOGY, DIDSBURY COLLEGE.

LONDON :

WESLEY AN CONFERENCE OFFICE,

2, CASTLE-STREET, C1TY-ROAD:

SOLD AT 66, PATERNOSTER-ROW.

1871.

PREFACE.

THE Author's object in these pages has been to concentrate attention on the unity and the indivisibility of the Saviour's Incarnate Person. To this sole purpose he has been rigorously faithful. The reader must also bear it always in mind: otherwise he will mark the absence of many things which so great a title might lead him to expect, but which do not come within the range of the proposed design.

Some apology is due for a certain incongruous combination of the Lecture and the Essay. Occasionally the sentences may seem too free; occasionally they are without doubt too much condensed.

This has been to a great extent rendered necessary by the subject, and by the very peculiar circumstances of publication.

One word more of explanation. A considerable number of subsidiary essays were prepared in the form of Notes, accompanied by a few extracts. Gradually and almost insensibly some of these little Essays coalesced into one, forming a sketch of the History of the Doctrine. This left the extracts to comparative isolation. The writer can only hope that the Dissertation which has grown out of the Notes will atone for their meagerness and want of unity.

But these are comparatively unimportant matters. May the One Lord whose Name gives everything its value, condescend to prove by His benediction that He accepts this humble tribute offered in great unworthiness to His glory!

Didsbury College,

September 16th, 1871.

ANALYSIS.

The Holy Ghost the Revealer of Christ.

The Saviour the Revealer of Himself.

In the Unity of His Divine and human Natures.

I. The Constitution of the Incarnate Person.

The Vocabulary of the Doctrine in Scripture and in Theology I. The PERSONALITY only Divine.

1. That of the Eternal Son.

(1.) This viewed in relation to Himself and His other names, especially the “Word" and the

"Image."

(2.) In its aspect towards the Incarnation.

α Why the Son, and only the Son, incarnate.

β His special affinity with our race.

2. This Personality unchangeable.

(1.) No second Person added to it.

α The Testimony of Scripture.

β The necessity of redemption.

(2.) The Human nature Impersonal.

α How this is to be understood.

β Incarnation-phrases, specially St. John's.

II. The Divine-human PERSON.

1. Two Natures to be united, each perfect.

(1.) Christ “truly" God in opposition to Gnostics and Arians.

(2.) Christ "perfectly" Man.

α "Only" man: a theory excluded.

β "Real "man against Docetism.

γ Without defect or addition, as against Apollinaris.

2. No Change through the Incarnation.

(1.) None in the Divine Nature

α Change only in manifestation.

β Modern Theories of Depotentiation.

(2.) None in the Human Nature.

(3.) None as the result of the Union.

Eutychianism.

3. Hence Christ is God and man.

(1.) Christological Watchwords.

(2.) Scriptural Guarantees for them.

(3.) Athanasian Summing-up.

The Hypostatic Union.

III. The Mystery and Glory of Christian Faith.

1. The Mystery in two senses.

(1.) As once hidden now revealed.

α The Mystery of Ages.

β The Mystery of Eternity.

(2.) As still unsearchable.

α Testimony of Scripture.

β This an essential element in the study of the doctrine.

γ Consequences of undue speculation.

2. The Glory of Theology.

(1.) The Perfection of its revelations.

(2.) The Centre of its doctrine.

II. Relation of the Indivisible Person to Christian Theology.

General View.

I. Revelation.

1. Christ the Revealer absolutely, and to man.

Not through man to man but in our nature 39

2. Application of this.

(1.) To Philosophy.

α That which requires all revelation to be within.

β That which limits knowledge of God.

(2.) To the Written Word.

α Christ a living Person infallibly speaking.

β To those who understand HIS speech.

II. Mediation.

Its three senses in relation to Christ.

1. As union of God and man in Him.

(1.) Pledge of Reconciliation of God and the Race.

(2.) Presupposes the coming Atonement.

α Speculative error of necessary incarnation independently of sin.

β Practical error of Latitudinarians on the one hand, and Sacramentarians on the other.

2. Intervention of a Reconciler between:

(1.) The Two Natures necessary.

α Divinity for the worth.

β Manhood for the appropriateness.

(2.) One Person necessary.

α A Living Sacrifice.

β Hence objections obviated.

(3.} AS to the full doctrine of Atonement:

α One Person vicarious for the Race.

β One Person representative of His Church.

γ One Person centre of union to Individuals.

(4.) Hence Redemption necessary and not an

experiment.

3. The Mediatorial Ministry.

(1.) Generally.

α The Humiliation of the God-man only.

β Under guidance of the Holy Ghost in all.

(2.) The Twofold Estate.

α Unity of Person in the great Obedience.

β Unity of Person in the Exaltation.

(3.) The Final End of it.

α The Judgment.

β The authority laid down.

γ Son in His Indivisible Person subject for ever.

III. Real Presence.

1. In His One Person Present and Absent.

2. His Person represented by the Holy Ghost.

3. Theories of Sacramental Presence.

α Transubstantiation (the Whole Person).

β Consubstantiation (the Manhood).

γ Anglican Real Presence.

δ The true Real Presence.

IV. Personal Religion.

General View.

1. One Person claims personal Submission.

2. Object of Christian Faith and Trust.

3. Union with Christ's Person.

The true Mysticism.

4. Divine-human Lawgiver:

As Man; as God; as God-man.

5. Divine-human Pattern:

Necessarily Divine and necessarily human.

The Two Natures not to be divided.

Consequences of regarding either nature alone.

6. Object of Worship and Devotion.

Prayer to Jesus.

7. Disposer of man's destiny as God-man.

V. The Divine-human Head of the Church.

1. His Person test of Orthodoxy in the visible Church.

Application to Christian Communities, and to Methodism.

2. Head of the Mystical Body.

3. Eternal Centre of the visible and invisible Churches made

one.

From the Doctrine to the Person.

From the Person to the Doctrine.

THE HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST'S PERSON.

I. The Ante-Nicene Age.

II. The Christological Controversies.

III. The Medireval Age.

IV. The Reformation Controversies.

V. Modern Arianism and Socinianism.

VI. Transcendental Philosophy.

VII. Present Aspects of the Doctrine.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

NOTES.

I. Nature and Person.

II. The Son Incarnate.

III. Reasons for the Incarnation of the Son.

IV. The Son of God and the Son of Man.

V. Impersonality of the Human Nature.

VI. St. John's Incarnation-Phrases.

VII. Apollinarianism in Modern Theology.

VIII. The Exinanition.

IX. Depotentiation.

X. The Unchanged Manhood.

XI. Biblical Theology.

XII. Revelation.

XIII. Latitudinarian Theories.

XIV. Modern Theopaschitism.

XV. and XIX. The Sinlessness of Jesus.

XVI. The Exinanition Incomprehensible.

XVII. The Sacramental Presence.

XVIII. The Real Presence by the Spirit.

XX. The Controversy on the Eternal Sonship.

THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

THE opening discourse of last year, on the Office of the Holy Ghost, was a fit introduction to every theological doctrine that shall be discussed in this place; but I may refer to it as specifically the prelude of my present theme. While every part of that exposition was complete, none was so luminous and ample as that which was occupied with the Spirit's testimony to Jesus.

Evidently the lecturer's loyalty found it hard to respect the limits of his subject; and to keep his Master in the subordinate place which its treatment required. My duty is to exhibit, in its full supremacy and without restraint, the Christian doctrine of the Person of our Lord. Leaving behind, therefore, though not forgetting, the question which the inaugural lecture left lingering in our ears, "Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?" I have to expound, illustrate, and enforce that earlier and all-essential test of the Gospels, "Whom say ye that I am?"

The central and the chief of the Redeemer's final announcements of the Comforter is, “He shall glorify Me." The Spirit's other offices, of showing the things of Christ to the disciples, bringing His words to their remembrance, guiding them into further truth, all were based upon this—the revelation of Christ Himself. The Spirit was to be the guardian of the sacred mystery of the Lord's indivisible Person in the union of His two natures; of that mystery which governs all His own utterances, as from the unity of a double consciousness He bears testimony to His one indivisible Self; when He speaks of Himself as departing and yet abiding for ever, humanly remembering His Divine coming forth from the Father and humanly anticipating His going back to the Father, whilst uniting that past and future in one such present as can belong only to God.

In humbly essaying to speak of that one undivided and indivisible Person whose "I" unites two natures, fills heaven and earth, and is the glory of theology, the Holy Ghost will be my sole Teacher, the whole Bible will be my text. All the Bible, I say: for no one passage, no one apostle or prophet, no single book, neither of the Testaments alone, can suffice. Of this the Lord Himself has set the example. When He opened the individual branches of His Messianic commission, He quoted the lawgiver, the prophet, and the psalmist; as in Nazareth, and the temple, and the mountain in Galilee. But when He spoke of His wonderful Self, of that ME which overarches both natures, all offices, and is a manifestation at once temporal and eternal, He appealed to all the Bible that then was. "Search the Scriptures: they are they which testify of Me." "Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them" out of "all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." This was the ME which the Spirit should glorify: not the Divine nature, for the restoration of the Divine glory was asked of the Father; not the human nature, for the glorification of that was also the Father's gift in the ascension. But it was what we may term the Divine-human Person of the Christ. The indivisible unity of that Person, to which at the outset I give prominence, will be the governing thought of the present Essay: first, as established in the constitution of the Person of the God-man; and, secondly, as stamping its impress upon the fundamental doctrines of Christian theology.

I.

The constitution of the Redeeming Mediator may be viewed, first, with reference to the eternal ground of His Divine personality; that being determined, we may regard the Person which results from the hypostatic union of two natures. It will then be our task to dilate upon the unity of the Sacred Person as the glory and mystery of the Christian faith: a glory which is beheld and acknowledged only by those who humbly submit to receive the mystery.

I. The Personality which, as distinct from the Person, of the Christ, constitutes the ground of His eternal unity, is Divine: it is that of the only-begotten Son of the Father, whose conscious personality in the Triune Essence is of necessity unchangeable. Before discussing these two topics, however, a few words must be devoted to the adjustment of our phraseology.

Generally speaking, the vocabulary of Divine mysteries, whether as to the internal relations or the external manifestation of the Godhead, is governed by laws of its own.

There is a sense in which, as Luther was never weary of saying, Christian theology speaks with new tongues: it must do so, for it makes familiar to man new and transcendent subjects. The language of the Holy Ghost, who alone searcheth the deep things of God and His Christ, is perfectly simple and unambiguous; and, if we adhered solely to His words, our task would be relieved of much difficulty. But however diligently we attempt this, however fervently we may desire a return in the future to the simplicity of Scripture, it is at present a thing impossible. Theology, as including Christology, is a science, humanly constructed out of Divine elements. It is a science which yields to none in the subtilty of its analysis, the grandeur of its synthesis, and the perfection of its inductive processes. It must speak to the men of this world in their own language. But, while bound by this necessity, it silently stipulates for a reverent construction of its terms, and for a certain tolerance which its high subject-matter demands. Bringing the incomprehensible mysteries of faith down to the region of logical definition, it requires that allowance be made for the essential inadequacy of the most carefully pondered formulas. Its analogies, and illustrations, and suggestions, rising from the earthly to the heavenly things, must receive a liberal and candid interpretation. With those who reject the Scripture, and count theology a vast and bewildering aberration of the human intellect, it of course has no further contention: of them it has no hope. To those who receive the Bible as God's oracle among men, theological science vindicates its terminology by showing that it is as close a reproduction of inspired thought as can be made in uninspired language. Our boldness could indeed scarcely be charged with irreverence were we to say, remembering the Lord's promise, that much of the established and sanctified phraseology of our science is only the penumbra of the sacred orb of Holy Writ, and little less than the words of a secondary inspiration.

This principle may be applied to a wide field of topics in systematic theology. From the Trinity, the most August creation of human speech, with its assemblage of terms defining the hypostatical relations of the Persons of the Triune nature, down through the whole compass of mediatorial theology to the ordinary terms of Christian intercourse, there is an abundant vocabulary which finds no precise representatives in the language of Scripture, although it is perfectly faithful to that language as its developed synonymous expression. But we must limit ourselves to the vocabulary of our present subject. Christology has its own distinct range of theological coinage. Its most glorious achievement here is the term Θεάvθρωπoς, Deus-homo, God-man; and with this it boldly utters the secret of the whole Bible. It long faltered and hesitated in the choice of a word that should express the holy bond between the God and the man: after many experiments it rested on the word Incarnation, which is the faintest possible deviation from the very word of the Holy Ghost through St. John: "He was made flesh." It then defined the two natures in Christ: Scripture still consenting, for it speaks constantly of what the Redeemer is "according to the flesh," and of what He is declared to be as the Son of God, Himself "God blessed for ever." The distinction of natures is only not declared in this very language. So also is it with the one Person. The New Testament represents our Lord as a conscious, intelligent Agent, who preserves from eternity into time and onward to eternity His own unbroken identity. And this we not inaptly or unreasonably term His undivided personality. It is true that there is a wide difference between personality in us, individuals of a species, and personality in Him of whose Person it may be said that "there is none like unto Him." In Christ, for instance, a new nature adds a new consciousness, without impairing the essential unity of the Self: of this we find in our own being scarcely any analogy. In Christ two distinct wills, the human and the Divine, blend in one Divine-human and supreme purpose: here also analogy affords us only a precarious help. In Christ a new becoming, a dawning sense of existence, grows up within an eternal unchangeable being: in this, analogy all but entirely fails us. Difficulties might be multiplied; and it cannot be said that our theological language does more than defend the doctrine from error. When it speaks of one indivisible personality in the Redeemer, it does not profess to use a word that is shielded from censure; it only avows that in Christ all things that are twofold, all the double elements of being, are gathered up into a higher unity, and that He is one Person in the simple meaning of the term: one in supreme Intelligence, consciousness of identity, and all the operations of an agent who wills and acts. [1.]

1. When it is said that the ground of the Saviour's one personality is Divine, we must be understood to mean specifically that of the eternal Son. This is a point of far-reaching importance to the entire doctrine concerning Christ, and we cannot be led astray in pursuing it, provided our thoughts keep rigidly within the limits of revelation.

In the essence of the Godhead there are Three Persons, consubstantial co-eternal, and co-equal, one of whom is revealed to man as God's "own Son" (Roman~ viii. 3), as the "only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father" (John i. 18, iii.16), and as "the First-begotten" who was brought "into the world "

(Hebrews i. 6; Colossians i. 15). These are the only three designations that are certainly given in Scripture to the Person who became incarnate. Theology, led by Origen, introduced the paraphrase of the "Eternal Son;" and with strict propriety, since all the interior relations of the Godhead are of necessity eternal. But these three stand out as the elect terms of Holy Writ: generation is common to all; and the Son is the own and only-begotten as it respects the Father, and the first-begotten as it respects us in His incarnation. Let us briefly consider these in their order; but only so far as concerns our present object, to show that the ground of the personality of the God-man is the eternal Sonship.

(1.) It is in the Person of His Son that God unites again our race to Himself. The Son is the one name that belongs to the Redeemer both in heaven and on earth, in time and in eternity.

In the persona] subsistences of the Trinity, that is His personal distinction, to receive eternally His personality from the Father: "as the Father hath life in Himself so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself" (John v. 26). Two other names are indeed assigned to the preexistent Mediator. St. John terms Him "the Word," and St. Paul the "Image" of God; both with the same meaning, and both with express reference to the incarnation.

He is the f reflection to the universe of the invisible God, in the one, and in the other the Revealer of the silent God. But lt must be remembered that these terms are introduced only as sublime figures that illustrate the greater name of "Son." They are never used save in connection with that greater name, which gives them their personal character and, so to speak, hypostatises them. "The Word was made flesh," St. John tells us; but the glory which was beheld was that of the "only-begotten of the Father," that of the "only-begotten Son" (John i. 18). His first epistle is not an exception; for the swelling paragraph concerning the "Word of Life" finds no pause till it reaches "His Son Jesus Christ" (1 John i. 1-3). St. Paul to the Colossians also makes the "Image of the invisible God" only a secondary attribution to Him who is "the Son of" the Father's "love"

(Colossians I. 13-15); and his language is precisely echoed, whether by himself or not, in the epistle to the Hebrews (chap.

i. 1,2). Hence, as it is our Lord's Sonship which constitutes His personality in the Divine essence, so it is His Sonship which continues that personality in the flesh. And, in this sense also, "the Son abideth ever." [2.]

(2.) Viewed more expressly with reference to His incarnation, the subject leads to a profound question which forces itself irresistibly on our minds, and is seconded by our hearts, as to the reason why it was the Son of God who took our nature. Doubtless this question is one of many that the Scripture leaves to the silent pondering of the believer's meditation: yet not altogether to silent pondering; for some hints as to the reason, both in Him and in us, are given, which may be shaped into words.

No other Person in the Godhead was incarnate than the Son.

Each of the sacred Persons has His propriety, in eternal truth to which the language of Scripture is unvaryingly faithful, with reference to mediatorial redemption; but this preeminence is His, that the assumption of our nature, with all its concomitants of sorrow and of joy, belongs only and for ever to Him. The style of Scripture is not that God became incarnate: rather, with unswerving precision, that "the Word, the only-begotten Son, was made flesh and dwelt among us." That the second Person should or could, apart from the Father and the Holy Ghost, take our nature into union with Himself is an unfathomable mystery. But the very word "Son” points to the direction at least where the solution lies. Co-eternal and consubstantial with the Father, the Son is yet "God of God;" and, in His eternal subordination to the Father as the Fountain of the Deity—a subordination without inferiority—

lies the possibility of His mission to our race, and of His acceptance of that mission. "Let us make man," and "Lo I come,"

are fragments of heavenly language which fall upon prepared ears with profound meaning. But between this derived Sonship, which the Scripture avows, and the Arian generation in time and for a special purpose of the Father's will, which the Scripture denies, there is a literally measureless difference. The Son of God is the eternal Son of an eternal Father; but He is an eternal "Son,” and in that truth our redemption has its profound prerequisite.

"All Mine are Thine," are words of our Lord Himself, which forbid further speculation; but they do not relinquish His original property in us.

The special relation of the eternal Son to the race of mankind may suggest another reason, or rather another aspect of the same reason. There are not wanting intimations in Holy Writ of an essential affinity between the Son, the express Image of the Person of God, and man created also in the Divine image.

"All things," says St. Paul, referring however primarily to man,

"were created by Him and for Him" (Colossians i. 16): words upon which meditation may inexhaustibly dwell "For Him" were we created, even as He redeemed us "for Himself: "the image of God in us, all the greatness of our nature, being a reflection, distant yet true, of His eternal mind. He is the "First-born before every creature:" again we must understand that man is pre-eminently meant; and the apostle signifies, not simply that the Son was begotten before the creature—a declaration that is included but does not fully explain this most unusual phrase—but that the intelligent creation, aud especially man, the elect creature of God, was made after the image and likeness of the Son, with the elements of a nature capable of being partaker of the Divine, to be afterwards crowned and redeemed by Him, when He should "come to His own." Hence we may dare to believe, magnifying the distinction of our birthright, that we had received His nature before He assumed ours. [3.]

To sum up what has been said, and at the same time to anticipate what follows, the abiding personality of the Son gives unity to the entire manifestation of the Divine-human Person.

"The Son" absolutely is His supreme name, assumed by Himself and given to Him by His apostles (John iii. 35, Hebrews i. 1-8).

Becoming the "Son of man," the name in which He most delighted, He ceased not to be the "Son of God," the name which He permitted His servants to use (Matthew xvi. 16). As He goes onward from strength to strength in His earthly development, He is declared at every new crisis to be the Son. With most solemn emphasis St.

Paul tells us He was finally marked out as such in His resurrection, when His human nature had vanquished death and reached perfection (Romans i. 4). But this was only the last of a series of defining crises, of which we can allude to only three:—His introduction to the world in His incarnation (Hebrews i. 2-6, Luke i. 35); His baptism, which visibly sealed the secret of His birth (Matthew iii. 17); and His death, when the voice of the poor Centurion was chosen to close the long series of angelic, Divine, and human testimonies—"Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew xxvii. 54). [4.]

2. The ground of our Lord's indivisible personality being His Divine Sonship, it must be steadfastly maintained that it knows no change. In His voluntary manifestation in this world of phenomena, where He underwent vicissitudes that have and can have no parallel, He in His essential Self preserved that Divine immutability which is "without variableness or shadow of turning."

(1.) He did not surrender His personality, or divide it with another, or even add to it a second person. In other words, the Son of God did not join to Himself an individual man, begotten and born after the manner qf men" sanctified from his mother's womb, educated and trained to the highest perfection of which our nature is capable. Such a union with a second First-born of humanity, especially when regarded as created anew of the Holy Ghost, is not in itself inconceivable. We can imagine this most highly favoured among men, born of this most highly favoured among women, made by the inhabitation of the Son of God the fairest among ten thousand and the altogether lovely; "with such grace poured upon his lips that he should speak as never man spake;" and so replenished by that Divine fellowship as to leave the memory of a life and death that should eclipse all other recorded excellence. But, fair as this ideal is, it is only a vision. The Scripture knows no such alliance. The First-begotten is brought into the world in quite another way.

The Father sends His Son and receives Him again in the flesh,—

Him, and not a son of man whom He brings with Him. The Holy Spirit prepares for Him the elements of our nature, "that holy thing," to be His body; and the Son takes the body thus prepared, and becomes partaker of our flesh and blood (Luke i. 35; Hebrews x. 5, ii. 14). In the sacred record there occurs no expression that can be pressed into the service of a double personality in Christ. He never speaks of a second Self, or even of a higher or lower nature. The necessity of doctrine, when He left it to the more systematic teaching of His apostles, required that they should make this latter distinction; but it will be found that they invariably guard, and by a phraseology chosen for the purpose, the unity of His indivisible Person. [5.]

This only pays its tribute to the necessity of our redemption. Our salvation could not come from a brother of our race, however richly endowed with the Spirit, however high in the fellowship of God. Enough that one so greatly beloved should save himself; that indeed must needs follow: but others he could not save. At the utmost, such a union of the Son of God with a man would simply have exhibited a higher degree of what in kind was seen in Adam. That holy man would only have been the vehicle or sphere of a nobler Divine theophany, and more like one of the judges or prophets than we dare to think He could not, in the sense which Scripture always teaches, represent our nature; and the link between that Christ Jesus—supposing him to be then Christ Jesus—and the Son of God, would have been one which, though forged in heaven, might be strained and broken upon earth.

Such an alliance, in very deed, Satan suspected between God and the Holy One led up to him in the wilderness. He remembered one great breach, when the Third Person of the Trinity was separated by the Fall from a man in whom God was well pleased. He essayed his craft a second time; but, as the fathers used to say, he was cheated by his own devices; and, this time hopelessly baffled, held his error in reserve for the Nestorian heresy.

(2.) To be more particular, modern theology has expressed the sense of the scriptural statements on this subject by the affirmation that the Redeemer assumed our impersonal nature. I will comment on the expression, and then turn from it with more satisfaction to a summary of those Scriptures which it professes to explain.

No clear idea can be conceived of an impersonal intelligent nature. But the phrase may perform good service if it only guards the truth that when our Lord became incarnate He took our nature, with all its personal capacities and powers, into such a union with Himself as forbade its personality to be for a single instant distinct. Nothing in His entire human development but became part of the Self of the Divine Son. The dawning consciousness of the Infant belonged to the God-man. This Child never had the “knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother"

(Isaiah viii. 4), to human parents: His first incarnate word speaks of one Father, common to His Divine and human natures (Luke ii. 49), and from that moment to the end there is but one Divine “I" spoken through human lips. There is no communion indicated between the lower nature and the higher; only between the one Christ and His Father. The perfect human will remained; yet in such necessary though free harmony with His Divine will that the Scripture never distinguishes between the two. But when the absolute personality, that which gives unity of operation to an agent, is concerned, the simple truth is forced upon us that the Redeemer's human nature is without it. He formed for Himself in the incarnation a new embodiment of our nature; and in such an unspeakable manner that He became man while He continued to be God. To every created eye that beheld Him He was very man; but angels and men learned to acknowledge, when taught of the Spirit, that He was God manifest in the flesh, and that there did not exist, and could not exist, a human person in Christ apart from the Personal Son. Thus understood, His manhood Was and is impersonal.

It is a relief to turn to the sayings of the Word. I take three from St. John, he being pre-eminently the evangelist of the incarnation: three which individually and in the union of their mutual lights declare without definition all that man labours to define.

First in order, though last in time—in fact, the last saying of Scripture concerning the incarnation—is the testimony that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came in the flesh (1 John iv. 2,3).

Not now to dwell on other purposes for which this striking expression was adopted, it is obvious that the Lord Jesus is said to have come, not into, but "in,” the verity of our flesh: "the flesh" here, paradoxical as it may seem, meaning the matter of our earthly organization, and the whole nature of which it is the visible frame. The second phrase, "The Word was made flesh" (John i. 14)—the most wonderful of all the incarnation-sayings—utters the same truth. It has been exaggerated into a meaning which will hereafter be condemned; but no perversion must blind us to the doctrine here plainly taught, that the Logos, the Son, so came in the flesh as to make that flesh His own, part of Himself, nay, His very Self. He assumed our nature with as much reality of possession as that by which He held His Divine Being of the Father, with such a perfect identification indeed as leaves St.

Paul's assumption-terms far behind. The third phrase, He "dwelt among us "(John i. 14), a phrase which represents many other variations of the idea, expands the same truth. "Among us," or in us, or in the essential elements of our nature, He dwelt and still dwells: not sharing our human conditions for a season, as a stranger tarrying but for a night. He appeared in us, in our nature as a temple, to inhabit it with His glory, and pour the light of His grace and truth into the souls of all who enter into His fellowship as He has entered into theirs. He has made of our nature a new sanctuary, filled with the Spirit of holiness which all who are one with Him receive, and thereby become "partakers of His holiness" (Hebrews xii. 10). But that temple is still Himself.

Uniting the three phrases, it will be found that, while they carry the full meaning of what is understood by an impersonal human nature, they so qualify each other as to rescue that truth from every kind of perversion. The strongest and boldest word,

"was made flesh," has on either side its meet corrective: He

"came" in the flesh, and still continues therefore to be the Son of God in the flesh which He enters. On the other hand, that flesh is the shrine in which He dwells: He who dwells in the temple is greater than the temple, and the natures are therefore distinct. The central text gives its strength to the other two, while by them it is in some sense softened and explained. The doctrine taught by these three gradational sayings—"He came in flesh," "He became flesh," "He dwelt in flesh,"—is precisely the same which the other apostles declare in other almost equally emphatic terms: that is, by His taking "on Him the seed of Abraham" (Hebrews ii. 16), by His partaking of the children's

“flesh and blood" (Hebrews ii 14), and by His being “made of a woman "(Galatians iv. 4). And all is confirmed by Him who gives these other witnesses their testimony, and who best knows the secrets of His own being. He calls Himself “the Son of wan,"

meaning far more than Ezekiel or than Daniel knew: He is the Son and Representative of the kind or race of man. [6.]

II. We are thus led to consider the Divine-human Person of our Lord, His personality being only Divine. The distinction here established, and the terms employed to establish it, are not found in Scripture; but the tenour of Scripture cannot be understood without bearing it generally in mind. Nor has it been current in systematic theology, which has hovered about some such expedient without venturing to settle upon it as a principle of interpretation. How far it is justified will appear as we proceed to show that the two natures in Christ's Person are distinct and perfect; that neither of them undergoes any change in consequence of the union; and that the One Person may be regarded as God or as man interchangeably.

1. The Person of Christ is the result of the indivisible and abiding union of the Divine and human natures. This is perhaps the most wonderful proposition that theology has to affirm: a stumbling-block to the unbeliever, it is a sore offence to all philosophy, but the very rejoicing of the heart to Christian faith.

(1.) The term "truly" (the Centurion's ληθς, Mark xv. 39) was employed by the fathers of antiquity to declare their faith in the supreme Divinity of the Son. The specific protest of this word was not needed in apostolic times. But the apostles predicted the coming of those who should deny "the only Lord God” (2 Peter ii. 1, Jude 4); and the second century witnessed the beginning of heresies which assailed, not so much the Divinity of our Lord, as, so to speak, the integrity 0£ His Divine nature.

The Gnostic sects united in asserting that the better part of the Christ was an emanation from God which descended upon the man Jesus, or rather, as will be seen, upon what seemed to be such,—

thus an imaginary God upon an imaginary man. Sabellius did not indeed impair His Godhead, but, if the paradox be allowed, abolished it nevertheless by denying the Son's distinct subsistence. Arius at a later time gathered up the scattered hints of many heresies into the fatal affirmation that the Son of God was Divine, but not of the Divine essence, not co-eternal, and not strictly consubstantial, with the Father; begotten before the world, but yet in time; and being, before all human computation begins, among the things that were not. This ancient error, after which for one melancholy age the whole world went out, was rebuked by the Nicene Creed, in a formula that precisely reflects the spirit of Scripture without using its language. The Arian delusion has never since overspread the earth, or taken a formal place among the heresies. It has indeed continued to fascinate individual thinkers, has entangled many honest speculatists, and coloured too much of the poetry of our own and other Christian nations. But the Nicene theology, especially as represented by the somewhat chastised Confession used in our services, has on the whole ruled the church of Christ. "Very God of very God" has been the avowal of a faith that there is nothing essential to the nature Divine that is not in the Person of our Lord. When the Father sent His Son He gave His other, equal Self: nothing Divine that did not with Him leave, so far as He left, the bosom of the Father: ascending once more from the streams of human theology to the absolutely undefiled fountain,

"God was manifest in the flesh." The Old Testament, paying its first tribute to the human nature, announces that the Seed of the woman should save the world; and the New Testament opens with the revelation that that Seed of the woman is Immanuel, God with us.

(2.) So also the term "perfectly" was anciently used to express the church's faith in the veritable manhood of the Christ. He is man without defect, without superfluity, in the perfect integrity of human nature.

To the theory that Jesus of Nazareth is only man, it hardly enters into our design to make more than passing reference. It denies the very first postulate of that doctrine of the Person of Christ which is the object of our exposition. With the other heresies to which allusion has been or will be made, we may hold controversy: they have their several more or less consistent hypotheses concerning both the Person and the work of Christ.

The Humanitarians, as they may be called, teach indeed something of His work; but His Person, in the sense we assign, is to them an idle term. The Ebionites of antiquity, and their modern descendants the Socinians,—descendants, but with few links of any intermediate lineage,—simply oppose the full living current of Scripture, the plainest sayings of which they either torture or trifle with or suppress. By making the Author of the Christian faith a man of like passions with ourselves, they destroy the very foundations of the truth. Redemption has no meaning; the Bible has lost its living soul; and the gulf between God and man remains impassable. Upon this in every sense human theory—it deserves no better name—we can now only look down with silent pity.

The manhood of Christ is without defect. The first assault of heresy on our Lord's Person was aimed at His human nature.

The oriental heretics who troubled the old age of St. John, whom St. Paul also had more casually encountered, denied that the man in Christ was more than a mere semblance. In their horror of matter as the seat of all evil, from which therefore the spiritual Christ came to deliver us, they invented a thousand expedients to make the redeeming work effectual through a merely phantastic or delusive union of God's Messenger with our flesh.

The Church condemned them as Docetics. The last writer of the Bible, in its final document, was not so tolerant. He called the holder of this error, which robbed the Redeemer of His veritable manhood, "Antichrist;" and language has, to the true discernment of the Christian ear, no more terrible anathema than that. But it was not St. John alone who spoke: it was Christ Himself who thus declared to the race of His adoption, that He "counts that man His enemy" who violates the reality of His human flesh and blood.

In the course of ages another error arose, not anticipated in ScrIpture; an error which, held loosely by Arius, was shaped into consistency by Apollinaris, and impaired the integrity of our Lord's manhood by taking from Him His intellectual nature, His rational soul. On this theory the Divine Logos literally took flesh and blood, informing the sensitive nature of Christ with the Divinity instead of a thinking mind. This monstrous perversion of St. John's words, "Jesus Christ came in flesh," was rebuked in the second Œcumenical Council held at Constantinople in 381; but the formula of condemnation appears only in the Athanasian Creed: "Perfect God, perfect man, subsisting of a rational soul and human flesh." Thus, we may believe, did the Holy Ghost, who prepared for the Lord His human nature, vindicate the integrity of that nature, and defend the holy vesture from those who would rend it. And we may be sure that the condemnation was just. If the resolution of Christ's flesh and blood into mere semblance was Antichrist, much more was the annihilation of the nobler part, the essential part, of the nature which Christ came to redeem. The Lord rebuked Simon Peter for standing between Himself and His human passion. And in that rebuke Apollinaris was condemned: "Get thee behind Me, Satan!"

For it was through His human spirit, in which He sometimes is heard "rejoicing," through His human soul, which "was exceeding sorrowful even unto death," through His human mind, on which was imprinted anew the violated law, and the verity of which is proved by innumerable tokens of positive exercise and negative limitation, that He redeemed the spirit, soul, and body of mankind.

Our Lord's manhood is also without superfluity. The error of Apollinaris was one of excess as well as of defect. It not only robbed the Christ of the human mind in which to think, and learn, and teach, and suffer; it also gave Him the Divine Logos as an excessive and exaggerated intellect. There is a certain grotesque grandeur in the conception of this heresy, the most imposing, and perhaps the most enduring, the traces of which are found in Christological history. Modified in Eutychianism and its Monothelite sequel, it has recently appeared in the Exinanition-theories of Germany and France as well as in some well-known American speculations; and has infected the popular thought and speech where the doctrine has not been dreamt of.

Its influence may be detected wherever the Lord Jesus is regarded as thinking, feeling, and acting, directly as God without the intermediation of a finite rational soul. It is an error which does not generally reveal its evil effect; but it commits an irreparable breach in theology. The splendid gift it seems to bestow in return for what it takes from Christ is a pure unreality. And its practical influence removes from Christian life the human example of the Lord. [7.]

Hence the manhood of our Lord was simply and only perfect in its integrity: not more, not less, than the realized ideal of human nature as in the mind of God, in the mind of the Son, it existed at the creation. But it must be remembered that its very perfection made this manhood a new thing; a new thing, and yet only the restoration of the old which we had from the beginning.

The second Head of the human race was in mind, soul, flesh, perfect; the goodliness of man's beautiful form as unmarred by man's sin. In Him was no germ of evil that might by any possibility find development: with the grief that may be felt for sin, as also with the grief that sin entails, He became vicariously acquainted, beyond all experience of the most wretched of its victims. But in Him was no sin, or the possibility of sin. In all that belongs of right to man He is perfect: nothing is in Him that man had not at the first. Apart from its union with the Son, our human nature had no new element of strength or capacity added: the very utmost that human mind in human flesh can do or endure was in its resources: no less, no more. St. John's word may be borrowed to sum up all: "Which thing is true in Him and in us,"—that "Holy Thing" (Luke i. 35).

2. It must now be shown that the two natures of our Lord undergo no change in consequence of the Incarnation. Any such imaginable change may be assumed to refer to the Divinity, or to the manhood, or to both, through some undefinable result of the union.

(1.) There could be no change in the Divine nature, by the very terms of the statement; though an opposite theory has been very popular, both in ancient and in modern times, especially on the continent during the present century. Speculative theology has made St. John's sentence, "the Word was made flesh," its starting-point; and has found the basis of its exposition in St.

Paul’s words to the Philippians (chap. ii. 8), "but made Himself of no reputation," or, literally, "emptied Himself." These words are capable of two connections with the context: one of these being chosen, they mean that He who existed in the form of God thought not, when human redemption demanded, His manifest equality with God a thing to be eagerly retained—had He so thought, a descent to the sphere of our salvation would have been impossible—but emptied Himself, assuming and being found in the form of a servant. This undoubtedly signifies that the Eternal Son voluntarily divested Himself of something when He became man.

A great prize He seized, (adhering to the phraseology,) but much He gave up. What He surrendered He Himself has told us (John xvii. 5): it was "the glory which He had with the Father before the world was." Hence He consented " for a season, if need be"—

and there was infinite need—to take the fashion of man upon Him, to make that lower nature the main vehicle of His self-manifestation, and thus to become the minister of human redemption. He emptied Himself, or voluntarily gave up His repute, and kept Himself down in this lower sphere: otherwise He must have ascended "where He was before” too soon. He underwent the whole process of human development: including the assault of Satanic temptation, both as common to man and as proper to Christ. Making His Divinity for a season (_ λίγov ρτι) secondary and not supreme, He surrendered Himself to the disposal of the Holy Spirit,—the Spirit both of His Divine and of His human nature.

In nothing that concerned redemption did He as yet act as "Master and Lord," but as "he that serveth." He received His knowledge through human faculties. During the course of His humbled estate, He spake as a man, He understood as a man, He thought as a man,—He, that is, the Divine-human Son; and, save at occasional periods when the irrepressible community with the Father burst through every restraint, and beholders "were greatly amazed"

(Mark ix. 15), He made His human life of submission the law of His manifestation, limiting Himself as none but Himself could limit Him. [8.]

But this self-humiliation or self-sacrifice is very different from that of the modern theories of the exinanition of Christ. These theories—they are many—unite in one common principle, that the Eternal Son, as an energy or potency of the Divine nature, contracted Himself voluntarily within finite conditions of existence; sank, if such language without meaning may be tolerated for a moment, from the Absolute into the Relative; and passed through a mysterious zero as touching the Divine into the beginning of a human consciousness in which the Divine would again gradually resume its glory. This would appear to many advocates of the doctrine an exaggeration; but it is honest as an exposition of what their sentiments appear to all but themselves. This is the legitimate account"of the common element in their various interpretations of "the Word was made flesh." It may be enough, in addition, to state without any argument the consequences of this hypothesis. It tends to confound variations in the Divine glory or manifestation with variations in His essential existence. It robs God of His power as well as of the display of His power; and puts no difference between His arm and the stretching out of His arm. It makes the human nature unduly "capable of God," and abolishes, which is a thing inconceivable, the distinction between the finite and the Infinite. It not only takes His "reputation" from the Son of God, but for a season His very existence as Divine. It disturbs the Holy Trinity by removing the Second Person, perhaps for ever, from His place and throne; and, by a miracle before which Joshua's pales, withdraws the Son from the heavens that He may reappear in man's sphere with healing in His beams. Instead of a Son of God in the flesh who is still in the bosom of the Father, it gives us a new Being whose development on earth is a kind of platonic reminiscence of a glorious estate in the past eternity.

It takes no account of the many passages in which the Redeemer reveals the secret of a Divine consciousness: soliloquising as it were as God, while His ministerial language is that of man; declaring Himself to be in heaven, while, speaking upon earth; assuming the incommunicable "I AM " as His own; and making known some at least of the mysteries of the universe as Himself the

"Door opened in heaven." This theory, like many other false theories concerning Christ, is full of a strange and imposing grandeur, and has thrown its spell over some of the profouhdest theologians of the day. But it is essentially misleading: it sins against the first rudiments of our notion of the Divine nature; and does not by its fatal travesty of the incarnation solve the difficulties which it promises to solve. The God who sinks so low is God no longer. It is needless to speak with asperity of an error that sprang from the purest desire to save the consistency of truth. But there are not wanting signs that English theology needs to be warned against a speculation which perhaps will bear more noxious fruit in a foreign soil than in that which gave it birth. [9.]

(2.) There was no change through the incarnation in our Lord's human nature. Here indeed it might well be supposed to have been otherwise. A lower nature like ours, thus embraced and upheld and sublimed, might well be expected to rise at the touch of God. But the Scripture assures us that it was not so, and confirms our thought concerning the reason why it could not be so. The same necessity—-the same ever-recurring "must"—which required Him to be made like unto His brethren, required Him also to continue like them to the end. In every possible way, and by every beautiful artifice of language, has the Holy Ghost obviated our misconception on this subject. One entire chapter (the second to the Hebrews, namely) has been written as it were of set purpose: in exceedingly emphatic terms, as the student of the original knows, it is declared that "He Himself likewise took part of the same nature with the children:" "likewise," in a sense that admits of no suspicion. And as He and His brethren, the Sanctifier and the sanctified, are originally "of one," so in continuance He abides the same; no change passed upon Him that might cause Him ever to "be ashamed to call us brethren," even in the heavenly places where we see Him in glory (Hebrews ii. 14, 11,9). So far does the Word of God go in this direction that it might seem sometimes to ally our Lord with much in our nature from which we ourselves, with Simon Peter's uninstructed zeal, might wish to exempt Him. With jealous precision guarding His holy manhood from the taint of our sin, it nevertheless so draws the picture of the Sufferer in His solitary way as to show that it is the same Jesus, the Man of sorrows, throughout. Here and there it leads us to see what we cannot understand, and to hear what it is a trial of faith to hear; and all to prove to us that the incarnation which puts on man's nature infinite honour has not a whit altered the elements of its character. He is still Man unchanged, even in glory: the first word of the angels after the ascension tells us so: "This same Jesus " (Acts i. 11). [10.]

(3.) Nor is there any mysterious result of the union that may be regarded as involving a change in both natures at once.

To use a subtile distinction made by men of old: Christ is one Person "in" the two natures, without being a new Person formed

"of" the two natures. As Nestorius was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, A.D. 341, for keeping the Saviour's Godhead and manhood so widely apart as to make Him two persons, so Eutyches was condemned at Chalcedon, A.D. 351, for confusing the two natures into one composite being, neither God nor man. It will be obvious to everyone that recoil from one error would lead towards its direct opposite. Neither Nestorius nor Eutyches would have accepted the definition just given of their respective errors; they had the purest desire; the one to preserve the reality of our Lord's human nature, the other to guard the unity of His person; but they both and perhaps equally misled their followers. Eutyches, in particular, with whom we have now to do, so suffered his theological thinking to be overwhelmed by the majesty of Christ's Divinity that he lost the manhood almost entirely, and let it be absorbed into the Godhead as a drop in the ocean. Both in bis own and in his followers' hands, the heresy degenerated into the assertion of a certain composite being, between Divine and human. The God in Christ was depressed by the very fact of this blending with the human, albeit the human element was infinitesimal)y small; whilst the man in Christ was elevated into an unnatural union with the Godhead, if such a word may be allowed. The result was a conglomerate, against which the decision of the Council defended the church by demanding that the two natures of Christ should be held as unchanged and unconfused. Of all the errors that haunt this Immanuel's land of theology the Eutychian is perhaps the most obvious and at the same time the most unreasonable. The more steadily it is regarded, the more repulsive does it appear in itself; and almost every precious doctrine of the Gospel withers at its touch. It literally takes away our Representative from the incarnate Person, especially after the ascension: it is not true on this theory that "there is one mediator, the man Christ Jesus." The man Christ Jesus is for ever gone. Much as we need, and struggle to secure, the unity of Christ's Person, it is not to be maintained in any such way as this. That unity is in a higher region, into which no human mind save His own can enter: a region where two wills, if indeed we say rightly two "wills," two consciousnesses, two processes of intelligence, two personalities also if rightly understood, are found belonging to one Subject,

"who is over all, God blessed for ever."

3. Christian theology is shut up, therefore, to the bold confession of a belief that the Lord Christ is both God and man: not indeed God in part, and man in part, but both, and each, and either, together and interchangeably. It has always been the effort of scientific theologians to provide formulæ that should express and regulate this truth; and the result is "one of the richest, and, as I think, the most satisfactory departments of the Christian vocabulary. Here again the Scripture gives but little direct help; though it never fails to point the way to the truth, and its express statements are so clear on every side that careful attention to them all will infallibly protect our definitions from error. Certain well-known regulative hints are there which abundantly justify the decisions of the earliest Councils: giving their sure warrant to what we may term the Nicene theology concerning the Lord's Divine Sonship, to the Ephesine theology concerning His manhood, and to what may perhaps most appropriately be called the Chalcedonian theology concerning His one Person.

(1.) The four leading terms or definitive watchwords, which like a quaternion guard the sacred Person of the Lord, are simply the plain teachings of Scripture classified and condensed into single defensive terms: Christ is "truly" God, "perfectly" man,

"indivisibly" one Person, "unconfusedly" two natures. Again, with more express reference to the union of the two natures in one personal agent, these last two adverbs in the Chalcedonian Council became four: the natures are said to be united (I must give the almost untranslatable Greek of words that have done more service than any other four): συγχύτως, without any commixture such as would produce a third nature unknown to God or man; τρέπτως, without transmutation or the turning of one nature into the other; διαιρέτως, undividedly, so as not to permit two distinct personal subsistences; χωρίστως, inseparably, so that the union shall never be dissolved, being indeed incapable of dissolution. So far, mainly against the Eutychian tendency, though dealing with every side of the question. Turning its battery of exquisite terms against Nestorius in particular—our chief enemy in the present discussion—the Council, or rather the Divines who represented its doctrine, asserted that the mysterious union of the two natures was not by a "junction" or link, however subtily conceived, by assistance however p]enary and perfect, by "inhabitation" however intimate, by "relation"

however close and logically defensible, by "estimation" or repute however true in some respects that might be, by "conformity of will" however certain that also was, or indeed by anything but a union in which the one part united is created by that which unites it to itself, so that the same Person shall be God and man at once, always, and for ever: one Mediatorial Agent, to will, and to act, and to be responsible for all His own most wonderful works.

(2.) Some more advanced formulæ may be noted, which have not so satisfactorily succeeded in seizing and fixing the pervading spirit of Scripture. The Lutheran theory, which indeed descended from antiquity, but like many others received a new and more vivid stamp in Luther's bold hands, was expressed by the phrase

"Communicatio idiomatum," imp]ying no less than that the properties of one nature belong also to the other. "In reality,"

said the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's human nature; "in figure only," said Zwingli and other theological opponents of Luther. Neither of these views is faithful to the record, which is content with exhibiting to the eye and to the faith of the church One Redeemer, who unites in Himself the attributes of the Divine and human natures, silently forbidding us to ascribe anything belonging to the Divinity to the manhood, or anything belonging to the manhood to the Divinity, but encouraging us to assign both spheres of attributes to the one common central Person.

A long and glorious series of New Testament witnesses rise to confirm this truth. "Immanuel" on its first page—that most holy compound and unresolvable name—unites the two Testaments, and is the very superscription of the whole doctrine of the Person of Christ. His witness to Himself throughout the Gospels is faithful to the same law. His "I" dwells in eternity as well as in time, in time within eternity. He is "the Son of man which is in heaven," while He is instructing as a Master "the master of Israel," and making him His own disciple (John iii. 13). This was His first recorded testimony while on earth; His last to the same effect is not one sentence only, but the whole tenour of His discourse and prayer on the eve of His passion. Not indeed the last: for His revelation to St. John in Patmos carries the evidence to the highest point. There He stands before His servant with every human lineament the glory of which He strengthens him to behold and describe; and uses language which belongs to both natures, but is bound into perfect unity by the

"I" and the "Me:” I am Alpha and Omega; the Beginning and the End; the First. and the Last. I was dead and am alive again; and I live for evermore (Revelation i. 8, 18). And all His apostles know His secret: only one high theory gives meaning to their words. "The Lord"—not His Divine nature, not His human nature—

purchased the church with His blood (Acts xx. 28). The princes of this world "crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians ii.

8): they crucified as to His passible flesh Him whose Person is the Lord of glory. "In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Colossians ii. 9): not dwelleth in His body, but

"in Him bodily." In the epistle to the Hebrews, which in relation to the doctrine of Christ's Person is the parallel of St. John's gospel, "Jesus Christ" is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever:" a declaration which derives much emphasis from the fact that in it the epistle revolves back to its earliest statement, "Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (chaps. i.

8, xiii. 8). It may seem strange to wind up the testimonies of Christ and His apostles by the word of a heathen; but no better language can be found than that into which the reverent Roman was surprised, under the cross: "Truly this man was the Son of God"

(Mark xv. 39).

(3.) The ancient creed called the Athanasian sums up all in the expression "One Christ." Whatever exception may be taken to this marvellous structure of symmetrical statements in other parts, these sentences are without fear and without reproach: "It is therefore true faith that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is both God and man. He is God, generated from eternity from the substance of the Father; man, born in time from the substance of His mother. Perfect God, perfect man, subsisting of a rational soul and human flesh. Equal to the Father in respect to His Divinity, less than the Father in respect to His humanity. Who, although He is God and man, is not two, but one Christ. But one, not from the conversion of His Divinity into flesh, but from the assumption of His humanity into God. One not at all from confusion of substance, but from unity of Person." The conventional language of Christian theology speaks of One essence in Three Persons, as the definition of the Holy Trinity: it speaks, conversely, of One Person in two natures, as the definition of Christ. He is One as the Agent in our salvation, One as the Object of our trust, One as the Head of the Church. This is termed the Hypostatic Union: the two natures are hypostatically united in Christ's Person as the Three Persons are hypostatically united in the Triune essence. This signifies that it is not a Theophany, or manifestation of God in and through a human person; that it is not the union of a Representative of the Godhead with a representative of mankind; but that it is an unspeakable union, the substratum, issue, and result of which is one Hypostasis or Person.

III. The Divine-human Person of our Lord is the mystery and the glory of the Christian Faith. And this I dwell upon, not for the sake of loyal expatiation on the Object which Christian faith adores, but as a most important element in the study of the doctrine itself.

1. The word "mystery" in the New Testament has two meanings.

In the one it is the unfolding of what had long been promised but kept hidden; in the other it is the revelation to faith of what the understanding cannot fathom, but believes on Divine authority.

In the former sense the Person of Christ is a mystery revealed. "The glory of this mystery," says St. Paul to the Colossians (chap. i. 27) is "Christ in you," or among you, "the Hope of glory:" that is, the Christ Immanuel. Ages and generations had waited for it, with light enough to quicken desire, but not enough to make expectation definite. One Deliverer, sometimes as in the first prediction human, sometimes as in the psalms and prophets Divine, had been always coming.

The incarnation was prefigured and anticipated throughout the Old Testament: it inspired its songs and prophecies, gave a wonderful humanness to its Divine appearances, and moulded almost everywhere its phraseology. The dawning mystery of the ancient Scriptures is the Three-one God and His Christ. As the Divine glory behind the veil sometimes seems to dispart into a triple radiance, blending while we behold into one again; so also the Form of the Fourth, like the Son of God become the Son of man, is seen elsewhere than in the fiery furnace. The deepest secret released from the Old Testament is the Person of Christ. We must not think of the Gospel scheme, and its publication among the Gentiles, as the "mystery which hath been hid from ages and generations," apart from Himself who is far above His works and more wonderful than them all. The great atonement is to be offered in the sanctuary, and the Gentiles are to be called from their outer court into the "fellowship of the mystery;" but the mystery itself is the Revelation of Christ. A greater than the atonement, than the temple itself, is here. It is the Lord who

"suddenly comes to His temple."

We go higher than the ages and the generations. The mystery of the Divine-human had been hid with Christ in God before the world was. Speculation is lost when it passes beyond finite relations; but we cannot close our eyes to evident hints that the purpose of the incarnation was bound up with the first idea of our race—if such language may be used—in the mind of the Word.

Those who assert that the union of God with man in the Son was a necessity apart fr?m the fall are so far right as that man was never contemplated save in connection with the Divine-human Person as his Head and Crown. They agitate a needless question when they ask if the Son would have been given to us without the plea of our sin. To us there can be, alas, no idea of our race dissociated from sin, and the redemption which is coeval with sin. And sure we are that, as man was contemplated as falling through transgression, so in the Divine provision he was to rise again in Christ. Time, and all its redeeming wonders, is only the revelation of the mystery of eternity. And that mystery is the Christ of God (Colossians ii. 2).

In the second meaning of the term, the Person of Christ, the unity of God and man—of the Divine essence in the person of the Son with the human nature as impersonally assumed—will be for ever the mystery of mysteries. The nature of God is incomprehensible, human life is a marvel understood only by its Creator; but here we have the wonder of Divinity superadded to the wonder of humanity, and both if it be possible made unspeakably more wonderful by an eternal union in one Person.

The Scripture is everywhere conscious of this its most profound and unsearchable secret; and it is its highest glory that it can bear the weight with such sublime ease. So is it with our Lord Himself. He maintained no reserve as to His Divine origin, yet He showed Himself always alive to the offence which His claim would excite in human reason, unenlightened from above. "How will ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things!" was an appeal that had direct reference to this subject. When He asked again "Whose son is He?" and "How is He His son?" and "What think ye of Christ?"

it was not merely to embarrass the Pharisees, bnt to show any remnant of vision that lingered in them how deep were the teachings of their Scriptures concerning Himself. And so when He asked His own disciples "Whom say ye that I am ?" it was, as we gather, to teach them that only a special revelation, sent for that very purpose, could enable them to give the right answer.

The true light began even then to shine around Him, but He promised when He departed that it should more fully shine: "at that day ye shall know that I am in My Father!" (John xiv. 20; compare verse 10.) But He did not thereby signify that the mystery would become plain to His friends, or that the offence of the incarnation should cease to His foes. Simeon's prediction over the Infant—the "sign which shall be spoken against; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed" (Luke ii. 34, 35)—had its range far beyond the Resurrection. The Pentecostal sun of revelation, which lighted up the things of Christ and Christ Himself with more than transfiguration glory, has not taken away the mysteriousness of this mystery. But it gave the apostles strength to bear it, and courage to glory in it; it raised them to that noblest posture of the human mind, repose in the assurance of what it cannot understand. St. Paul is never greater than when he is in the presence of "the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ" (Colossians ii. 2); or, as he perhaps wrote, "the mystery of the God Christ." Nor has he any nobler prayer than that in which he supplicates for the Colossians in an agony that they might rejoice in "the full assurance" of "the acknowledgment of the mystery" (Colossians ii.

2), in such a full plerophory of conviction as should carry before it every trace of doubt, and silence every thought of unhallowed curiosity. His final testimony is, "great confessedly is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh" (1

Timothy iii. 16). St. John, writing long after the other organs of revelation had finished their task, St. John, who came from the bosom of Christ as Christ came from the bosom of the Father, who, if any man, might have done something to simplify this truth, has no such thought in his mind. His saying, "The Word was made flesh," rebukes human impatience of the incomprehensible, beyond any other. And this is in his didactic gospel. In the Apocalypse, with its wonderful visions of Christ's Person and work, the seer shows that Paradise itself has given him no new light. His last record is perhaps the most instructive, as a summary of truth and an end of all controversy:

"The testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy." "On His head were many crowns; and He had a name written that no man knew, but He Himself. And He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and His name is called The Word of God" (Revelation xix.

10,12,13). Here we have the most holy Trinity; God, the Word, and th~ Spirit. But let us see that we receive the full meaning of that saying in the centre: no man knoweth His name but Himself!

Are we then forbidden to ask concerning this mystery? Does the Saviour say to us, as He said to Manoah, when His hour was not yet come: "Why askest thou thus after My name seeing it is secret?" Most certainly not. I appeal again to His words, "At that day ye shall know th~t I am in My Father!" The thoughts of individual believers, and the labours of the church, have never been discouraged by the Lord Himself. But the study must be pursued with reverence and restraint, and with the assurance that some residual difficulties will always remain. This has been too often forgotten. Many who speak very fluently about the subordination of reason to faith forget their own principles when speculation tempts them, or when the flippant scepticism of the day suggests its calm dilemmas. But it must be remembered; it is one of the first elements of the question—-the question of our Lord's two natures, His one Person, and an union between them which, though we give it that name, has nothing analogous or parallel in human things.

Theology has suffered much from the desperate determination of speculatists to sound the depths of the hypostatic union.

Three times has the whole strength of the Christian intellect been spent on the subject: first, in the age which followed the Nicene testimony, when the church was entirely occupied with Christology; secondly, in the days of Scholasticism, when the subtilty of the Schoolmen began afresh a study which the Lutheran Divines received from them and pursued with a subtilty almost equal to their own; and thirdly, in the present century when, in Germany especially, the discussion of the Person of Christ has started afresh, with new and most ambitious aims, and a tranquil perseverance which no difficulty can daunt. The results of the Christological investigations of this last period are in some respects to be rejoiced over, in some respects to be deplored.

It would be ungrateful to deny the value of labours which have given birth to noble creations of Christian theology. But they teach the necessity of caution and theological self-restraint.

The various theories that have been constructed to explain the self-exinanition of the Son (Philippians ii. 8), the revived discussions of the ancient questions discussed by the Kryptists and the Kenotics as to whether the Son of God only hid the Divine attributes which He possessed, or really was for a season without both their possession and their use; the hypotheses that seek to reconcile a Divine-human personality with the possibility of sin in Him and His real victory over real temptation; the schemes that have been constructed to establish a gradual incarnation, a progressive interpenetration of the human Person of Christ by the Divine Son:—all these departments of Christologica1 study are teeming with writers the tendency of whose works shows that speculation is lifting a veil which is not to be lifted till the great day, or which, if rent at all, must be rent "from the top downwards." Probably it will never be removed, and the Person of Christ will be pondered throughout eternity. Be that as it may, it is certain that, after all that we can do, difficulties win remain for tbe exercise of our humility and patience. There are a few texts that will always remain knots, however polished knots, in the fair stem of our doctrine concerning the Incarnate Son. For His own life, like ours, is "hid with Christ in God."

2. But to those who receive the mystery it is tbe centre of all truth. This doctrine is at once the cross and the crown of Christian theology: the burden it has to bear, the truth in which it glories. The unity of our Saviour's Person as the God-man, in whom the Divine and the human natures meet for ever, is in itself the supreme truth of the new Christian revelation, and in its bearing on all points of Christian theology of the most vital importance.

I will not say that alone of all the doctrines of our most holy Faith it is absolutely new to the mind of man. They err who strive to prove that neither in the Bible nor out of it was there any clear pre-intimation of this glorious wonder. No great truth belonging to the relations of God, and man has ever been left altogether without a witness: there is: nothing absolutely new under the sun of revelation from the time it first arose. As the Holy Trinity, redemption by atonement, the entrance of the Spirit of inspiration into the human mind, and other teachings of Christianity, had all their dimmer foreshadows in Heathenism and their brighter pre-intimations among tbe Jews; so was it with the doctrine of the Incarnation. The periodic and transitory avatars in the East, the descent of the gods to men in the West, and the more authentic theophanies of the ancient revelation, all prepared the way for that awful truth. Still, when it became fact in what was therefore the fulness of time, when the mystery of ages and of eternity was an accomplished reality, it was so wonderful that it seemed as if no sign had ever brought it or could have brought it near to the human mind.

And in its relations to the compass of Christian theology this doctrine of the Indivisible Person is of the most commanding importance. It is the basis at once and the superstructure and the top stone of the whole. A needless jealousy for the atonement, as if it were a counterpart of the incarnation that we are tempted to neglect, has sometimes obscured this truth. No fruit of theological controversy is more deplorable than that there should be rivalry between Bethlehem and Calvary in the minds of Christian men. Neither is the incarnation without the atonement, nor the atonement without the incarnation, "in the Lord." In Him and with Him all things are freely given us (Romans viii. 32). All that man needs, and all that God has for the supply of man's need, the whole sum of human destiny and hope, is contained in the Person of Christ "who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man and was crucified for us." "It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell" (Colossians i. 19), "and of His fulness have all we received." Christian theology, like the Christian believer, is

"complete in Him," in whom "are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."

II.

The relation of the one and indivisible Person of Christ—and of His Person as one and indivisible—to the circle of Christian doctrine is absolutely fundamental. Any the slightest error that touches the unity of the one Christ, both God and man, leads directly either to a subversal of the .Christian Faith or to such a perversion of its leading tenets as leaves but little worth defending. It would be useful to trace the bearings of this dogma through the whole domain of theology, in all its branches, whether Biblical, or Dogmatic, or Historical. But this would require a treatise, and a bare analysis of what might be attempted is all that time will admit now. I shall endeavour to attain the same end by showing the connection of our dogma with some or rather with all the fundamental principles of evangelical doctrine. For instance, its vital importance may be traced in connection with the following five watchwords of Christian theology: first, with the truth and reality of Revelation generally; secondly, with the essential meaning of Mediation between God and man; then with the doctrine of Christ's presence in His church; then with the evangelical privilege of personal union between Christ and the believer; and, lastly, with the Christian doctrine of Christ's Church, its character, and development, and destiny. It will be found that the truth amidst conflicting errors in each of these essential subjects of Christian theology depends upon, is saved by, a true statement of its relation to the Indivisible Person of Christ, which alone gives to each its strength, and their harmony to all. [II.]

I. At the basis of the Christian Faith lies the idea of a Revelation of God to man, to his mind but in His nature. In His incarnate Person our Lord is not only the medium of that revelation, He is the revelation itself; not only the "Apostle of our profession" (Hebrews iii. 1), He is also "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (John xiv. 6).

1. It has been seen that the only names given to the Son, when His incarnation is spoken of, are such as define Him to be the eternal and essential Revealer of the Being of God to the universe. The absolute God becomes relative to His creatures through Him who is the "Brightness of His glory," "the express Image of His Person," "the Word" of His eternal thought. By maintaining the unity of Christ's Person in the flesh we bring the communication of "that which may be known of God" (Romans i.

19) into our very nature. To "know God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent "is to know God in Jesus Christ. In these last days He hath spoken to us in His Son (Hebrews i. 1): whereby we are to understand, not that the earlier fragments of truth were given without the Son—for it was the "Spirit of Christ" who was in the prophets—but that the glorious Source of all our knowledge had now become manifest as such. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him" (John i. 18). Here is the great distinction.

No knowledge of God can come to us through the report of an observer from without; it must come from within, from the bosom of the Father Himself. "None by searching can find out God," we are told in the Old Testament; in the New Testament no man can even "approach" to search (1 Timothy vi. 16). Nothing is more certain than that all revelation is most absolutely shut up to Christ. And as we have the only Revealer of God, so His revelation is in the indivisible unity of His Person brought nigh to us, "in our mouth and in our heart." It is our own, and a light within us. The Son does not instruct a human person with whom He is united, that He again as a prophet may instruct us.

He is in our nature; and we receive through union with Him out of His fulness of grace and truth (John i. 14, 16). He makes the knowledge of God in some sense "common to man," unveiling the Father through our own faculties and "in our own language wherein we were born as "the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world," or that cometh into the nature that He has made His own. But out of His fulness only we receive who have first received power to become the sons of God (John i. 12, 16).

2. The applications of this truth can be only indicated: first, in its response to human philosophy, and, secondly, in its bearing upon the written Scripture.

Philosophy assumes a twofold attitude to this question. In one of its moods it lays great emphasis, and with reason, on the impossibility that any revelation of God to man should exist save in man's own consciousness. And our doctrine responds by saying that it is even so: whatever means, media, or instrumentalities the Revealer employs, He is within our nature—generally in every man who shares it, specially in every regenerate soul—the living internal "word of life" (1 John i. 1). In another of its moods, philosophy rejects the idea that the absolute God can be brought within the cognisance of a finite mind. Christ in the flesh denies this. He does not indeed manifest in our nature all the essence of the Godhead: only τ γvωστ v τo Θεo , that which is knowable of God (Romans i. 19). An infinite reserve of knowledge is His, in the unity of His Person, that will never be ours; but

"all things that I have heard of the Father "—in contradistinction to that eternal and absolutely personal knowledge which He claims in Matthew xi.,—" I have made known unto you " (John xv. 15). "Christ in us" is a guarantee that we have a true, real, and sufficient knowledge of God as our high prerogative: perfect, so far as it is possible to man; real, and corresponding to His true nature; and sufficient for every human need in time and in eternity. Let not philosophy, therefore, either by too much pride or by too much humility, deny the possibility that the finite should know the Infinite.

In its relation to the written Scripture this truth is of great importance. No man can be a genuine disciple of Christ who does not receive the Holy Oracles at His hands as a testimony to Himself given by His own Spirit to the prophets before He came, and by His own Spirit to the apostles after He departed. It is not too much to say that the whole Book—the rich word of Christ (Colossians iii. 16)—must be brought with the disciple when he comes to Christ, must continue with him through all his discipleship, and never cease to be his guide at least while he is a student on earth. Now, if it be true that our Lord makes the Volume—and it is a perilous thing to doubt this—the voice running through all ages of His own Divine-human personality, certain conclusions flow rapidly, surely, and blessedly, from that principle. We may safely grant that the true Bible is Christ in the Bible: as the life is more than meat, so the Word is more than all His words: and it is the Living Truth Himself whom we seek for in the letter. But then that letter is as it were the vesture in which He with His truth is clothed; and it must needs be worthy of Him, a "seamless garment woven from the top throughout." "Let us not rend it." Admitting that the teaching of Scripture is progressive, and limited, and committed to a form that is liable to the fluctuations of human literature, it is nevertheless the teaching of One whose words cannot betray us, will never teach us error, and shall not even the lightest of them fall to the ground. Best of all, we have Christ with us in His word: God incarnate, speaking from heaven, and yet the human Oracle of mankind. "It is the voice of a God," but "it is in the speech of man; "and if we would hold communion with His Person it is needful that we "understand His speech" (John viii. 43). We must remember that His Spirit can alone make the words His to our hearts which our minds may receive as His. We must have that same preparation which the Lord required in those to whom He spake on earth, the presence of which made Him an embodied manifestation of the Father, the absence of which deprived Him of all His dignity and power to the souls of the unbelieving, so that He who "spake as never man spake" was contradicted as never man was contradicted (Hebrews xii. 3). To him who takes the word of God as the record of Jesus, and reads, or rather "searches,"—

for there is great force in that solitary command given by Christ concerning the Bible,—with a mind submissive to the Spirit, it is verily and indeed a present Living Teacher: the Truth speaking as an intelligent Person to his person, the Eternal Mind to his mind, the Divine Heart to his heart. [12.]

II. No idea is more fundamental in Christian Theology than that of Mediation; and none so obviously depends for its right conception upon its relation to the one and indivisible Person of Christ. With reference to our present purpose the term may be viewed under three aspects. In the union of His Divine and human natures, our Lord is in the highest sense of the word, and in virtue of His twofold nature, a Mediator; but this only on the ground of a mediatorial reconciliation of two parties through His sacrifice as a Third between the Two; and, combining these, His incarnate Person is the Mediator of the Christian covenant in all His acts. Hence our doctrine may be referred to the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Redeeming Ministry of Christ, in their order.

1. In Jesus, God incarnate, mediation has its highest and fullest meaning. Human nature is actually brought into fellowship with the Divine in the Person of a Being "who hath made both one." Too much stress cannot be laid upon this, provided only we remember that the eternal pledge of reconciliation was given to man only on the presupposal of an atonement which in that nature Christ should offer.

The birth of Jesus was a sign from heaven that mankind was restored to God. Immanuel was the incarnate "Peace on earth:"

not only as the prophecy of a future harmony which the angels sang, but as an accomplished and blessed reality. Nor was it only the announcement of a fact that then began: though the incarnation took place "in the end of the world," it must be antedated and carried back in its virtue to the world's beginning. This is an "extension of the incarnation,"—an extension backwards, as well as forwards,—that should never be forgotten. Redemption must follow creation in the order of thought: otherwise the "Second Adam" was really the First. He appeared in the fulness of time to proclaim a secret of eternity, that God had "chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world," had predestinated us to the adoption to Himself (Ephesians i. 4, 5). It is only the one Person of Christ that can sustain the weight of this mystery. The Divine Son joined to an individual member of the fallen race could not have attested this catholic reconciliation between the race and God. It is indifferent at what hour in human history the Son of man may be supposed to come, if He bears the verity of our nature with Him; for then "God was and is"—to give St. Paul's word its deep significance—"in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." (2

Corinthians v. 19). The assumption of our nature goes backward to the beginning, and forward to the end. But, before we proceed, our doctrine must take a watchful and suspicious glance in two directions.

There are some who find deep satisfaction in the thought that the design of the descent of the Son of God into human nature was to crown it with its predestined perfection; and that the ministry of sorrow was only superadded or grafted on that design. There is much that is attractive in this theory, whether as coldly reasoned out by the schoolmen or as embellished by modern mystical theosophy. But, like some other beautiful theories, it is not without danger. The Christ in this hypothesis must needs come—not, however, Christ then—to make permanent our union with God: the manner of His coming was accidental. "The sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow" (1 Peter i. 11) is a phrase without meaning, or the meaning of which must be inverted. The entire economy of redemption is reconstructed, and can hardly be recognised; something unspeakably precious is gone from the condescension of Christ, and the Father's love has lost its supreme commendation (Romans v. 8). Moreover, we remember that the Lord took not the nature of angels, whether lapsed or steadfast; and must believe that it was in the prevision of our departure from God that the Son of man came, voluntarily and not of necessity, "seeking" that He might "save the lost."

This error, however, does not come near to us: it is, as it were, a false light playing on the distant horizon. There is another which is much more vital, though only a variation of the same: namely, that which in spirit and tendency, if not in words, makes Christ's union with an impersonal nature the essential redemption of the race. In tracing the effects of this error we have to unite two classes of theological teachers who are united in very little else. On the one side are the latitudinarian interpreters of Christ's work, who behold in the indivisible Person "the root of our humanity," one whose abiding contact with our nature as such sends virtue into all its members, virtue which if trusted in will renew and sanctify the soul and make men as gods. The sure result of such a view of Christ's Person is to soften and lower if not to destroy the atonement: to open a way of life in which the Cross is not an object of the soul's self-despairing trust, but a symbol of high devotion; a stimulant to holiness, but not a refuge from sin and wrath. On the other side are the teachers whose exaggerated views of sacramental efficacy tend to make the atonement recede before the incarnation as the point of union where the Person of the Redeemer meets the sinner's soul. It is not that the doctrine of the Expiatory Passion is forgotten, or even neglected: their theology is stamped everywhere, written within and without, with the sign of the Cross. But the sure tendency of their system—the most prevalent in Christendom—is to connect the idea of the mediation which has its highest seal in the union between God and our nature too strictly and exclusively with the Person of Christ as

"extending His incarnation" in the souls to whom He sacramentally imparts Himself. To this we shall have to return hereafter.

[13.]

2. Mediation is the intervention of a reconciler. In the body of His flesh our Lord—who is God and man, and in His one Person neither God nor man alone—carried with Him the instrument as well as the pledge of our redemption. "In Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead," and all the fulness of the manhood also,

"bodily." But this is the mystery of His mediating Person, that each nature gives its own virtue to His propitiatory work while that virtue is the result of His intervention as a Third Person.

It is Divine in its worth, human in its appropriateness, Divine-human as reconciling God and man.

(1.) The Divinity of Christ's Divine-human Person gives the offering which He presented on the cross unlimited value and acceptance: the blood which purchased the church was His own blood (Acts xx. 8), and the life which in the effusion of that blood was offered up in sacrifice for human sin was the life of that only-begotten Son whom "the Father spared not." It was an

"offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling saviour” —

unspeakably acceptable and propitiatory—because it was presented by Him of whom the Father had said, when He was on His way to the cross, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Twice we hear this assurance solemnly pronounced over the Son whom He beholds in our nature: first, when He began His way of suffering; and, the second time, when He was transfigured and strengthened for His passion. The third time, when the Father received His spirit, we hear not the words; but it is as if we heard them: we know that the pouring out of His soul unto death was an act of supreme self-sacrifice for the sins of mankind that was precious to the Father in the proportion of the love He bore His eternal Son: that is, in other words, it had a Divine value and infinite merit. This fundamental principle of evangelical doctrine, that the Divinity of the Redeemer gives its value to His ransom price, can never be argued away from theology. We need not make the most distant approach to the ancient heresy that ascribed suffering to God; but we may boldly say that such is the absolute unity of the two natures in Christ that the suffering of His human soul could not be more truly Divine suffering were the tremendous error found to be truth. It is the blood and passion of God: the atonement stands or falls with this. [14.]

But the Person of Christ is human. He is altogether man.

St. Paul's last testimony is, "There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy ii. 5): not indeed, as a corrupt theology asserts, that in His human nature alone He was a mediator; but, His "ransom" being to follow immediately, the ransom price is regarded as paid in that fine gold of the sanctuary, His human life. Timothy, to whom this testimony was given, had probably heard the counterpart version of the same great truth which St. Paul left with the elders of Ephesus: "Feed the church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood" (Acts xx. 28). The perfect humanness of His sacrifice makes it ours: all died in Him (2 Corinthians v. 19).

Though it is trifling with mere words to say, as is sometimes said, that the multitudes of mankind were summed up in Him, yet it is perfectly true that His Divinity gave His human nature a value available for the whole race. As the God-man He paid its penalty for the whole kind of man; as the God-man He offered a sacrifice which was accepted before it was offered, which could not but be accepted, which indeed was provided by the wisdom and love of the Triune God, and offered by the Son Incarnate as the servant of the Divine counsel of redemption.

(2.) But we must now more specifically view the relation of the One Person to this great offering, and some important consequences that depend upon its unity.

This makes the offering of Christ, in the highest sense of the term, a living sacrifice. It is true, and as essential as true, that the Sacred Sufferer stooped under the weight of the sins of mankind; felt Himself for one eternal moment forsaken of God; and gave up His spirit, or, as men say, died, as an expiation of human guilt, a propitiation of Divine wrath against sin, and satisfaction to the claims of inviolable justice. But the law of unity in His Person demands that even in dying He should live. The power of the Godhead still sustained the existence of Him who in the weakness of the manhood was crucified; and our dying Sacrifice was at the very same time our living Redeemer. The original union of such vast antitheses in His Person brings with it a multitude of other reconciliations of opposites, and this among the rest. The Victim who expiates sin by suffering its penalty is at the same moment the Representative of a delivered mankind and the Deliverer whose ransom-price is the power of a new life. Thus He secures at one and the same moment all the ends of Divine justice, in the salvation of man and the vindication of holy law.

This doctrine effectually silences the objections often and in many forms urged against the vicarious atonement which lies at the foundation of the Christian Faith. The saying of Scripture concerning the blood of bulls and of goats being unable to redeem (Hebrews x. 4), has been turned against the blood of our Saviour's human nature, as if it also "could not take away sin."

And the objector would be justified in his challenge were it not for the precious truth which our doctrine sustains, that it is the Saviour's living Self which avails for us whether on the cross or before the throne. The sacrifice offered for us was not simply the blood that was shed; that only carried with it a sacred life. Nor was it simply the life that was poured out; that was to be valued only by the Person who offered it. But it was the living Person of the Christ Himself, who "is the Propitiation for our sins," as St.. John's last testimony tells us in the most express and affecting manner. But this will be made still more evident if we consider the Indivisible Person in relation to three ideas underlying the atonement, —its vicarious nature, its representative bearing, and its personal realization through union with Christ.

The very soul of the doctrine of atonement is its substitutionary character; that taken away, the whole circle of New Testament phraseology—not only in the English translation but in the original—would require to be fundamentally changed: it is adapted to a vicarious intervention, and to no other. But such a doctrine can rest only upon the undivided Person who may be at once a substitute for the race and take the place of the individual sinner. However little we understand the impersonality of the nature assumed by the God-man, we are bound to believe this, that He bore the curse that rested upon the sin of the race. In words that we cannot use too often, provided we use them reverently, He was made " sin for us" (2 Corinthians v.

21). His person was vast enough to be a counterpoise to all mankind, and to offer an atonement that has been accepted for the world—the world of all actual and all possible sinners." Behold,"

said the Baptist, "the Lamb of God, which beareth the sin of the world:" the antitype of the Jewish vicarious lamb, but taking the place of both Jews and Gentiles; a substitute for mankind, but One whose living Person beareth away the sins that are atoned for, and sets free the guilty race. It is not supposed that any human words can lighten much the weight of mystery that is here.

But it may be said with confidence that the doctrine is possible only on the assumption that the nature of man is in Christ the Atoning Reconciler. A personal man in union with Christ might save himself, but not another: man's nature in Him may be the substitute of the whole sinning nature of man. And it is the glorious doctrine of Scripture that it has been accepted as such.

It has availed in its substitutionary passion for all the world, and for every sinner that rejets it not. St. Paul has left two words which express all this: each is used only once, aud wonderful is their force when combined: He "gave Himself a ransom in the stead of all," and He "gave Himself for me." Himself is the strength of both (1 Timothy ii. 6, Galatians ii. 20).

But the individual bearing of this suggests at once the representative character of the atoning Person: not indeed as displacing the vicarious, but as qualifying it and filling out its meaning, or as being another form of stating it. The very idea of a Divine-human Person is essentially connected with a Representative of the race whom each may claim as a Representative of himself. He did not, apart from us and before we existed, assume our place, and bear our doom, and secure our salvation. To a certain extent all this He did; but the Scripture places another view more steadfastly before us: namely, that He now represents in heaven the race of man, on that account highly favoured notwithstanding the cry of its sins; and that He specially represents the soul and the cause of each. He is the true guardian angel of everyone of us in the presence of the Father; and this He is in virtue of the personality which our doctrine gives to Him who bears our nature in heaven. He is not the Substitute of God but His Representative; and not otherwise our Substitute than as our Representative also.

Still further is the vicarious atonement qualified, and at the same time perfected as a doctrine, by the scriptural teachings which make the Person of Christ and that of the Christian one in a mystical union. Relying upon the acceptance of an offering presented by the Redeemer in his stead, and trusting to a living Representative in heaven, the believer goes still further, and in the very essence of his faith makes Christ his own. United by that faith with the Person of his Lord, the Saviour's sacrifice becomes his. "I am crucified with Christ,"

sets forth the finished secret of the atonement, without which no theory of it is complete. By remembering that the Person of Christ is not an abstract nature, with which in the nebulous language of much modern theology the Christian is supposed to become impregnated, but a living Person, perfect communion with whom is established by His Spirit, we avoid the perversion of this great truth and receive all its benefit. "We are partakers with Christ," both in His death and in His life, because He is pleased to identify us with Himself, and the Father beholds us accordingly "graced," as the apostle says, that is, pardoned and accepted in the Beloved (Ephesians i. 6).

Once more, the unity of our Saviour's Person suggests a reflection which may appropriately be considered before we proceed to the Mediatorial Ministry: our redemption was not an experiment that might have failed. On any other theory than that of the one Indivisible Christ, there could be no absolute assurance of this. The Nestorian Redeemer—who reappears in Irvingite and other theories—might in the final possibilities of His probation have yielded to temptation, and failed as the first Adam failed. The Son of God might have been constrained to leave the temple of our humanity desolate as He left the temple of Judaism; or, to adopt the favourite figures of these teachers, might have folded and laid aside the vesture rent under the pressure of unlimited test. Most intimate fellowship between God and a man is known to have been sometimes interrupted and broken; and so might it have been, say these too timid or too daring theorists, in the case of Jesus. Hence they place the Redeemer under a contingent probation; and our salvation was the result of a successful warfare in which either party might have succumbed.

All this is required by the current theories of a union, between Christ and a representative man. Bound by their error, they know not what they say, and are forgiven. But it is the glory of the Saviour's Person that thus it could not be with Him. He came under the Divine necessity of suffering, redeeming the race, and thus entering His glory (1 Peter i. 2). We feel all this as we read the record of His woes. We cannot suppose ourselves in fear lest He should fail to come back again from the wilderness of temptation; we cannot suppose ourselves trembling lest the three hours darkness should leave us after all unsaved. We know that He is working out for us a predestined salvation; and that, by virtue of the hypostatic union of the Divine and human in His Person, the conflict for us that redemption demanded could have no other end than victory. [15.]

3. All this leads to the third and broader aspect of Mediation which represents Christ's Person as achieving on earth and in heaven the union between God and man. We rise, if such a word may be used, from the incarnation as a pledge of peace, and the atonement as the redemption of that pledge, to the mediatorial ministry of our Lord Himself in which both are united.

(1.) As to His work generally, the process of our Lord's redeeming life can be understood, or be harmonized into perfect consistency, only so long as we steadily keep in view the unity of His Person. He was Man; but how could mortal man, of ever so high a strain, and ever so mightily strengthened from above, accomplish the mission on which our Redeemer entered, and "finish the work given Him to do?" He was more than mortal man: He was God. But how could God give Divine perfection to a work wrought only through a creature? Every act of Deity is performed only by Deity; as all His works are known to God alone from the beginning, so they all are accomplished only by Himself. Our redemption is in its entireness a Divine act, wrought by a man who is God. This leads us once more, and directly in relation to the Saviour's life, to the mystery of His descent into our flesh.

"He made Himself of no reputation:" made Himself, be it ever remembered; His humiliation to our nature was a Divine act, the link between the Divine omnipotence that created and upholds all things, and the same Divine omnipotence that redeemed the world and purged our sins (Colossians I. 16, 17; Hebrews i. 2). Hence the taking our flesh cannot in strict propriety be termed a humiliation. But, having assumed it, or rather in the act of its assumption, the Divine-human humiliation began. Then was the mystery of the exinanition slowly, awfully, triumphantly unrolled before the eyes of all. But how the incarnate Lord of glory ceased from the display of His glory, from the use or acknowledgment of His inseparable attributes, will be for ever an unfathomable secret. [16.]

But the manner of its exhibition is as plain as the mystery of it is incomprehensible. From the conception of His human nature to the moment of His resurrection, the Incarnate Person is

"led of the Spirit," who, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is the ever-blessed Agent common to Both. Occasionally, and in most memorable words, our Lord still vindicates the interior secret of His Divine independence: "My Father worketh hitherto and I work," and "I and My Father are One" (John v. 17, x. 30).

But generally His language is of another strain. "I came down from heaven not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me" (John vi. 38). Hence His Divine will and His human blend into one Messianic Will that executes the commandment received of the Father (John x. 18, xiv. 31). He surrenders Himself wholly to the Spirit, His Comforter and ours. His incarnation being, as already said, His own act, for "He came in flesh," as well as that of the Holy Ghost, who prepared for Him His body, from that moment onwards the Spirit is the Disposer and Director of His life. By Him He was trained, anointed, led to His temptation, empowered to work miracles, taught of the Father; through the eternal Spirit He offered Himself a sacrifice, appointed His apost1es, and was sealed through the resurrection (Luke iv. 18; Matthew iii. 16, iv. l; Hebrews ix. 14; Acts i. 4; Romans i. 4). This was the glorious humiliation of the Mediatorial Person, "in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," that all He did and suffered upon earth was by the Ho1y Ghost (Acts i. 8). When all things written of Him had their end He laid aside the garments of His servitude, and, as "Master and Lord," shed forth the Spirit who had been just shed forth on Him, as the "gift" which He had received in His human nature "for men"

(Ephesians iv. 8).

(2.) But the twofold Estate of the Christ, His humiliation and His glory, must be viewed in re1ation to the unity of His Person, and the Righteousness which He accomplished and imparts.

In His humbled condition—and, in this sense, "in the days of His flesh," though in another sense the days of His flesh continue for ever—our Substitute and Representative rendered an obedience, in life and unto death, in which His active and passive righteousness are one. It is of great importance that we should maintain the unity of the one obedience: we must not rend the garments of His righteousness, and give one half to cover our guilt and the other to cover our unholiness. And it is of equal importance that we make it the righteousness of His one undivided Person: it was His, and not ours in any sense; for us indeed, and availing in the economy of mercy for our pardon and sanctification, but still His own obedience, and not another's: offered for the race, but not by the race; for me, the sinner, but not by me in Him. "Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered" (Hebrews v. 8). This states the fact as such, and declares it to be a wonderful fact.

It could not be strange that the Incarnate Son should exhibit a full and finished holiness,—that He "learned" only as a necessary development of His new human life; but that He should, as the Divine-human Son, learn the obedience of submission through suffering, that He should have learned that obedience which was prescribed in no moral law, written, or unwritten,—was a mystery, solved only by the unity of His Person. In Divine strength, made perfect in human weakness, He exhibited the perfection of holiness, and learned the perfection of sorrow. For man, and in man's nature, He magnified the law, and made it honourable, down to the obedience that died in human integrity. For God, and His righteousness, He endured the holy wrath of love against sin, which entered with infinite subtilty into His spirit from the moment He left the Jordan, and never ceased to pervade, and depress, and rend His soul—save for a few unspeakable moments—

down to the time when the great controversy ceased, and perfect expiation cried, It is finished!" We cannot here too jealously guard the Indivisible Person. Always He is rendering a perfect satisfaction in His holiness, whilst He is rendering perfect satisfaction in atonement. In virtue of His Divine-human Person, He sinks under wrath whilst He is victorious over it. There is no meaning in one half of the New Testament if we do not bear in mind that the Son of God is inseparably the Son of man.

Especially is the last scene on any other assumption incomprehensible. We see a total ruin, which yet we know to be a perfect restoration. There seems to be nothing but the cry of utter abandonment; and our representatives can only say, "We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.” But on the other side, where the sun is not darkened, we hear the cry of victory that fills the universe. There death receives the living Lord, as John the Baptist once received Him, "Comest Thou to me?" surrendered the keys of Hades, and joined the procession of His triumph. "Truly this man"—once more to quote the Centurion—"was the Son of God."

In His exalted estate the One Person is transferred to heaven, "where He was before." The human nature is assumed into the glory which the Son "had with the Father before the world was" (John xvii. 5), and is itself so glorified as to be capable of sustaining that weight of glory. Thus changed, the Divine-human Person must needs be received by the heavens; earth could no longer have supported His presence. And all His offices above require the doctrine of His unity as God and man. There He presents His sacred Self as being by His very presence our sufficient Friend, and Advocate, and Forerunner. But still He is Man and God, and this is the real "wonder in heaven." Both the voice and the hands of man are assigned to Him with peculiar emphasis. His presence a1one is an irresistible plea for every man that lives; but His "intercession" at the right hand of God is added, not as one of the terms that theology has been obliged to invent, but as one of the leading expressions of Scripture itself. And so it is with regard to His government, the peculiar administration of which, as foreshadowed by Daniel in the night visions and described by St. John in the full light of day, is human. That high supremacy to which St. Paul tells us (Philippians ii. ) the Lord is now exalted could belong only to the One Person, who is the Son of man, and absolute over the human race, and also the Son of God, whose unbounded authority makes it appropriate that not man only, but all creatures in every part of the universe, should bow before His name.

(3.) The end of our Saviour's mediatorial ministry receives important light from the true doctrine of the one Divine-human Person. His last function in the administration of our human affairs, the last act to be recorded in the chronicles of our King, will be the universal judgment. The Father "hath committed all judgment to the Son," "because He is the Son of man" (John v.): judgment over all angels or men, as God-man; especially the destiny of all human beings as God-man. No severance of the God from the man can be for a moment permitted here. Judgment, universal judgment, penetrating the secrets of all hearts, and following its inquisition by eternal awards, like vengeance,

"belongeth unto God: "with reverence be it spoken, no mere man could be appointed to that office (Acts xvii. 31). Yet what heart of man does not instinctively rejoice, apart from every theological consideration, that all judgment is committed to the

"Son of Man?”

When the judgment is past, and all enemies are subjected, the Son also shall subject Himself, and God shall be all in all.

But it is obvious that He who is one Person, and in whose Being there is not a distinct human personality, can never renounce His human nature: not in that sense will "God be all in all." There is no manhood in Christ that can be renounced, even supposing Him—a thing impossible—to be weary of our fellowship, or the Father to demand His Son's relinquishment of us—a thing incredible. His manhood is part of His being: "He cannot deny Himself." The figures that are sometimes used,—as if He inhabited a human temple, or was clothed with our nature as with a garment, or was joined to a son of Mary—are all misleading, and should be very cautiously used. Having wrought so marvelous a deliverance in the human panoply we gave Him, He would not ungird Himself at the end, even if He could. But He cannot: we were with Him in His temptations, and He will not forsake us when we rejoice in His kingdom.

The mediatorial authority which will end is that universal and, as it were, sovereign and independent sway which the Incarnate Son exercises in heaven as such. That it is said He will renounce: He will be subject, or subject Himself; preserving His Divine authority still in the act of that subjection, but ceasing to act in His one Person as Lord, because the function of that specific lordship shall expire. The Son will a second time

"empty Himself," not of His human nature, but of that special authority which He acquired in our nature, and which was the reward of His Divine-human obedience.

Lastly, the doctrine of our Saviour's everlasting union with our race, as a union which is more like identity than union,—

explains how "God will be all in all" at the same time that "the Son Himself will be subject” (1 Corinthians xv.). The assumption of our nature was itself a subordination of the Son to the Father; and it may be boldly declared to be impossible that that subordination should cease. But how then is it said that at that time, and not till "then," the Son will be subjected? Because, till then, the high reward that made the name of Jesus the symbol and bond of authority throughout the universe will not have been surrendered; and till then the idea of subjection as belonging to the incarnate estate is lost in the glory of an unlimited dominion. But the hour will come when the dignity of that intervening reward shall cease. That throne "in the midst of which was the Lamb" will be abdicated; and that one among His

"many crowns," perhaps all the many crowns there signified, will be laid aside. The dignity of the Eternal Son in the Holy Trinity will remain: as in the record of His life upon earth, so in that second and unwritten record, there is the silent and implied reservation of His essential Deity. And therefore "God shall be all in all:" the Triune God. The Godhead unchanged and incapable of change will be the sole authority, without the intervention of mediatorial dominion. But the Son—the Son incarnate—will be by the necessity of His early, unrevoked, and irrevocable gift of Himself to us in His One Person, subject for ever. The indivisible unity demands this solution of what is otherwise an insurmountable difficulty. Urged by the keen edge of that difficulty, some adventurous theologians in early times—

made heretics unawares by their exaggerated and self-destructive reverence—insisted that the Son in the Holy Trinity would in some sense be absorbed; and God, the Triune God indeed, but without a Father and a Son, be all in all. There is no need of any such artifice of exposition. The economical Trinity is the absolute Trinity. But the Son Incarnate is ours: "the same yesterday"—

yes, yesterday, for His personal identity is the same—"to-day, and for ever." St. Paul did not say, he could not mean to say—

for he knew too well the value of the gift to our nature in Christ, and the truth or the everlasting condescension—that the subordination of the Incarnate Persou ceased when He was "highly exalted." That special exaltation we may with strict propriety regard as in itself ending with the day of Christ; and it will then be seen that our Saviour, God-man, being ours to eternity, will not deny Himself, but accept in His One Personality the full consequences of His stupendous act of condescension and be subject with lis for ever.

III. Another very important branch of dogmatic theology is deeply affected by the doctrine of Christ's indivisible Person: that which treats of His presence, sacramental and otherwise, within the church.

1. According to the doctrine already established, our Lord is at once in heaven and on earth: as touching His Godhead, He is on earth; as touching His manhood, He is not out of heaven; but as touching His One adorable Person, He is either, or both, interchangeably according to the measure and kind of His operation. "Lo, I am with you alway" was spoken to those who were to "see Him no more:" the Lord, who never distinguishes between His Deity and His manhood, does not instruct His disciples to believe that in a higher nature He would be present.

At this time of final explanations He would not have left this unspoken had He not purposed to lay emphasis on His One Personality: "I am with you alway!" Yet "tbe heavens have received Him until the times of restitution; "and this states another and counterpart aspect, though not an opposite one, of the same truth: here it is not said that the heavens have received His glorified human nature, but, most expressly, that they have received Him. Between these two decisive utterances the word of the angels, interpreting the ascension and promising the return, mediates: "this same Jesus." Many other instances might be given of the same duplicate style, which bas only one solution, the undivided and indivisible personality of the Lord.

On the one hand, the veil is rent, and His pervading presence makes of the upper and the lower courts one temple. Our Deliverer, stronger than Samson, not only entered the everlasting doors, He hath lifted them up and carried them away for ever; and now the "house of God remains," but no longer "the gate of heaven." On the other hand, the ascension wove for His manhood another veil behind which our Forerunner stands, a veil impenetrable as the thick curtains of the sanctuary to sight, but to faith so subtile as to keep no secret hid. Meanwhile, there is, above and below, but one Christ, who rebukes every attempt to separate His Deity from His manhood, for the sake of whatever theory made; who confounds the devices of those who say, "Lo, here is Christ Divine," "Lo, there is the human Christ," by the one steadfast question which I dare put into His lips, "Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord?"

2. This then is the One and only Real Presence. And the great question immediately arises, how is that presence glorified, shown, manifested, imparted to the faithful within the church? The very terms here employed suggest at once the answer: by the Holy Ghost, who, though He shares not His other saving titles with the Lord, has this in common, to be another Paraclete. "He shall glorify Me" "He shall take of Mine," of all the fulness that is in Me, of all the virtue that goeth from Me, of all the merit of My passion, of all the power of My word, of all the inexhaustible grace of My one Person, "and show it unto you." As "he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," so we hear the unspoken sequel], which however is only a paraphrase of many words that were spoken, "he that receiveth My Spirit receiveth Me also." There is indeed a certain restraint in our Lord's teaching concerning the supremacy of the Holy Ghost as the one mediator between Him and us: a restraint which before the Pentecost was inevitable, for "His hour was not yet come." But

"when He the Spirit of truth is come He shall guide you into all the truth:" as into all truth generally, so also into the full truth concerning Himself in His relations to the Father and the Son in human redemption. Hence we find, and the more carefully we seek the more certainly we find, that in the epistles the Holy Ghost is ever raising Himself up to the level of the Father and the Son, entering as a Third into that awful fellowship of the Two, which, for instance, the High-priestly prayer exhibits. It would not be difficult to quote for the Spirit a parallel of every the profoundest word spoken concerning that fellowship, and concerning the fellowship of saints in God and His Christ. But it is enough, with reference to the present object, to refer to such passages as declare that "he that is joined to Christ is one Spirit," that "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His:" sayings which represent a large class, all running up into one, "the Lord is that Spirit " (2 Corinthians iii. 17).

Whether as speaking to the soul of the believer, or as working within it,—and all His offices may be summed under these two heads—the Holy Ghost is the Representative of the whole and undivided Christ.

All the theories and systems that make union with Christ in the church depend upon an impartation of His glorified Body to the soul, distinct and apart from the indwelling of the Divine Spirit, offend against the dignity and office of "that other Comforter." "If I be a Paraclete," He asks, "where is Mine honour?" His restoration of Himself is in truth sufficient for every need; and Christ gives Himself to us by giving us His Spirit. Nor can it be said that the Holy Ghost exercises His office in forming Christ within the soul, as if He repeated the mystery of the incarnation in every spirit brought to regeneration. There is a sense in which Christ becomes the life as well as the Head of every man; but the indwelling Spirit is the bond of that union, as being Himself within us, "the great Power of God," and not as merely ministering to us from without another's life. Seeking to "bring Christ down from above," and to connect His bodily presence with the sacred elements, these systems cannot avoid disparaging that Sacred Person who, in the unity of the Father and Son, is "the Lord and Giver of life."

Glorifying Christ, the Holy Ghost is Himself also to be glorified. It cannot be questioned that a fruitful source of much of the corruption of the Christian church, wheth6r in doctrine or practice, has been the dishonour done to the Supreme Administrator of that which is a "dispensation of the Spirit."

The charge lies against a number of systems and confessions; including, on the one hand, the carnal Christianity that connects the impartation of Christ with priestly acts; and, on the other, the schemes that introduce a new economy of the Personal Reign to accomplish what the Spirit and all His agencies failed to accomplish. But we have to do only with those which affect the doctrine of the unity of Christ's Person. And these are, of course, the Sacramental theories.

3. The doctrine of Transubstantiation is based upon a theory of the conversion of the Person of the God-man into the sacred symbols of His body and blood, a theory which could not have originated without the aid of Eutychianism. The mystery of the union of the two natures is carried into another region where the Scripture is no longer a guide: the Incarnation, a sealed and determinate and final fact, is "extended" in a manner with which the Holy Ghost has no part. The Romanist doctrine has one element of consistency that is sometimes forgotten when it is compared with variations from it in other communions. Eutychian in its confusion, it does not yield to a Nestorian division of the Divine-human Person: it is the Divinity and the humanity of the whole Christ that is involved in the transubstantiation. But at what a tremendous cost is this consistency maintained! It evades indeed the Capernaite objection, "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” and it avoids the alternative, "How can God give us His flesh to eat?” but it transforms the God-man into human elements of nourishment, and gives Him to man to eat. Our refuge from this error, and its all-pervading effect on Christian theology, is in the truth already insisted on, that Christ becomes ours and we become His only through that Holy Spirit whom He gives us as the common bond of union, and in the reality of whose fellowship we become figuratively members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones." Joined to Christ we are one Spirit.

The Lutheran doctrine of Consubstantiation has some vital notes of difference from the former, but also some perilous points of affinity. It does not escape the Eutychian confusion; since its theory of a Divine ubiquity in the sacred flesh, based upon the "communication of properties" between the two natures, borders upon such a composite of the Divine and the human as it requires incomprehensible refinements to protect from the charge.

And its notion that Christ's life is imparted to us through the sacramental communication of His glorified corporeality (whatever that may mean), present in, and with, and under the unchanged elements, leads plainly to a Nestorian distinction between the God and the man in the Redeemer. Lutheran divinity may protest against this; but in vain: plead as it may, it still makes man's spiritual life dependent on the infusion of a physical Christ whe

"giveth us His flesh to eat.” Meanwhile, we hold fast our unbending principle that we receive no Christ but the whole Christ; precious as His body and blood are, we open our souls to nothing less than Himself, and all the mystery of His undivided Being. And, whether at His table or elsewhere, we wait for Him only according to the laws of the Third great Revelation of God to man: we wait for the Promise of the Father, which is the Promise of Christ, which is the Holy Ghost. [17.]

The doctrine of the Real Presence held by some modern Anglican divines, not without important deviations from that of their fathers, is only a diluted composite between those already referred to. The formularies to which they attach their dogma, a dogma almost too impalpable to deserve the name, are perfectly consistent with the truth of the One Person of Christ. These formularies we condemn not: they are our own. They do not blend the two natures into one, and give it to the faithful in the consecrated elements. They teach that sacramentally all the benefits of the Lord's passion are imparted to the faithful recipient; and that Christ is verily indeed but spiritually given and received: figurative language being used as to the separate effects of the Lord's body and of His blood which is sanctified by scriptural precedent, and well understood by the true instinct of the believer. But the indefinite dogma now prevalent in many parts of the English Church forsakes the ideas of the ceremonial.

It uses the form of sound words; but with a written or unwritten Targum of its own that wavers between the Lateran and the Lutheran doctrines, without the precision of either. Its chief offence, however, as it concerns our present object, is its forgetfulness of the relation between the One Person of Christ, sacramentally brought near in the Eucharistic commemoration, and the Holy Ghost. It speaks indistinctly on other points: for instance, respecting the translation of the Whole Christ into the elements, the actual repetition or extension of the One Sacrifice, and the impartation of the Sacred Body alone to the faithful. They speak indistinctly—we must think of the men and not of the doctrine, for it is only as yet "a tradition of men"—

because on these points they dare not define. But there is no uncertainty about their doctrine of the Holy Ghost. "They limit the Holy One of Christ;" and withdraw Him from His administration of the Redeemer's Person, while they seem to exalt Him in His administration of the Redeemer's kingdom. They maintain that the indwelling of the Divine Paraclete is in the church alone, and that in the individual believer it is only Christ's prerogative to dwell: the Spirit in the body as a great abstraction, Jesus in the man as a corporate reality. Thus they separate at once the Lord from His Spirit, and His Spirit from the Christian, in a manner which their sacramental theory may require, but which the Scripture condemns. The eighth chapter of the Romans seems written on purpose to show that there is no Christ in man but by the Holy Ghost's indwelling. The intercessory Spirit within us answers to the interceding Christ above. And "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His." Whatever the Real Presence Sacramental may be, it can only be by the Holy Ghost.

[18].

Such a Real Presence there doubtless is. The true doctrine of the Person of Christ lends no sanction to the theory of those who go to the opposite extreme, and make the Eucharistic commemoration only the remembrance of an absent Head. An absent Head He cannot be whose Divine-human Person fills heaven and earth. He presides by His Spirit at His own ordinance, which derives all its dignity and grace from that presence. Our earthly sacrament is only a "shadow of the heavenly things;" for in heaven our everlasting High Priest presents Himself always as the memorial of His own passion. Above He stands ever at a sacramental Altar diffusing the propitiation of the sacrifice once presented below. Below He presides only at a table, where He keeps the feast with us, whilst we commemorate His life and death; "in remembrance" not only of what He did and suffered, but

"of Himself," His whole Incarnate Person and work. And, as we thankfully remember His manifestation in our midst, so we sacramentally partake of the benefits of His redemption; partakers, that is, not of His body and of His blood in any sense whatever, but "of Christ," of all that Christ is by His Spirit to the believing soul. We sacramentally receive Him; the symbols which He consecrated are pledges, then and there exchanged between Him and us, that we have the blessings of acceptance through His blood, and sanctification through His Spirit, sealed to us in the sacred rite. In other words, they are a continual ratification of our union with His Holy Person through the Spirit. And they are tokens and pledges of a bestowment of grace, of all grace, through other than sacramental channels, until His return shall render sacramental ordinances and the whole circle of the means of grace no longer needful.

To sum up what has been said on this subject: the present dispensation is in the hands of the Mediator, as He unites God and man, heaven and earth; but upon earth, and until what is emphatically called "the Coming of Christ," the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Spirit of the Father and of His Christ, is supreme. And this is true, not only of the church which is the body of our Lord and informed by His Spirit, but of every rite, ordinance and administration in the church; and it is equally true of the relation of the Redeemer to all the individuals who make up in their gradual accumulation and several increase the complete mystical fellowship. The New Testament doctrine, like its most eminent expositor, knows not "Christ after the flesh;"

the long-continued corruptions of Christianity have known Him after the flesh, and the reform of those corruptions has kept to too great an extent that one corrupt element; nor will the body be restored to perfect soundness until it cries, with reference to that misunderstood Christ, "Now henceforth know we Him no more."

IV. It is a pleasant transition to the bearing of our doctrine on our individual relation tQ the Redeemer. "The Head of every man is Christ;" a profound truth, which has no meaning, or at best only a shrivelled meaning, on any other theory than that which has been maintained. As the Saviour, Glorifier and Head of every individual Christian He is not God, nor is He man, but He is the God-man. His indivisible Person itself is the centre of personal religion as it is expounded in the Christian covenant; and the doctrine of that indivisible Person gives its clear explanation to each definition of that religion as it is dwelt upon in the New Testament. As the God-man He claims the allegiance of every soul; as such He is the express Object of Christian faith; the spiritual life is the result of union with Him through the Spirit; our duty is prescribed by Him as a Divine-human Lawgiver; He presents in His Incarnate Person the example of Christian perfection; He is the Elect Object of all the affections of the soul, from adoration to human enthusiasm; and, finally, He is the end and crown and exceeding great reward of the soul's probation. This is a large and most important assemblage of truths, which will give a refreshing relief from a strain too didactic and polemic. But, lest the relief itself should prove wearisome, only a very slight review of these can be attempted now.

1. "All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth:" this was our Lord's final proclamation of His authority as the Incarnate Redeemer. Since that power was given to Him, it was not as God that He spoke; and such absolute and unlimited sway over all human interests, and more than human interests, could not be the prerogative of any mortal man. The Saviour's Me, therefore, is here, as from the beginning, His Divine-human Person. To Him, whom as God, they regarded with awful adoration, and before whom as man, their loyalty bowed down, that first Christian congregation on the Mountain in Galilee offered the earnest of all Christian homage. To Him "every knee must bow;"

and the message of the gospel is as earnest in demanding submission to His authority, as it is in urging men to accept His salvation. The Mediator is, as we saw above, God in man, and not merely between God and man: no principle requires more constant enforcement than this in every exhibition of the Redeemer's claims. "Repentance towards God" is no other than repentance towards God in Christ; sin, if not made "more exceeding sinful"

by His coming, has derived its keenest aggravation, and more than that its essential definition, from the rejection of God brought near in Christ (John xvi. 9). The Holy Spirit, reproving the world of sin, was to make this His one convicting charge, "that they believe not in Me." In these His last words concerning human sin, we cannot but feel that our Lord is not referring simply to man's rejection of His claims as a Messenger sent from God, but to his rejection of the Supreme Moral Governor in His Person. This was the conviction that pierced the heart of Saul at the gate of Damascus (Acts ix. 4, 5); at the gate of heaven

"the chief of sinners" has no other definition of his sin (1 Tim.

i. 13); and he is a representative of all transgressors who coming back through Christ to God find God in Christ. The God-man is the revelation at once of our sin and of our forgiveness, of our danger and of our hope, of our wrath and of our peace: "shut up to Christ," even though regarded as wearing the form of man, we are still in the presence of our Judge and of our Saviour. Whether as sinners or as believers, we are in the hands of Jesus alone, of Jesus who is man who is God.

2. As such He is the appropriate Object of the Christian faith that saves. Faith in all its exercises believes a record concerning a Divine Person whom it trusts. Under both these aspects it finds in the Incarnate Jesus its fit object: in its peculiar Christian characteristic supremely in Him. The principle of human trust has in Christ a human person to rely upon: a Man, mighty to deliver and to save, towards whom the heart of mortal feebleness may go out with an instinctive and familiar, and as it were natural, appeal for help. But this fellow of our race to whom our human trust clings is God's Fellow also, is God Himself in the flesh; and man's human trust is justified by the presence of the Great Power of God in Him. All this our Saviour meant when He said, "Ye believe in God, believe also in Me" (John xiv. 1): words the profound depth of which is too often lost to us in the abundance of the revelations which they introduce. God in the New Testament is not represented as the Object of Purely evangelical faith, apart from His Son: His Son, in some aspect of His revelation, and work, and passion, and resurrection, is always at hand to give that faith its Christian character. But Christ as the Object of this faith is always Christ in His Undivided Person: we must not think of reserving for the God in Christ the trust that needs a Divine support, and for the man in Christ the hero-worshiping enthusiasm of human confidence in the "Founder of Christianity." His Person is One; and every outgoing of trust in His word, and His work, and His presence, meets the sympathy of a heart as human as our own, whilst it brings down to us all the succours of the eternal God.

3. There is no view of personal religion more familiar in the teaching of the Holy Ghost than that which traces its origin, growth, and perfection to union with Christ. "He is our life:"

not as God, nor as man, but as the Incarnate Person in whom human nature is sanctified in an unlimited fulness, out of which all we receive (John i. 16). Our jealousy for the honour of the Spirit of Christ and of God, and our anxiety to defend Christian doctrine from the error of supposing our life to consist in an assimilation of Christ's humanity infused into us through His own Divine energy, have by a sad necessity thrown something of restraint over our statements of the direct personal union of the soul with the very Person of Christ. But, having done enough to obviate perversion, we may take our pleasant revenge. There is a union, the description of which almost reaches the language of identification, between Christ Himself and the believer "one Spirit with Him," which we must allow nothing to impair in our estimate of the Christian privilege. To take this away would be to dim the glory of the New Testament; to lower it is to check the tenderest pulsation of New Testament life. The strength of the new nature is a Divine power within; but it comes to us through our union with that Universal Person whose common Spirit is given to each. "I live, yet not I, Christ liveth in me," is the language of St. Paul the Christian mystic, speaking then as ever the words of truth and soberness.

St. Paul the Christian mystic, I say. The union which he here rejoices in, as the satisfaction of all his desires, is the deep reality of that which mysticism in every age, and almost in every zone of the religious earth, has yearned after as an unattainable ideal. True, there has been a mysticism which, in its despair, has gone out after an abstract, formless, silent, and Pantheistic God: missing the Divine personality at the outset, it has ended in the extinction of the soul's own personality in the vast abyss. But a better and a truer mysticism has set its aspiration on a Form that should bring God near to man, in a Divine Person "bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh," whose mind might have fellowship with our mind, and with whose heart our heart might be brought into harmony and rest. In Jesus we have this Object. The God-man whom mysticism has been ever, consciously or unconsciously, and always ignorantly, worshiping, Him the gospel declares. In the Incarnate Christ the human spirit finds its God, who created it for Himself and out of whom it can never find repose; but that God is "brought nigh to us," so nigh that we can see Him, touch Him, embrace Him, and, as it were, lean upon His bosom.

4. But Christian mysticism is "under the law to Christ."

Our Divine~human Lawgiver issues the whole code of His new legislation in His undivided Person. He is God and He is man: like Moses, "He is appointed of God over all His house;" but, unlike Moses, He is the "Son over His own house," who builded it and is therefore God (Hebrews iii. 3,4). The Christian laws proceed from One who is a human lawgiver, conversant with all our interests, and relations and duties, and whose most blessed enforcement of those laws is His own condescension to obey them.

But in uttering them He is armed with Divine authority for the sanction of every ordinance, while a Divine infallibility guards every word of His mouth. To separate the Indivisible Person is most fatal here. If Jesus is ever "left alone" when He speaks, or if He sometimes speaks only as man; if, as some modern theorists think, He was only by degrees replenished with His Godhead, or, as others, was for a season limited to the exercise of a human intellect: what guarantee have we for the perfection and integrity of His system of doctrine and of ethics? Who will tell us when the human voice spoke fallibly, and when we may implicitly trust the Divine? Whilst we hold fast the human development of our Saviour's human nature, with all processes of growth and final limitation, we must not limit His legislatorial function to that lower nature; we must believe that "He speaketh the words of God," being, on that seat which is higher than Moses', God-man always; and when, although a Son, He is interdicted by His commission from speaking all that we might desire to know—for instance, concerning the day and hour of the judgment—we may be sure that He will not fail to tell us so. It must ever be borne in mind that the mysterious law of our Saviour's restraint in the exercise, or in the possession as it respects His human manifestation, of His Divine perfections, is unknown to us. But not one of His words can fall to the ground or ever be superseded or corrected by higher teaching. He is to us the Divine-human Teacher: a human prophet "like unto Moses,"

but in all that He speaketh "He speaketh from heaven."

5. The Incarnate Lord, once more, presents to us a supreme pattern of excellence. His redeeming passion as the ground of our hope, and His supreme authority as the rule of our life, are not more clearly set before us in the New Testament than His moral character as the standard of our imitation. And, as we better apprehend both the former when we base them upon the undivided Person, so also the Lord's example is most fully understood when we regard it as presented by the God-man. None but God is good; and no final standard of goodness can be set before the creature but one that is Divine. But man cannot copy excellence that is not human. As we are bidden to imitate the angels only in qualities which they possess in common with us, or in points which concern the obedience common to them and to us, so also the supreme Divine example must be humanized before it can measure our excellence or direct our pursuit of it. Even in the Old Testament, where the incarnation was as yet unrevealed or disguised, the character of God which was made the model of imitation was brought down into near resemblance to that of man.

Whilst nothing was more fearfully forbidden than the presentation of the Divine object of worship under any form that might suggest the creaturely, especially the human, it cannot well be denied that the ethical character of Jehovah was presented under human aspects and with human attributes. And this may be transferred to our adorable Saviour. He presents us by the necessity of His Divine nature, according to His own testimony as confirmed by the Holy Ghost throughout the New Testament, an example of sinless and consummate perfection. All that we can conceive of good in God is the law of His life. The God of the Old Testament, the Jehovah of the law and of the Psalms and of the Prophets, reappears and comes nearer to us in the Lord Christ: the same in all holiness, whether the holiness of severity or of love, whether the holiness that communicates Himself or that which guards His rights. But then in Him this goodness is placed before us in a strictly human presentment. He sanctifies our nature before our eyes, or rather displays its sanctity, from infancy through all stages to the end. What we see is enough to command our faith in that which we see not of His human excellence. Devotion towards God could be carried no farther than it was carried by His days and nights of prayer; and hyperbole itself fails in describing His charity. It is unbecoming and a theological irreverence to measure His holy career by the standard of the Commandments severally and in order. But that one which unites the Two Tables can hardly fail to suggest itself when we regard His human perfection. The fifth may stand for all the rest: He has made it, not only the first commandment with promise, but in some sense the first in blessing. As the earliest hour of His human responsible obedience showed the loveliness of His filial reverence, and all the more because it seemed to come into collision with a higher law; so His last hour bore witness to the same holy filial love, and all the more because the burden of the whole world was then upon His soul. But it is dangerous to take the first step in this path of meditation. I must leave it, almost thankful to escape from a burden too great, in order to enforce the necessity of remembering here the Indivisible Person of our Example.

His excellence must not be regarded with an exaggerated and too distant reverence, as simply Divine. This carries it out of the region of human imitation altogether; and, though we keep our Saviour, we lose our Pattern. It is possible to make our Lord's excellence a merely Apollinarian beauty of holiness, a Divine and supernatural, or superhuman, display of goodness which seems and only seems to be wrought out in a human life. This is an error which insensibly affects the estimate formed of Christ by vast numbers of His most faithful disciples: their very reverence and loyalty leading them into it. They forget that, while "God is manifest in the flesh" before them, both sides of this wonderful saying must be equally emphasised, its last word not less than its first. The error is, if any error may be, venial: but its consequences are very evil. The beauty of our Lord's grace and submission, and devotion and charity, is infected by a subtile Docetism that makes it little better than a Divine excellence which is not human at all; or, if human in any sense, so altogether unattainable that it must be left for admiration and wonder until it is reflected and toned down in the example of His saints. This mistake robs the most pathetic scenes in the gospel of their deepest meaning, from the wilderness to the expiring cry; and it deprives His humble imitators of what is to them their noblest stimulant, the reality of His human example.

On the other hand, the recoil from this error leads to what is still more dangerous, and much more grievous to our reverence.

When our Lord's human moral development is studied too much apart, and unguarded by the unity of His Person, the result is an indecorous familiarity with the secrets of His lower nature, and a forgetfulness of the wide distinction, in all things even that are common, between Him and us. It is possible to enter too curiously into the mystery of our Saviour's humiliation, and, under pretence of maintaining the identity between His manhood and ours, to give Him our sinful flesh to combat with. This tendency is very manifest in the present day. In earlier and medieval times the veritable humanness of our Lord's development was too much forgotten. But, in its eagerness to secure a new found truth, our own age is going to the other extreme. In recent "Lives of Jesus" we see much in this respect that is to be deplored; and not only in them, for many of our most evangelical commentaries seem to think it necessary for the explanation of His human excellence that the Divine Son in Christ should leave Him for a season. They seek to surprise His humanity as it were alone; and think that He can be no example of human virtue who has not attained it in the human way, thus in short making the Lord "a man of like passions with ourselves." Nestorianism, not to say Humanitarianism, lurks hardly disguised in their pages.

Let us be on our guard, and remember certain Divine prerogatives thrown around the flesh of our Lord's humbled estate. So low He never sank as to feel our sin stirring within Him, or to pray for the suppression of any evil in the manhood that He had taken.

The Holy Ghost brought our Lord a nature that was as free from sin as Adam's, and to be made by the assumption of the Son more inaccessible to sin than his. There was no germ of evil in Him to which temptation might appeal: "in Him was no sin," and by a Divine necessity no capacity for sin. He "came to destroy the works of the devil," but not in Himself: had it been in Himself, that would have isolated Him from us all; for the destruction of a man's own sin is enough for his own probation. He was

"separate from sinners" (Hebrews vii. 26); "and was tempted in all points like as we are," only so far as He could be tempted

"without sin" of His own, though the Bearer of others' sin (Hebrews iv. 15). It was not possible that He could fall. Our Redeemer did not first redeem Himself: the Holy Ghost was the only Redeemer of His humanity, which indeed needed no redemption as His. A Divine Person in the flesh raised our nature into Himself that we might rise through Him. Other examples, not His, show us the path of return to virtue, and the secret of the suppression of latent vice: that was no part of our Redeemer's function. His temptation to sin was only the trial that proved His sinlessness; and at those points where His example fails His virtue comes to our help. As much of His Messianic obedience was altogether out of the sphere of our imitation, so much of our obedience as sinners conquering sin finds no pattern in Him. Our doctrine of the Indivisible Person is urgent here; and I follow it where it leads. Nor will I accept the subterfuge that the Divine necessity of His holiness was consistent with His own absolute freedom as man. It is hard to deny this; moral liberty is the glory of man; but when this word is used of Christ, in His Incarnate Person, it must be used with the same abatement and with the same reverent glorification of the word as when we say that God is free. [19.]

6. Once more, the Person of our Lord claims as such the believer's adoration, worship, homage, and, in a word, perfect love, which is the highest form of worship. The controversy as to the propriety of offering prayer to Jesus, whose human nature might seem to forbid it, has been more or less agitated in every age. It has entered into every controversy concerning the Person of Christ. But it is a very petty controversy. Doubtless, in the economical relations of the Holy Trinity in redemption, prayer is offered to the Father through the Son by the Holy Ghost; and praise as the counterpart of prayer ascends in the same order. But who can approach the Sacred Person in the gospels, the three as well as the fourth, without feeling that He demands such love and such creaturely incense of the heart as God alone can claim. Who can read the epistles without perceiving that there is literally no restriction in the homage which the regenerate soul may offer to the Lord and the Lord will accept.

The highest law is the love of God; but the sternest sanction of that law is the anathema on him that loves not Jesus Christ. The Indivisible Person explains all this. Whilst the distinction between the Father and the Incarnate Lord of mediation is carefully maintained, the Scripture never forgets that the Mediator is, in Himself and apart from acts of mediation, God as well as man: it therefore leaves the Christian to the freedom of His loyal effusions, which cannot go astray in their ascent, though they may descend too low. Where there can be no transgression, there is no law. We are not exhorted to distinguish carefully and separate off the human person, when our souls would worship and call upon the name of Jesus. Nor are we bidden to abstract His Divine majesty when we fix our thought upon His human form—so far as we can do that—and to reserve the pure affections of our human hearts for any Man Christ Jesus.

He, in His one Person, is our Lord; and the spirit of the ancient psalm unites all human loyalty and adoration for God in the words of its command and permission, "Worship thou Him!" (Psalm xlv.

ll.) As His Person is a mystery absolutely unique, revealed to faith, so it evokes in the heart a perfectly unique sentiment and feeling, as if by the creation of a new Christian sense. It excites through, the Holy Ghost a love that is at once perfectly human and perfectly Divine; and it prompts us to offer to Christ a devotion which is, so to speak, His alone: not, however, to be offered to Him in some side sanctuary where lower worship reigns, but in the undimmed glory of the temple of God. Such words as these, however, labour hopelessly to express their meaning. All may be summed in one injunction: Let not the Person of Christ be divided either in our faith or in our devotion. Let not the man be too familiar to us, or we fall into certain Pietistic excesses; let not the God be too overwhelmingly contemplated, lest we forget that Christianity is not Deism, but the revelation of God in man.

7. Lastly, the Divine-human Lord is as such, and as such only, the Disposer of man's destiny and the very End of His being. None but the Creator can decide the fates of His creature. By the Son and for Him, the Son who is Christ, "all things were made" (Colossians i. 16). The fall of man, and his redemption, has not changed the destination of the race: it only interprets to us the meaning of those deep sayings which make Christ the End as well as the Redeemer of man's life. No doctrine concerning the Incarnate Person other than that which we maintain will bear the weight of this great truth concerning the end of man. If there were any flaw in that doctrine it would be detected here at the last. If the Deity of Christ were less than essential Deity; if the manhood of Christ were in any sense separable from His everlasting Person; if in short He were not to continue the Incarnate Jesus for ever; the "day of the Lord"

would declare it. But we learn that when all mediatorial functions are finally discharged, and the redeeming work with all its wonders of justice and grace shall pass into heavenly history, the Lord Christ is to be still the Head of His church, which will never cease to be "His purchased possession, redeemed and purified to Himself" (Acts xx. 28, Ephesians iv. 30, Titus ii. 14). His saints in their innumerable multitude and distinct individuality, "redeemed to Himself as a purchased possession"

(Ephesians i. 14) by His Divine-human power, "given to Him by the Father" (John xvii. 6) as the fruit of His Divine-human obedience, will be His own for ever: beholding His glory in their redeemed spirits, with their bodies fashioned according to His glorious body, they will have their consummation in Him. "They that are Christ's" (1 Corinthians xv. 23) is their description both in time and in eternity. But every point we would establish here—the Divine propriety, the final end, the full disposal, the Divine-human possession of our souls—is summed up in one word of St. Paul to the Ephesians, "that He might present it to Himself a glorious church, (chap. v. 27).

V. This last passage fiyly introduces the final aspect or our Doctrine, its relation to the Christian church as the Body of which the Incarnate Christ is the Head. The visible church is the one body constituted of all those who maintain that sound faith of which this doctrine is the centre; the invisible church is the fellowship of all who, in heaven and earth, are united to the Lord's Living Person through the One Spirit; and in everlasting union with Him the visible and the invisible churches will be one.

1. The "Truth as it is in Jesus" means really, in an important sense, the truth as it is concerning Jesus. The doctrine of the one Christ, who unites God and man in the redeeming work, to whom all authority is given in heaven and in earth, whose only name and whose name alone is given for salvation among men, is the most compendious and the sufficient test of evangelical orthodoxy. "Holding the Head" is the scriptural formula; and that Head is the Incarnate Son of God and Son of man. Our Lord's own test in the gospels can never be superseded: "What think ye of Christ?" "Whom say ye that I am?"

(Matthew xvi. 15.) He who answers this aright will answer aright every vital question. If "the Name which is above every name"

have its true place in Christian theology, all the truths that belong to the common salvation will adjust themselves in their perfection of symmetry, from the Most Holy Trinity down to the

"least commandment" that pertains to life. It may safely be affirmed that whatever creed or confession gives the Indivisible Person its rightful place can consistently contain no essential error: perhaps it may be added, no error that shall absolutely invalidate its possession of Christian truth. The charity which asserts that no community holding this faith is altogether outside the pale of Christendom has the support of Scripture, and therefore of all candid men. And the fidelity which excludes all who maintain not the integrity of our Lord's Person, as God and man, can scarcely be charged with unscriptural severity. It is quite true that many bodies of nominal Christians in East and West, whose creeds are sound as to the constituents and unity of the One Person of Christ, neutralize their soundness by inconsistent errors and superstitions that go far to render that truth of none effect. The Christ of the Creed may be exhibited in connection with such media as obscure and veil His simple supremacy even more than some of the heretics who were anciently cast out of the church. On the other hand, many communities, and especially many individuals in those communities, who hold most defective views of the Divine-human Person, even renouncing His Divinity altogether, may nevertheless, through a certain instinctive and irrepressible faith that defies heresy, own Him practically as supreme whom in words they deny. Happy are they, and may we ever be among them, who, making the Scriptures alone their final standard, hold fast the doctrines that were established in the earliest controversies of the Christian church, and formulated in its Councils, without defeating their pure Confession by the traditions of men.

It would be inappropriate here to enter upon a review of the whole Estate of Christendom in relation to this great test of orthodoxy; or even to consider what are the securities and probabilities of a more general consent in the central truths of Christianity. I must content myself with congratulating our own Communion upon its unfeigned faith in the doctrine, and its firm loyalty to the Person of Christ. From the beginning of our existence as a people, there has been no variation, nor any shadow of turning. With all our other unfaithfulness and unworthiness, there has been no unsoundness in this regard. We deserve the rebukes that Simon Peter so often received; but we have never wavered in Simon Peter's good confession (Matthew xvi.

16), nor faltered in Simon Peter's daring challenge (John xxi.

15). One at least of the doctrinal controversies we have known had reference to the Saviour's Person. His eternal Sonship was for a season disputed by some who, thinking no evil, aimed to conciliate reason, and knew not that they were imperiling faith.

Our standards of doctrine repelled their error; it has been habitually disavowed among us; and our teaching has been preserved from its infection. And now, through the blessing of Him who is the sole Guardian of our most holy faith upon our fidelity as its guardians under Him, there is not a voice in our ministry which hesitates in the utterance of the three dogmatic Creeds—so far as this doctrine is in them; and not a congregation from the greatest to the least among us that would tolerate for an hour the slightest deflection from the truth concerning the one Christ, both God and man, who suffered for the salvation of the world. We and our people "seethe King in His beauty,"

whatever else we see not; and proclaim the one Christ to mankind, whatever else we are charged with failure to do. And we believe that He who has established this supreme test of a sound faith will, while we are thus faithful to His name, preserve us from every error, pardon and heal our manifold defects, and deliver us from all such minor differences of judgment as might endanger our unity or thwart the purpose of His will concerning us. [19.]

2. The church then with which we have to do, and with which the interests of the world are so vitally bound up, is a visible community, the members of which proclaim in a succession of living witnesses a confession of faith in Christ against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. But it must not be forgotten that the true, abiding and everlasting church is, under another aspect, the company of those who through union with Christ form part of His mystical body, which also is "growing in wisdom and in stature, in favour with God and with man." We cannot but be familiar with that law of the Spirit's phraseology concerning the Person of Christ by which the same terms are used interchangeably of His human nature and of His mystical body the church. It might seem as if the new humanity, the new Fellowship of the regenerate, the new order of mankind whose second Head is the Son of man, were regarded as an extension of His own holy manhood, an extension of the incarnation, or, to adopt St. Paul's vast words, "the fulness of Him who filleth all in all"

(Ephesians i. 23). It may be said that this is figurative language, and such undoubtedly to some extent it is. But it is the same kind of figure that runs through the whole evangelical covenant: a shadow to which the profound reality of heavenly things corresponds. The Lord's one, common, universal, Divine-human nature is the element of which all are partakers; and, in virtue of that common heritage, they are said to be, in part below and in full above, "partakers of Christ" (Hebrews iii.

14). The result is that transcendent unity of the "perfect stature of the fulness of Christ" which the High-priestly prayer anticipates while it asks, and asks while it anticipates. The completed mystical fellowship of Christ's saints shall be as really one in Him, and part of Himself, and the complement of His perfection, as the sacred flesh was in which He wrought our redemption. But in another way. By the energy of the one Spirit this body is formed for Him out of mankind, grows up into Him, and is conformed to His image: not created by any mystical incarnation in His saints, or transformed into Him, or fashioned by the assimilation of His sacramental humanity. Rightly understood, this is the grandest and most spirit-stirring application of the doctrine of the Undivided Person. No view of the destiny of the faithful Fellowship can surpass or equal this.

Christ shall be one with His body the church in indissoluble fellowship: all to the redeemed made one in Him that His Divinity was to His human nature—its sanctity, its blessedness, and its glorification. Christ in us now the hope of glory will then be in us the glory itself. St. Paul's expatiation on this theme I am afraid to trust myself to quote; and. St. Peter follows hard,

"We are partakers of a Divine nature." But the Lord Himself uttered all that could be said for wonder, for adoration, and for hope, when He cried, in words which never yet have had their meaning told, "I am come that they "His flock the church" might have life, and have it more abundantly”—and have it MORE,

περίσσov: more than Adam lost, more than unfallen man could have known, more than eternity itself can limit. For He spoke of the life that He should give His body the church for which He waits in heaven.

3. The analogy between our Lord's incarnate Person and His union with His body the church will suggest the closing observations on this subject. Even with regard to the incarnate Christ Himself, we have to speak of a natural and of a spiritual body: first that which was natural, afterwards that which was spiritual. All that connected Him with earthly conditions, and partook of physical humiliation, the Redeemer left behind when the heavens received Him. Yet He remained the same Jesus, unchanged in His transformation. So also will it be with the natural and spiritual, the visible and the mystical, body of the church. As the Lord permits us to say that His manhood underwent dissolution, though it knew not corruption, in the separation of spirit and body—"Destroy this body is His own language—and that He was changed into another form after His resurrection and in His ascension, so also the visible church will be dissolved without corruption, will be transfigured, shall never know increase or diminution, infirmity or decay, that shall not again be separated either from the love of Christ or from Christ Himself for ever. Every member not meet for the Master's use will perish with the world that never received His life. Then at length and after the long process of ages and dispensations, the visible church will be exactly one with the church invisible; and

"Immanuel, God with us," will have its second glorious accomplishment. Not, as was said before, by a second incarnation; for the union between Christ and that outer body will not be hypostatical, but wrought by the bringing of many sons, each in his personal integrity, to glory , and so conforming them to the Incarnate both in, body and in soul, that He and His shall form one everlasting and indivisible Object, in a unity of which the Lord Himself has given us the only parallel and explanation: "that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us" (John xvii. 21).

And here I take farewell of this "Good Matter," this Verbum Bonum, this Λόγov γαθόv,(Psalm xlv. 1, Vulg., Sept.). We have examined the testimony of Scripture to the constituent elements of our Saviour's Person, and shown it to be One in the indivisible unity' of the God-man. We have seen the manifold bearings of this truth on the fundamental doctrines of theology, upon which its seal is everywhere impressed. We have paid regard to the laws which regulate the theological phraseology of the subject, not without some side references to the controversies that have disturbed the Christian church. Withal it has been shown that the full understanding of the mystery of "the Christ of God" is not possible to man in this life, perhaps not possible for ever; but that our faith in that which may be known of it is essential to our Christian completeness, whether of belief or of practice.

Let us now rise from the doctrine to HIMSELF; and confirm to our hearts what has been said by one common act of reverent contemplation. Let the epistle to the Hebrews, to which we have been so largely indebted, furnish us an example and a guide.

After the first chapter has proved that Christ is truly Divine, and the second has exhausted the evidence that He is perfectly man, the sacred writer, leaving the incarnation an unexpressed secret behind the veil, proceeds to dilate upon the wonders of His redeeming work. But, before he does so, he reverently lifts the veil and summons His readers to "consider” the Wonderful Person Himself. To that consideration—that fervent, concentrated, absorbing, never-weary study—the Holy Ghost invites us all: not only us, who are appointed to be the stewards of Christ's mysteries, but all who are the "holy brethren" of Jesus, and "partakers of the heavenly calling." Let us unite to fix the eye of our faith upon Him now, for He is present in our midst.

Let us touch Him with the hand of faith; and we shall find that there was no virtue in the Galilæan plain which is denied to us.

And then, under the influence of this evening's consecration, let us devote ourselves afresh to this immortal study, to the pursuit of this knowledge that shall not pass away; until, after having for a season beheld the glory of the Lord as reflected from His word, we, changed into the same image by His Spirit, may reach the Beatific Vision, and see Him: as He is, to Whom, in the unity of His Sacred Person, and in the unity of the Father and the Holy Ghost, be ascribed might, majesty and dominion now and for ever. AMEN.

THE HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF CHRIST'S PERSON.

WHEN we cease to behold the Form of the Incarnate Lord in the New Testament, and begin to trace it as the centre of Historical Theology, we enter upon a series of doctrinal developments that runs on without intermission through the Christian ages to the present day. The dogma of the Divine-human Person has never been absent from the mind of the church: when not itself directly under discussion it silently enters into all other discussions; whilst at certain great epochs it absorbs and entrances the thoughts of the whole Christian world. Meanwhile a deep and strong testimony to the truth may be heard through all the confusions of heresy. To indicate the variations of controversy through which that truth has maintained its steadfastness, and fixed itself firmly in the belief and in the confession of Christian men, is the object of the following sketch.

I.

New Testament doctrine is continued through the medium of the Apostolical Fathers. They in feebler language teach the same Jesus in His union of the Godhead and the manhood. Clement of Rome, the father of uninspired Christian literature, may represent them all: he speaks of Christ as the preexistent Power of God, who gave His perfect humanity, “His soul, and flesh, and blood," for our redemption. But these early writers do not, any more than the apostles who taught them, touch upon the formal characteristics of the personal union. Whilst they were writing their simple epistles, heresy had singled out the natures of Jesus for attack. The Ebionites, a scanty remnant of the Judaizers whom St. Paul encountered, denied His Divinity; whilst the Nazarenes, another Jewish remnant, regarded Him as supernaturally conceived of the Holy Ghost. Cerinthus, traditionally connected with St. John, belonged to the former class; though with certain modifications that link him wlth the Gnostics. Another Gnostic-Ebionite was the unknown author of the homilies that go by the name of Clement. His speculations are remarkable as containing the germ of many wild theories that have since been held concerning the relation of Christ to mankind. He makes Him the original or primal man, who, after appearing in seven other "pillars of the world," Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, was finally manifested in Christ. The Spirit of God or of Christ came down upon Him as the last incarnation; filled Him with supernatural knowledge, though not as a spirit separate from His own; and made Him, though not Divine, absolutely sinless. This fantastic speculation has often reappeared among the delusions of mystical Christology.

Gnosticism proper, in the second century, formed its theory of Christ's Person in accordance with its fundamental notions of spirit and matter. Setting out with a dualistic conception of the eternal opposition between God and matter, its idea of redemption was the deliverance of man's spirit from the bonds of sense and the impure material life, and in order to this the release of the people of the true God from the dominion of the imperfect law of the Jewish false God or the demiurgus. Hence the Christ must be a pure Spirit of spirits, one of the highest reons or emanations from the unfathomable abyss of Deity. But, in order to rescue man, He must appear in matter to "condemn sin in the flesh;" yet He must not actually assume the flesh, for that would be to place Himself in bondage. Hence the Docetic or fantastic body; a theory which, common to all the Gnostic heresies, assumed a variety of forms in their various systems. In some the æon purged the sin from a true human nature, but destroyed the verity of that nature in the process; in others what Mary bore was an immaterial psychical body that could not suffer; whilst there were some that brought the true Christ down on the man Jesus at the baptism to forsake him at the cross, thus rendering the Divine alliance with matter an unreality. But all were united in this, that they contradicted St. John's testimony in the gospel,

"The word was made flesh;" and inherit the condemnation of

"Antichrist," which anticipated their error in his epistle.

Thus, while the Ebionites in the second century denied the Deity, the Gnostics denied the manhood of our Saviour. But, both systems agreed in a certain doctrine of the Person of Christ; in all their varieties of combination they made Him different from every other mortal, and in some sense or other intermediate between God and man through the peculiar visitation of a Divine power. A Christ only man was unknown till the third century, if indeed then.

Whilst these heresies, composites of Judaism and Heathenism blended with Christianity, were disposing of the human nature of Christ after their own fashion, the representatives of Christian doctrine were intent upon defending both natures, without as yet defining their union. Against the imaginary æon, as fanciful as the Docetic body, was set the scriptural doctrine of the Son of God; and it may be said that during the entire ante-Nicene age the relation of the Logos to the Divinity was the leading subject in theology. The Greek fathers rejoiced in St. John's great word; whether as expressing the Ratio, reason, in God, or the Oratio, the word of God to the creature, it stimulated and guided, if it did not altogether satisfy, their deepest speculation. Some of them wavered between an eternal emanation and an eternal personality. Origen may be regarded as their representative. He affirmed an eternal generation, and preferred the term Son, which from his time to a certain extent displaced the term Logos; but he made that generation a process, like creation, eternally going on. Thus he laid the basis of the Nicene formula; but by His insistance on the Son's subordination he paved the way for Arianism. The truth he taught was held fast by the church generally; and the error he interwove with it was already rejected, before the Council of Nicrea, A.D. 325, vindicated both the consubstantiality and the eternal generation of the Son.

Meanwhile, from the end of the second century to the middle of the third, tendencies are observable which resulted in two distinct and permanent forms of error, one affecting the personality of the Lord's Godhead, and the other robbing Him of His Divinity altogether. Praxeas, of Asia Minor (A.D. 160-180), boldly charged the Catholic doctrine with being Tritheistic; yet, anxious to save the Divinity of the Son, and fastening his thought upon one saying of Christ, "I and My Father are one," so intently as to forget all other Scripture, he came to the conclusion that the Father Himself became man, suffered and died in Christ. Noetus of Smyrna, A..D. 200, followed him in this strange device, pleading against his opponents, “What evil have I done, thus glorifying Christ?" This doctrine had the Papal sanction of Calixtus I., who asserted that the Son was merely a manifestation of the Father in human form, as the Spirit animates the body. Hence this doctrine is known as Patripassianism.

Sabellius, a convert of this Pope, about A..D. 250, enlarged the theory so as to include the Holy Spirit. His fundamental position was that of the distinction between the Monad and the Triad in the Divine nature: the unity of God unfolds itself in three redemptional forms; and, when redemption is complete, is only a unity for ever, the modes of its revelation ceasing. This error was condemned at a council, A..D. 262, which, by its precision of language, anticipated Nicæa. But it has never been absent as a latent theory from the speculation of later ages, and reappears in modern times under many forms, but especially in the subtile theology of Schleiermacher. Thus it may be said that Patripassianism began what Sabellianism completed, the Docetic perversion of our Lord's Divinity and the extinction of His personal Sonship.

Precisely at the same time another class of heretics revived the Ebionite error, and made of our Lord man only. It is true they none of them denied His superiority to all other men.

Theodotus and Artemon admitted His supernatural birth of a virgin; Paul of Samosata, A..D. 260, even asserted that the Logos dwelt in Him more abundantly than in any former messenger of God, and that Christ won by His moral excellence a Divine dignity.

These false teachers, one and all condemned by the church, were thus the ante-Nicene Unitarians; but they differed from the Unitarians of modern times, by admitting a prior dignity of the Logos in Christ as well as a subsequent dignity in His exaltation in heaven. In fact, that Unitarian doctrine which the followers of Socinus have at length reached was not known, in its barest and most repulsive forms, to even the heresy of the ancient church.

As it respects the personal union of the two natures, the early Fathers propounded no clear theory; although we find hints, in their controversies with the Docetics, of the doctrine which was afterwards developed. Irenæus teaches an indissoluble union of Divinity and humanity in Christ; and, like Tertullian, finds the foundation of that union in man's original likeness to the Son, and capacity for union with Him as the true and archetypal idea of mankind. Origen, the source of so much good and so much evil in later theology, came nearest to dogmatic theorising on this great subject. His untameable intellect wrestled with some of the profoundest difficulties of the question. As he originated the two lines of thought which led respectively to Arianism and Athanasianism, so also his speculations were the starting-point of the Nestorian and Eutychian views of later times. For he hesitated much between the human soul of Jesus and His Divine nature, as the seat of the one Personality. His well-known illustration of iron heated by fire, like such illustrations generally, looks both ways. But he extricated himself; and rendered lasting service to theology by the term which his energetic mind was the first to conceive—that of the God-man.

II.

The decision of the Nicene Council asserted the true Divinity of Christ against Arius, whose restrictions of that Divinity were at every point detected and condemned. In vain he might plead that the creation of the Son was timeless and before all time; and that he was the origin of all other life. The terms of the Creed grant that the Son was begotten, but of the very substance of the Father, and from eternity. As to our Lord's human nature it uses two remarkable expressions, all the more remarkable for the repetition, "Who was incarnate," and

"became man." But, absorbed with Christ's true Godhead, it neglected the precautions which were in the next Council found necessary for the protection of the integrity of the Saviour's manhood. The "Homoousion" was afterwards found to be as needful for the lower as for the higher nature. The direct tendency of the Arian theory was to render a human soul in Jesus needless.

It made the Logos in Christ a created nature so similar to the human spirit as to be capable of participating in all the conditions and affections of which man’s soul is the subject. In fact, there was no reason why it should not animate the flesh as naturally and perfectly as the spirit of man itself. The finite could not indeed receive the Infinite; but the Created Word or Reason, indefinitely great but not infinite, might coalesce with the protoplasm—to use the modern term—of man's organism, might enter the flesh, and use its head, and heart, and members as an instrument. Now the Nicene formula of "the Son" did really, though silently, preclude such an inhabitation of the flesh by the absolute µoύσιov τ πατρ . But its unsuspicious use of the strong expression, now first employed, σαρκωθέvτα, "was made flesh," which it might be supposed only an Arian could pervert, did not with the precision of the Third Creed bar the way of over-curious speculation. At any rate, it required to be very carefully watched. Even Athanasius did not, till experience had taught him, discover how perilous was his own manner of treating the incarnation as only "taking flesh." But he and all the Nicene Fathers were soon aroused by the phenomenon of one among themselves laying all the stress upon the one term, "incarnate,"

and forgetting the other, "was made man."

Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicrea (A.D. 362), may be said to have been the father of all the strictly Christological controversies, or those which referred solely to the union of the two natures. He was a friend of Athanasius, and a zealous defender of the Nicene theology; but his defence of Christ's Divinity led him to sacrifice the integrity of His manhood by taking from it the human spirit. His doctrine, so far as without the evidence of his own writings it can be understood, had two aspects: one relating to the pre-temporal Christ, the other to the incarnation. "The Lord from heaven was the watchword of the former; the union between God and man had been eternal in the Logos, who brought the better part of His manhood, the heavenly humanity, with Him from heaven. Hence, in the latter part of his doctrine, the incarnation was only the taking flesh and the animal soul of man. The Divine nature of Christ dispensed with the human spirit; and the resultant was one Person, a composite of God and two parts of the human nature. Apollinaris thought that thus only could the church hold fast the One Christ in the absolute sinlessness of His personal nature and the Divinity of His atonement. But it was triumphantly argued by Athanasius, the two Gregorys, and Basil, that Christ never became man if the human spirit was denied Him; that He never redeemed our nature if the noblest part of man, the spirit in which lay the glory of the Divine image and the shame of his sin, was not assumed; and, finally, that there was no such Manichrean necessity of sin in man's triple constitution of spirit, soul, and flesh as should render the assumption of our whole nature impossible to God. The second Œcumenical Council, of Constantinople, A.D. 381, condemned the Apollinarian doctrine; and thus the same council that finally asserted the integrity of the Trinity, by proclaiming the Divinity of the Holy Spirit, finally asserted also the integrity of our Lord's human nature. But the error thus condemned left the church only "for a season." Within fifty years it revolved in other and much more plausible forms.

We now enter the very heart of the question as to the relation of the two natures in the Nestorian and Eutychian controversies. But these will be better understood if we trace them first to two tendencies of a decidedly opposite character, which had from the beginning stamped their impress upon Christian theology, and were the guiding principles in these Christological contentions. The Alexandrian school of thought was speculative, mystical, and transcendental: to the thinkers of that school the union of God and man in Christ irresistibly presented itself as an unspeakable blending of the Divine and human, in which, of course, the humanity was in danger of being entirely lost. The Antiochian or Syrian school, on the other hand, was sober, reflective, and practical; by the thinkers of that school the union was naturally regarded under the comprehensible aspect of a moral bond between the Divine Person and a human, or of the inhabitation of the latter by the former. It may be safely affirmed that on these two opposite principles of thought, in their application, hang all the errors which have appeared, and vanished, and reappeared in the history of the doctrine of Christ's Person. And it is equally certain that the truth is to be sought where the wisest theologians have sought it,—not indeed in an impossible reconciliation of these opposite views, but in such a doctrine as shall borrow the undeniable elements of soundness in both.

The Antiochian tendency found its full expression in the Nestorian controversy, which lasted from A.D. 428 to A.D. 431, when it was brought to an issue by the condemnation of Nestorius in the third Œcumenical Council, of Ephesus, and the assertion of the Unity of the Person of Christ.

Nestorius has given his name to the heresy which divides the Persons. But Theodore of Mopsuestia, his teacher, was really the originator of the doctrine, and of the formulas that tended to sever the Divine from the human person in Christ. Nestorius only declaimed what Theodore taught; but his turbulent latter days and miserable end were so closely bound up with the heresy and its condemnation that his name has always displaced every other in connection with it. He was a bigoted monk and powerful preacher.

When, A.D. 428, he was made Patriarch of Constantinople, he commenced a vigorous persecution of all the heresies save one, Pelagianism, and stimulated that persecution by the vehemence of his pulpit denunciations. There was one thing even among the orthodox that displeased him—the popular habit of calling the Virgin Mary the mother of God (Θεότoκoς). Theodore had taught him to object to this, having maintained that "she only gave birth to a man in whom the union with the Logos had its beginning, but was incomplete until his baptism." Nestorius seemed to have a clear apprehension of the bearing of the question when he proposed to substitute "mother of Christ;" but he neutralised the truth in this by declaring that the union of the two natures in the Redeemer was not personal, but moral, that a perfect man became the instrument of the agency of the Logos, the temple in which He dwelt. Cyril of Alexandria was his chief opponent. The rival patriarchs anathematised each other, worldly power was invoked, and the worst passions inflamed. Nestorius was condemned by the Synod of Ephesus, but in his absence, and in an unworthy manner.

His subsequent fate, and the suppression of his doctrine in the Roman empire, and its continuance among the Nestorians of Persia and of India, the present subject does not include. Th ndemnation of Nestorius was only negative; nothing positive was added to the Christian doctrine or formula. Soon after the Council of Ephesus a compromise was attempted, and a symbol of union constructed which for a short time satisfied all, but only for a short time. Cyril died A.D. 444; probably just in time to escape the unenviable dignity of a heresiarch. Eutyches, a feeble monk of seventy, who had never been heard of until the council that condemned Nestorius, became as it were accidentally the father of monophysite doctrine, in virtue of some remarkably plain sentences that he published. He declared that after the incarnation he could worship only one nature in Christ, the nature of God become flesh; that all human attributes must be transferred to the one Subject, the humanized Logos, the deified Man; and that thus only could God become capable of suffering and death, Here is the essence of Eutychianism: one nature and one Person in Christ, and no distinction whatever in His acts or our worship. Eutyches was singled out for attack by bitter party spirit, subserving however by the will of God the cause of truth.

He was condemned, A.D. 448, at a synod in his own city, Constantinople, which confessed its faith that "Christ, after His incarnation, consisted in two natures in one hypostasis, and in one Person, one Christ, one Son, one Lord." Both parties were exasperated; but it must be left to ecclesiastical history to record with shame the violence of the Robber Council at Ephesus, and the proceedings which led to the summoning of the fourth (Œcumenical Council at Chalcedon, A.D. 451. Appeal had been made to Leo, Bishop of Rome, the master spirit of the age. His celebrated Epistola ad Flavianum was the result, perhaps the finest theological treatise on the whole subject; and there can be no doubt that it contributed much to the formula which finally, so far as œcumenical decisions go, expressed the full truth of Scripture. In balanced and careful phrases that formula mediated between Nestorius and Eutyches, by condemning both:

"Following the holy fathers, we unanimously teach one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, complete as to His Godhead and complete as to His manhood, truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting: consubstantial with His Father as to His Godhead, and consubstantial with us as to His manhood; like unto us in all things, yet without sin; as to His Godhead begotten of the Father before all worlds, but as to His mThhood, in these last days born, for us men and our salvation, of the Virgin Mary, the mother of God; one and the same Christ; Son, Lord, Only-begotten, known in (of) two natures, without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division: the distinction of the natures being in no wise abolished by their union, but the peculiarity of each nature being maintained, and both concurring in one person and hypostasis. We confess not a Son divided and sundered into two persons, but one and the same Son, and Only-begotten, and God-Logos, our Lord Jesus Christ, even as the prophet had before proclaimed concerning Him, and He Himself hath taught us, and the symbol of the Fathers hath handed down to us."

The sentences of this Creed, especially in the original Greek, exhaust at once the definition of error and the defence of the truth. They are as tranquil as the scenes in the midst of which they were composed were turbulent. The Athanasian Creed probably was an Augustinian variation on it, the production of Vigilius Tapsensis, an African bishop: if so, it is not the least of the many obligations which Christian theology owes to the genius and dialectical skill and wonderful command of human language possessed by the African fathers. But that Creed adds little on the Person of Christ; its chief additions have respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, which it for the first time formnlated and introduced into the Christian confession as such.

One element of novelty it has: an illustration occurs which seems out of harmony with the stately simplicity of a creed, and shows the operation of African rhetoric. "One not at all from confusion of substance, but from unity of person. For, as a rational soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ." However much propriety there may be in the analogy, it is very faint, and provokes more criticism than it allays. At any rate it is hardly in keeping with the severity of a confession of faith, which is fact and belief confessed with the mouth to the glory of God. Arguments and anathemas were not introduced till the church had taken many steps on the way of declension.

III.

Here, at Chalcedon, Christology had reached the conclusion of the whole matter. Subsequent controversies and decisions have added but little to the defensive statements to which the Chalcedonian Creed with profound wisdom restricted itself. The mystery of the manner of union of the two natures which it left unexplored, and untouched, has not been solved, and probably will not be solved by theology on earth. But that mystery has never ceased to stimulate a spirit of speculation which will not accept defeat, urging its adventurous pursuit all the more vigorously the more it is baffled. The decisions of the fourth Council cast out the Nestorian and Eutychian heresies from the sanctuary of Christian doctrine; but representatives of both errors soon reappeared: Eutychianism in the long, and wearisome, and disgraceful controversies known as the Monophysite and the Monothelite in the East, and Nestorian in the obscnrer Adoptianist controversy in the West. To these our attention must be directed; very briefly, and only so far as they affected the doctrine of our Saviour's Person.

The Monophysite heresy, as the name imports, was only a continuation or echo of the Eutychian dogma of a single nature in Christ. It disavowed indeed the absorption of the human nature: that evil element perhaps may be said to have passed away for ever from history. But it made our Lord's manhood only an accident of the immutable essence of the God. The Monophysite opponents of the Chalcedonian Creed introduced a liturgical formula to express their sentiment: "Holy God, Who hast been crucified, have mercy upon us!" hence their doctrine has been termed Theopaschitism, just as Tertullian gave the name Patripassianism to the error of Praxeas. During a hundred years these sectaries convulsed the Eastern church with their disputes over the body of Jesus. Severus, Patriarch of Antioch, made the first deviation from the orthodox doctrine of our Lord's perfect consubstantiality with our nature. His party believed that the Saviour's body was mortal and corruptible before the resurrection; and hence they were termed Phthartolaters, or adorers of the corruptible. These were opposed by the Aphthartodocetæ, who affirmed that the corporeality of Christ was from the very beginning partaker of the incorruptibility of the Logos: this was a combination of ancient Docetism and Eutychianism. These two great parties had their subdivisions.

One sect receded from the Monophysite principle so far as to deny our Lord's omniscience during His humiliation; and hence were called Agnoetæ. Other sects arose out of the dispute as to the question whether the body of Christ was or was not to be regarded as a creature: these were, on the one hand, the Ktistolatræ, and on the other, the Aktistitæ. Trifling as such distinctions and discussions may seem, they were the natural outgrowth of the Monophysite root. They form one of the most curious subsections of the great doctrine we treat. But in the midst of all these confusions there were not wanting thinkers of a stern Monophysite stamp, who declined every attempt to distinguish between the Divine and the human in Christ: not because the mystery was unfathomable, but because the two had become absolutely one in Him. The historical relations of the Monophysite heresy are irregular. The fifth Œcumenical Council, convoked by Justinian at Constantinople, A.D. 553, anathematised Nestorianism, and to a certain extent gave its sanction to Monophysitism. Yet the sects remained apart from the Greek Church; and, like the Nestorians, are found in the East to this day; known as the Jacobites in Syria, the Copts in Egypt, the Abyssinians, the Armenians, and the Maronites.

In the Monothelite controversy the great question at issue assumed a more dignified character. Whilst the Monophysite controversies were confined to the relations of Christ's fleshly body and the soul as the seat of His knowledge, the Monothelite investigation turned upon the unity or duality of His will. The emperor Heraclius proposed a compromise, by which the Monophysites might be won to the catholic church, in the formula which deserves deep attention: µία Θεαvδρικ vεργεία one Divine-human operation. It was not accepted; and the question raged furiously until the sixth Œcumenical Council, of Constantinople, A.D. 680; formally condemned the doctrine of One Will. This decision, in which East and West concurred, was arrived at after considerable argumentation. The Monothelites contended simply on the ground that two wills imply two subjects, while all things in redemption proceed from one Divine-human Agent. Their opponents on the catholic side urged that in two natures there must be two wills and two natural operations. And they ended the discussion by teaching the doctrine of two wills harmoniously co-operating, the human will following the Divine.

John of Damascus, a generation later, who was in the Greek church what Leo was in the Roman, the most consummate theologian on this subject, presented the whole doctrine of the Council in its fullest form. He defined the relation of the human to the Divine nature in the unity of the Person as enhypostatic or anhypostatic. The manhood of Christ is not hyostatic in itself; yet not wIthout an hypostasis, inasmuch as It exists in the hypostasis of the Logos. It is the human nature only as it is before it has become a personal individual. In other words he taught the doctrine of an impersonal human nature in Christ. But it cannot fail to strike the thoughtful mind that the old formula of Heraclius (or of Dionysius Areopagita from whom it was borrowed)—one Theandric operation—was discarded too soon. The term itself, like many others aiming to express the same idea, may be open to objection. But one idea lies at the foundation of the entire history of our Lord. Save in a few passages which speak of His eternal place and relation in the Deity, the New Testament uniformly assigns one character and one operation to the mediatorial Person. Our Lord Himself takes up, if such words may be allowed, His whole being into the past eternity, and "came forth" from the Father, not to do His own will but that of the Father who sent Him. Before He had taken our flesh, He willed and accepted the Triune Will, as already the incarnate Christ.

And throughout His manifestation in the flesh His words and deeds and sufferings derive all their significance from their proceeding from one Source, which is the mediatorial Person.

Every attempt to distinguish what is of the Divine from what is of the human invariably fails. Theology is shut up to the theory of the one Theandric operation: of the absolute unity of all the manifold and wonderful developments of the Redeemer's human nature in union with the Divine. Difficulties there are in the conception, no doubt; but that theology will be the soundest which, notwithstanding those difficulties, refuses to separate the two natures for a moment in relation to any part of our Saviour's life.

The Western reaction against the Chalcedonian Creed—and the only one of any importance that ever took place—was that known as Adoptianism, which was Nestorianism with a difference. Two Spanish bishops, Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgella, broached heretical opinions as to the unity of the Son in relation to His two natures. They and their followers urged that in His human nature Christ was not in the same sense the Son of God as in His Divine: in the latter by nature, in the former He was only by adoption, a Son. They contended that Christ as man could not have been begotten of the Essence Divine. They referred to the evidence of Scripture, which, though it does not use the word "adoption" in relation to this, yet defines the thing itself by many cognate terms; as also to traditional and liturgical language which habitually treated the assumption of human nature as being an adoption. In their theological subtilty they supposed Christ as man to have come into the world in the character of a servant; yet the adoption took place at the very moment of the conception, in virtue of His future excellence, while the act of adoption itself took place only at the baptism, and was consummated in His resurrection. Alcuin was one of the chief among the opponents of Adoptianism. He brought to bear upon it the leading arguments with which Nestorianism had been withstood; and pleaded that in adsumtione carnis a Deo persona perit hominis, non natura, not the nature of man but his personality is lost. And thus Adoptianism, like every modification of the Nestorian heresy, fell before the doctrine of our Saviour's impersonal humanity. It may be observed, before passing from this subject, that there is no affinity between this ancient heresy of a double Sonship and the modern theory that has denied the Eternal Sonship of the preexistent Lord. The modern doctrine would apply all that is said concerning the Son to the Son as the Eternal Word incarnate.

IV.

To follow the course of Christological doctrine into medieval times is, in a certain sense, to lose it for some seven hundred years. Not that theology or theological speculation slumbered during those ages; it was never more active, restless, and inquisitive. But there was no appreciable advancement made, either in the resolution of the difficulties of the dogma, or the systematisation of the vast mass of materials of which it had become the centre. The scholastics in their several dialectic and mystical schools spent the strength of their intellect or the fervour of their hearts on the natures and the Person of the Redeemer without adding much to the sum of knowledge. They discussed a thousand subtile topics which earlier decisions had fixed, but without unsettling any of them; and they indulged in a thousand speculations which later philosophy has revived. Hence, full justice will be done to this branch of the subject by considering some of these residuary questions bequeathed by the past, and some of the germs which they deposited for future development.

A few sentences will suffice to dispatch that branch of medieval speculation which dealt with subjects which may be held to be interdicted; In the middle of the ninth century the monks of Corbie, Paschasius Radbert and Ratram carried on a discussion as to whether our Saviour's birth was not as supernatural as His conception. The details of this discussion ought to be left to the obscurity of these ages. But the question involved was very important, as concerning the reality of our Lord's participation in our nature as lying under the curse of transgression. Rather than admit that, one party elaborated incredible theories of a merely docetic birth, which removed the very foundation of the Saviour's true human life. The other party, admitting the naturalness of our Saviour's entrance into life, began to devise methods for removing the sin from the mother in order that the Child might be a "holy thing." In this case, as in almost every other aberration from the truth as to Christ's Person, the Holy Ghost was forgotten. He provided that the Child Jesus should be born amidst the consequences of the curse without inheriting it for His own Person. Edward Irving long afterwards solved the difficulty in another way, by giving our Lord a manhood bearing in it the common taint.

In the same century Scotus Erigena laid the foundation of the Pantheistic conception of Christ's Person, which entered so largely into the mystical theories of the next five hundred years, and has reappeared in modern German Christological philosophy. Christ is here the primal, archetypal Man, man in His nature and essence; and His incarnation is the unity of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and eternal, which constitutes the idea of man: as consciousness must have in it the element of finitude, so God's own consciousness can be conditioned only by the incarnation of God. Thus personality and limited consciousness seem to be one, and God must be embodied in the Christ to have a personal conscious existence. He who can understand the ancient schoolmen will be at great advantage in studying the modern transcendental Christ of Schelling and Hegel.

If he cannot understand it, he will, at least, know whither to trace it.

In the twelfth century Peter Lombard, Master of the Sentences, broached a question which occupied the thoughts of a whole generation, viz., whether, the human nature in Christ being impersonal, the Person of God the Son may be said to have become anything in reality different from the other Persons of the Trinity through the incarnation. The tendency of his inquiries seemed to make the manhood merely a Docetic vesture of God; the union did not make of two natures one Person, because the Son was never conscious of Himself as man. Hence the incarnation ceased to be necessary for atonement, and the Lateran Council of A.D.

1215 condemned the error to which these discussions led, as Nihilianism, a term which itself explains the controversy better than any dissertation could, by establishing its opposite, the profound and eternal reality of the incarnation as not belonging to the entire Divine essence, but to the Eternal Son in Divinity.

The next Christological controversy of the middle ages was perhaps the first which connected the Person of Christ with His work of salvation. It was this, whether Christ must have become incarnate independently of man's sin. When once started, this question had a mighty attraction for the schoolmen, and they carried on a controversy as fruitless as it was ingenious and full of beautiful theorising. Rupert of Deutz was the ablest defender of the thesis that the Son of God was, from eternity, to be the incarnate Head of the creation. Interweaving speculations of his own with the words of St. Paul to the Colossians, he maintained that angels and men, that is, as he supposed, disembodied and embodied intelligences, were created to be the two spheres of Christ's one supremacy, answering to His two natures. He and his followers further asserted that the link between the Creator and the creature must be constituted of One who shall join the two in Himself. They thought that it was derogatory to the dignity of the Son to make the union with mankind dependent upon the accident of man's sin. The scholastic camp was divided. They never, of course, settled the question; it was taken up at the Reformation, and is, to this day, a subject that divides the Lutheran divines, and produces a series of barren, but very interesting, contributions to serial literature.

Thomas Aquinas denied the necessity of the incarnation independently of man's sin. He took his stand on the essential immutability of God; and, regarding human nature as finding its true personality only in the Logos, made the Divine-human Person the medium of the intercommunion of Divine and human attributes.

The two wills in Christ he acknowledged as different modes of the same one Divine will, the human will being made an instrument of God. His speculations on our Lord's knowledge, in relation to His two natures, are very instructive: he assigns to the human soul a capacity of knowing all that is or will be, stopping short however at all that nlight be, as being the prerogative of God alone. Duns Scotus carried his speculations on the union in Christ's Person to much more subtile issues. He held that man's nature is in its deepest essence supernatural, and that there is in the soul a limitless tendency towards God, and an infinite capacity of being filled with the Divine. Hence God and Christ in man may be one in the sense of an indefinite progression of the spirit towards God. It is obvious that in all this there lie the elements of almost all heresy on this subject. The theory of Scotus bore its fruit in his doctrines of redemption. He denied the objective importance and necessity of the atonement; which owed, all its virtue to the simple will of God that thus, and not by any other method that He might have appointed, man should be saved. Hence he pleaded for the "Immaculate Conception,"

Christ's predestination being connected in God's foreknowledge with the holiness of His mother. The disciples of Scotus were the founders of Scepticism; and metaphysical inquiry, where not sceptical, became transcendently mystic in its character.

The Christ of pure Mysticism must find its place at this point in our historical sketch. The earlier mystics had been very much independent of Christian doctrine in their speculations; and the later mystics, whether of the old or the new church, lost the Christian doctrine in a formless void of theosophy and transcendentalism. But the scholastic mystics held fast the Christological decisions of the church, however fanciful were their variations on them. They held firmly to the doctrine of the Trinity; but with a Sabellian distinction between the nature and the operation. According to Tauler, as God brings forth His Son in Himself eternally, and gives Him to man through the virgin birth, so is His Son born in us by a constant incarnation in every devout soul. The mystics make no real difference between the Son incarnate and every Christian united to Him. Believing that Christ was God in the sanctified impersonal nature of man, they thought that the goal of desire must be to enter into Him and lose personality in Him, by sharing His impersonal nature. Christ was to some of them the archetypal Mystic who exhibited not a union between God and a man, but the abased God suffering in the flesh: they not only asserted the capacity of human nature for the Divine, but the capacity of the Divine for human affections. Some of them anticipated the later theories which shrink not from making the power of God in Christ a constricted or lowered potence of God. But none of them added anything to the doctrine of Christ's Person, and therefore we leave them. However rapturous their contemplations of His incomprehensible form, and however intense their yearnings to lose themselves in Him, they never had the incarnate Man of Sorrows clearly before their minds. They would not submit to the letter of the record, and the true and veritable Saviour became one whom they ignorantly worshipped. In common with all mystics of every age they suffered the cross and the atonement to vanish away, lost in the wide expanse of their sublime intuition. In a word, instead of humbly fixing their thought upon that historical Personage who “appeared once in the end of the world to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself," they lost themselves and almost their Christianity in the contemplation of an incarnation eternally going on in themselves after the pattern of Christ's incarnation. The history of the doctrine of Christ's Person will not need to introduce the mystics of any school again.

V.

The era of the Reformation, which witnessed so great a revolution in the doctrines of grace and in the principles of ecclesiastical authority, wrought but little essential change in Christology, or the doctrine of Christ's Person. What the Reformation did was to bring that Divine-human Person into its central place as the only ground of man's salvation; to remove those accumulations of superstition which had obscured, not so much the doctrine, as the Person Himself; and to bring into preeminence the direct individual relation of every believer to that Person. As to the two constituent natures and the union between them—neither Nestorian on the one hand, nor Eutychian on the other, the formularies of the Reformation retained the ancient creeds, and had no contest with the old communities whose fundamental principles on other points they assailed. The incarnate Son of God Himself had never ceased to occupy His rightful place in the creeds of the churches which had dishonoured His work by multitudes of superstitions.

Some points of subordinate, though by no means unimportant, difference among the earlier confessions of Protestantism require a brief consideration. These relate chiefly to the opposite views of the Lutheran and the Reformed communions, and with special reference to their respective doctrines of the Eucharist.

Differences as to the mediatorial offices of Christ do not enter into the present subject.

The Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's supper demanded for its foundation the assumption of the ubiquitas or omnipresence of the body of Christ; and this again required a definite theory as to the relation of the two natures in His one Person. The ancient formula, communicatio idiomatum, that is, the expression of the fact that, in consequence of the communion of natures, the properties of each of the two natures are communicated to the other, and to the whole Person, was found essential to the doctrine of consubstantiation. The Formula Concordiæ sets forth that the Person of Christ was constituted by the Son of God assuming in the Virgin's womb the human nature into His own unity. This act was the decree of the whole Trinity, accomplished by the Logos, who is therefore the Personal Principle. This personal union is entire: not part with part, but the whole Logos with the flesh, and the whole flesh with the whole Logos, so that wherever the Logos is there He has the flesh most intimately present. This union is not natural, as between body and soul, nor merely verbal, nor mystical, nor internal, nor sacramental, but essential, personal, and abiding. They further analyse thus the doctrine of the communication of properties.

There is (1) the genus idiomaticum, whereby the properties of one nature are applied or transferred to the whole Person, and here their theology is indisputably sound; (2) the genus majestaticum, whereby the one nature gives its property to the other, which however is no communication, because it is only the human that can receive; and (3) the genus apotelesmaticum, whereby the redemptional acts of the Person are predicated of one or the other nature, on which also there can be no doubt. It is on the second of these kinds of communication that Lutheranism established the doctrine of an impartation, at the will of Christ, of His glorified body and blood in, and with, and under the unchanged elements, to the communicant.

Consistently with this doctrine the One Person of Christ is seen in Lutheran theology in a state of exinanition and a state of exaltation. The incarnation is a permanent state, and therefore as such is no part of our Lord's self-abasement: it was consummated before the conception, in the assumption of our nature into the Divine. The humbled estate begins with the conception and ends with the burial; the exaltation begins with the descent into hades, and goes on for ever. But the Lutherans were not always at one on the nature of our Lord's humiliation.

The Formula Concordia taught that "He did not exhibit His majesty always, but when it seemed good to Him, until He laid aside the servant form." In the seventeenth century the theologians of Tübingen decided that "the man Christ taken into God did govern all things as a present King, but latently: "hence theirs was the theory of the κρύψις. The theologians of Giessen denied this, and went so far as to defend a veritable κέvωσις, or self-emptying on the part of Christ. The Tübingen school deemed that our Lord already sat on the right hand of God at His conception, and on the cross, and that the exaltation did not impart the reality but the name and appearance of the dignity. They afterwards yielded so far as to admit a renunciation as concerning the priestly office, but no more. The germ of this controversy we shall see hereafter developed.

The Reformed or Calvinistic churches rejected this interpretation of our Saviour's Person, and all the consequences that flow from it. The fundamental principle of their doctrine will best be exhibited by showing its points of difference from the former. They maintained that the Divine perfections could be attributes of the Man to the extent or His human finiteness, and established it as their foundation that finitum non est capax infiniti, "the finite cannot be capable of the infinite."

Whatever the Lutherans might say as to the Infinite being pleased so to communicate itself to the finite as to make it one with Itself, to that principle they kept faithful. The Lutherans held that Christ was the God-man before He became man; that the incarnation was the assumption of the human nature into the fellowship of the Trinity in the Person of the Logos; and that the God-man as such must empty Himself of His Divine form before He could assume that of a servant in human existence. His Conception being the first voluntary act of the, as it were, preexisting Divine-human Person, the God-man was a real personality before He descended to a human life. The Reformed denied all this. They held the incarnation to be itself the humiliation, in that the Logos absolute exists as the Logos made man in a developing life and consciousness. They even teach that the human nature is connected in personal unity with the Logos, not immediately, but only by the instrumentality of the Holy Ghost; and in their opposition to the idea of too close an affinity between the finite and the Infinite, they fall into the danger of making Christ's manhood too much like that of other men. When Zwingli would substitute the idea of a mere rhetorical interchange for the communicatio idiomatum he went too far, for any Nestorian would have done the same; and Luther's vigorous epithet had some sense in it, as well as much wrath, when he denounced the Reformed λλoίωσις, or figurative interchange, as a larva diaboli.

In an historical review it is not appropriate to enter at any length upon a comparison of these rival systems. Confining ourselves strictly to their treatment of the Person of Christ, we cannot but observe that the Lutheran tendency is as decidedly, though unconsciously, Eutychian, as the Reformed is decidedly, though unconsciously, Nestorian. Hence, as it will be seen, the later speculations of Lutheranism have almost invariably leaned towards the idea of such a union of the God and man in Christ as should abolish the double nature of the Redeemer, while the Reformed churches have found their chief danger to be in such a separation of the God from the man in Christ as concedes everything that Unitarianism asks. This, however, refers to a later time. A reaction of withering Rationalism awaited both, and was not long in coming.

Thus the Reformation era only established more firmly than ever the doctrine of the Incarnate Person, in the perfect but unfathomable union of His two natures, the One Object of faith.

Disputes there were as to the distinction between the active and passive righteousness, one result of which was that many supposed the God-man to owe no obedience on His own account, in virtue of the communicatio idiomatum, and therefore that His superfluous merits were available for the believer. This error was not, however, confined to the Lutherans; it was bound up with the Calvinistic faith, while only a perversion of the Lutheran. But, apart from this error, it was the glory of the middle of the sixteenth century to unite all the Reformed communions in a glorious confession of the Object of faith, the whole, undivided, and indivisible Person of Jesus Christ, whose work, like Himself, is one, and who is in both the Object of faith to man. The essentials of the ancient creeds were reproduced in the article De Filio Dei of the Augsburg Confession, which We quote here, because at the time when it was framed it perhaps expressed on this point the faith of a larger proportion of Christendom than any other article. The same truths, encumbered and disfigured, were found in the creeds of Eastern and Western communions; but these words expressed the truth, and the pure truth, that had descended from antiquity. Socinianism was not as yet known, and the Lutheran, and Reformed, and Anglican confessions joined in this faith:

"Item docent, quod Verbum, hoc est Filius Dei, assumpserit humanam naturam in utero beatæ Mariæ Virgis, ut sint duæ naturæ, divina et humana, in unitate ptrsonæ inseparabiliter conJunctæ, unus Christus, vere Deus, et vere Homo, natus ex Virgine Maria, vere passus, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus, ut reconciliaret nobis Patrem, et hostia esset non tantum pro culpa originis, sed etiam pro omnibus actualibus hominum peccatis."

The second Article of the Church of England is based upon this, but somewhat strengthens it, especially in the simultaneous original Latin. There we read, "In utero beatæ Virginis, ex illius substantia naturam humanam assumsit." But the English Article, which was the faith of the whole empire at one time on this central doctrine, ought to be familiar to all:

"The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man's nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance; so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say the Godhead and manhood, were joined together in one Person never to be divided, whereof is one Christ very God and very man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins of men."

Instead of giving extracts from the several confessions that embodied the faith of the Calvinistic branches of the Reformers, the Westminster Confession, of a hundred years later, may be referred to, as expressing almost in the same words the belief of all Calvinistic communities on the Continent, in Great Britain, and in America: "The Son of God, the Second Person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance and equal with the Father, did, when the fulness of time was come, take upon Him man's nature with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin, being conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary, of her substance: so that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one Person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which Person is very God and very man; yet one Christ, the only Mediator between God and man."

These extracts from the three leading confessions of Protestantism cannot be read and studied, and compared in their minute differences, without profit. Their phraseology should be written on the mind of every one who would understand the doctrine of Christ's Person. But their highest interest is found in the fact that they represent the great result of fifteen centuries of the church's theological history in this central department of the truth. All the creeds contribute to these sentences; and the faith of man need not hope for any clearer definitions to sustain it than these. But now we pass to a less pleasing theme.

VI.

No sooner had the Reformation restored the Saviour's Person, as the one Christ and one Mediator, to the view and the faith of the Christian world, than an antichrist appeared in the form of what may be called Modern Unitarianism. The early history of the church was as it were re-enacted. The Ebionites, and Gnostics, and Arians, reappeared in the Socinians and Rationalists and mythical theorisers who have been steadily under various forms assailing the catholic truth from that time until now. The spirit of the Reformation was appalled by the beginnings of this deadly evil,—the only essential Antichrist whether of ancient or modern times. By it Luther's soul was stirred within him as it was stirred by nothing else; Calvin joined the Inquisition in striving to suppress it by the stake; states and governments disavowed, proscribed, and punished it. But in vain. Its development was at that time a necessity; it has its place among us still; but it will also have its end.

Passing by Swedenborg's identification of the Trinity with Christ's Person, Socinianism is the first development of Unitarianism in order of time, and the only one that ever formed a confession and a literature. Lælius Socinus was an Italian, who felt the influence of the Reformation in its first advances in Italy; but, becoming infected with doubts, he travelled, and at length settled in Geneva. Under the rebuke of Calvin, and warned by the death of Servetus, he kept in the background, cherishing his opinions, but leaving others to maintain them for him. Faustus Socinus, his bolder and more systematic nephew, took up his abode in Poland, already, as will be hereafter seen, the stronghold of anti-Trinitarianism. There he moulded his heresy, and there the Racovian Catechism, the formulary of his tenets, was constructed. In its relation to the Person of Christ the system had some peculiarities not known in antiquity, and since obsolete; but generally it was a revival of ancient Ebionism. It set out with the principle that the Divine and the human natures forbid any such union as the incarnation supposes; that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin by a supernatural interposition, was a mere man, though free from original sin; that His baptism was the descent on Him of a special Divine efficacy; that He received His commission as prophet, priest, and king, during some mysterious rapture into heaven, probably in the wilderness of temptation; that in His death there was nothing propitiatory, but the highest of all martyrdom for truth; that in His resurrection He received a quasi-Divine but only delegated authority over the universe; and that only as a representative of the power of God is He entitled to reverence and the receiver of prayer. Socinianism was developed in Poland; but it never became naturalized there: in the middle of the seventeenth century it was proscribed and exterminated. During its prevalence it assumed a propagandist character, and sent missionaries to Hungary, where they had no success; to Holland, where they met with more encouragement; and to England, where they were represented by a single congregation which soon died out. The Socinian theory of Christ's Person—and it is with that only we have to do—has not survived. It had so much affinity with Arianism in some of its elements, as to be absorbed in many cases into that system. It retained too much of the supernatural, and adhered too closely to the letter of Scripture, to satisfy the growing spirit of pure Rationalism, which gradually discarded it therefore throughout Christendom. Modern Unitarianism has left Socinus far behind; and his theories, while they fill a Polonian library, have ceased to occupy a place in the living process of the historical development of our doctrine.

To modern Arianism a secondary place has been assigned, simply because it has been more sporadic in its character, and has never been able to furnish a creed or a literature to represent its claims. In other respects, and as a power in the history of the Christian church, its importance has been very great. To trace this, however lightly, we must go back to the Nicene Council, and take up the thread again which was designedly left unpursued. A modification of the doctrine of Arius, known by the name of semi-Arianism, and by the formula of Homoiousion—

of like substance with the Father, in opposition to Homoousion, of the same substance—disappeared from Christian history before the fourth century closed: it was a mere subtile evasion, and was lost again in the spread of the parent doctrine. Arianism proper branched into a variety of denominations, which will not here be referred to, because they refer rather to the doctrine of the Trinity, and introduce nothing new into that of Christ's Person, who, in all of them alike, is a man inhabited by a Being created of the Father. It was for more than three hundred years a formidable rival of the catholic doctrine: prevalent among the Goths, the Vandals in Africa, the Visigoths in France and Spain, the Lombards in Italy, it was not extinct as a public profession until the end of the seventh century. During the middle ages it appears again and again in Italy and elsewhere, secretly held by many who openly professed, with a reservation, the Nicene Creed.

At the time of the Reformation one species of the tares that grew up among the wheat was Arianism. Servetus and Gentilis, who died for their errors at Geneva and Berne, held this among their other heresies. But it was in Poland that this form of anti-Trinitarianism flourished most: there the Arians formed separate congregations, all of which concurred in maintaining the supremacy of the Father, but differed among themselves as to whether the Son was a god of inferior nature derived from the Deity, or the first created spirit who became incarnate. Some of those who at first believed the latter doctrine descended to the theory of Christ's simple manhood, and were prepared, as we have seen, to receive the teachings, more consistently developed, of Socinus. Driven ultimately from Poland, where alone they had had a corporate existence, it cannot be said that in any part of the world the Arians have ever maintained, or now maintain, their faith as a community. It is only through prejudice or carelessness that the Arminians of Holland are sometimes said to have been infected with Arianism. As a body they certainly were not amenable to this charge; and though some of them, such as Grotius, and Wetstein, and Episcopius himself, spoke very tolerantly as to the condemnation of those who denied the eternal filiation, they were not Arians. Their leanings, so far as they leaned to error, was towards the Racovian school, but they were leanings that betrayed themselves mostly if not solely in inconsiderate language. Arianism in England has to Englishmen an interesting history, but that history evolves only one doctrinal element that demands attention here. That element is Subordinationism, which only indirectly affects the question of Christ's Person, being really a branch of the Trinitarian controversy. Dr. Samuel Clarke's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, published in 1712, opened a series of discussions which brought to light the existence of a strong and definite leaven of Arianism in the English Church. His apology to Convocation in 1714 declared his belief that "the Son was eternally begotten by the eternal, incomprehensible power and will of the Father; also that the Holy Spirit was eternally derived from the Father by or through the Son, according to the eternal, incomprehensible power and will of the Father." This is the highest refinement of Arianism, and something very different from the species of subordination doctrine taught by the best English divines, following the early fathers, though using far more cautious language than they. Whatever "eternal” may mean in this definition, it is not possible that it can redeem from Arian imputation the words, "by His power and will." This transcendental view of the Godhead of the Son, who is, nevertheless, not consubstantial with the Father, was held by many eminent men, whose names need not be mentioned; it was taught both in and out of the Establishment; but at length, by an easy transition, became that Humanitarianism of which Priestley was the first representative in England, having Lindsey and Belsham as his feeble followers. It strove to interpret the theory that Jesus Christ was only man. With remarkable industry it applied the resources of Biblical criticism to the task,

"improved" the version 0f the New Testament, and succeeded in keeping up and continuing, down to the present century, a Unitarian system of faith and worship based upon the purely humanitarian hypothesis. But this system, which denies the original sin of man, the atonement of Christ's death, the Divinity and influence of the Holy Spirit, and which, denying all these, regards Jesus of Nazareth as a man remarkably endowed of God, whose claims have been much misunderstood, has no claim to consideration in this Essay. It is an embellished and more complete edition of Deism, and, with Deism, bids fair to vanish before the effect of influences now to be referred to.

With the eighteenth century began, throughout most of the communions of the continental Reformation, a marked indifference to the old formularies. The spirit of subjective philosophy turned away from the objective standards; the supernatural and transcendent was given up in favour of the natural and tangible; and Divine faith was surrendered to the censure and despotism of human reason. The age of illuminism had come; and upon no object in the sphere of Christian belief was its false light more searchingly shed than upon the ancient doctrine of our Lord's Person. One of its first canons of criticism required that every contradiction be removed from the idea of the historical Redeemer. Then vanished at once the union of God and man, with the communicatio idiomatum; and the Lutheran church had its writers who bitterly wrote against this essential of Lutheran theology. Nestorianism was triumphant. Then, with the Homoousion, the true Divinity left the Christ, and an Arian stream of doctrine set in. The Arian Logos became simply a Divine energy, and the descent to Ebionism was made. Soon the touch of Divine power that even Ebionism left in the Redeemer's nativity was renounced; and Jesus was in German theology only man. By degrees, as illuminism became more luminous, it could criticise the character of our Lord, which was found unable to endure its inquisition. In Germany, as in English Deism, the doctrine of our Lord's Person had thus reached the lowest stage of its abasement, to begin at once to rise again.

VII.

Then commenced what may be termed the modern development, the peculiarly modern philosophical development, of the Ideal Christ.

This had its birthplace in Germany; but has exerted a very strong influence in England and in America, in fact, wherever the Person of Christ is an object of study. It has almost recast Christology, although in itself scarcely worthy to be called a doctrine. The father of this philosophy, Kant—unless indeed Spinoza be the father of it—regarded the Son of God as the representative of mankind, well pleasing to God; as the personification of the principle of all good, the ideal of moral perfection. From that time the idea of the God-man became one of the profoundest and most cherished ideas of philosophy: each giving it, down to Hegel and beyond him, its own specific impress. Kant's system required a redemption from the original evil of our nature, and the human ideal to guide aspiration. But it was matter of indifference whether that ideal became a reality through supernatural generation or otherwise. It sublimely rose above the petty historical Jesus of Nazareth: like the Gnostic æon leaving the man Christ Jesus, after having used him for its purpose. Indeed, according to Kant, the good principle did not enter the world at any definite crisis, but had invisibly descended into man from the beginning. Schelling's philosophy of identity regarded Jesus as the unity of the finite and the infinite, as the God incarnate in time, who in Christ as the climax of His manifestation, ends the world of finiteness, and begins that of the infinite or the supremacy of spirit. The mystery of nature and the incarnation of God were to him intertwined and inseparable. It is an incarnation from eternity.

The man Christ forms in His historical appearance only the crown, or in another sense the beginning, of that incarnation; for, having its noblest form in Him, it was to be so continued in His followers that they should be the body of which He was the Head. But after much that is honourable to the historical Christ, his idealism carries him away again, and he declares that the single incarnation of Christianity is not so rational as the Indian successive visitations of God; and that the narratives concerning Christ are matters of indifference, inasmuch as the great idea depends not on this single phenomenon, but is universal and absolute. Hegel's philosophy has had more influence than any other on our doctrine; but it is exceedingly difficult to extract its fundamental principle, and make it available for our purpose. To take it boldly: God is man, and God is spirit. As spirit distinguishing Himself from Himself the finiteness of consciousness arises: God thinks Himself in man into a finite spirit; not indeed in any individual but in mankind as a whole. God, as the Infinite has man as the finite for His counterpart, or rather opposite pole. So, to dismiss this incomprehensible travesty of the gospel, what the church attributes to Christ, as His predicates, should be attributed to the great idea of humanity as the veritable God-man. It is obvious that these principles do not of themselves belong to the doctrine of the Person of Christ; nor would they be introduced here save as showing the origin of many influences that conspired to mould the Unitarianism of England and America during the present century, and to throw a haze over much of the theology of those who profess themselves Trinitarian Christians. Some illustrative renlarks on this subject will end our sketch of Humanitarianism.

The first noticeable effect of the transcendental philosophy on the doctrine of our Lord's Person, was to discredit, in Germany and everywhere, those theories of infidel Rationalism which based the historical manifestation of Christ on conscious or unconscious imposture. With those theories, beginning with that of Reimarus the Wolfenbüttel fragmentist, and continuing through a series of cold and irreverent and sometimes blasphemous criticisms of the Holy Life, we need have nothing to do. It is grievous even to be obliged to preserve their names. They were all, both the English Deists who preceded, and the French Encyclopredists who followed them, based on an absolute denial of the supernatural as bound up with the life of Jesus. And the first touch of the transcendental philosophy exploded th error.

Whatever else the philosophical patronage of Christianity did, it shielded it and its documents from a purely naturalistic treatment. The Person of Christ was replaced in its position between the two worlds; and men began everywhere to study what was His significance with regard to both.

Schleiermacher marked a new era in modern Christology, inasmuch as he brought the ideal theory into closer connection with theology; Christ, as the normal idea of mankind, into closer relation with the historical Christ. His doctrine of our Lord's Person, however, denies the personal union of the Divine and human natures. His Trinity is not the Christian Trinity, but, so far as it is triune at all, is Sabellian. Jesus was, in his theory, born without sin or the possibility of sin; but, whether by supernatural generation or not, his theory does not ask, and it pays but slight attention to, the gospel narratives. God's indwelling in Him simply realizes the idea that human consciousness has of its own possible sinlessness. The impersonality of the human nature in Christ is carried to its extremest point; His humanity passively receives God, or a power of God, and in His historical Person God always, and supremely, acts. He is like all men in independent human volitions and deeds; unlike all men in the everlasting power of His God-consciousness, which is the only idea of the God in Him.

Hence Schleiermacher's doctrine of the Saviour's sinlessness, and freedom from error, and absolute perfection, is extremely high, and redeems his Christology in general to a great extent. Christ is mankind anew created, and His salvation rests upon our entering into His new nature and fellowship, and into a vital nnion with His representative obedience. His system dismisses altogether the idea of vicarious expiation; but, inasmuch as Christ represents the whole of redeemed mankind, He may be called our Satisfying Substitute. He gives his doctrine of redemption in the form of what to us is a paradox. The redeeming sufferings were vicarious, but without making satisfaction. Christ's obedience makes satisfaction, but not as vicarious. Hence it will be obvious that the entire system of this leader of modern German theology is composed of the most heterogeneous elements, bound together by a mystical and sentimental bond peculiarly his own. He agrees with the transcendental philosophers in making the infinite and finite meet in the ideal Christ; but he differs from them in regarding God, not as becoming Himself in Christ, but as being in Him as the archetype of anew humanity. He rejects the church doctrines of the personal union, the atoning death, and the supreme importance of the historical facts of Christ's life; but he agrees with the Christian faith in making Jesus man's representative, and in holding something like the New-Testament doctrine of a union with Him by faith. Above all, he nourished in his own soul, and poured into his theology, a deep and tender love to the Person of Christ as he conceived Him, and thus atoned by the affections of his heart for many of the errors of his head. It is impossible to trace here the influence of his teaching on a whole generation of thinkers in all parts of Christendom; nor would it be easy to prove, by individual instances, what, nevertheless, may be safely asserted, that he contributed largely to raise to a higher character the grovelling views of humanitarianism, above which he himself was greatly elevated.

Whether or not through the influence of German Transcendental Christology, certain it is that the more modern Unitarianism of England, France, and America, has undergone a marvellous change—improvement it is not necessary to say. It is not that the doctrine of Christ's simple manhood has risen towards the older Socinianism, or the Ebionism of ancient times.

Such a return to their old paths can hardly be predicated of the representatives of modern Unitarianism. They have rather caught the infection of the ideal Christ hovering mysteriously and undefinably in our midst neither God nor man, too low for the one, too high for the other,—concerning whose true character and lineaments they are in hopeless confusion; whom they cannot, like their forefathers, formulate in any creed that words can frame.

The works of the most prominent Unitarians of America, Dr.

Channing, Theodore Parker, and others, and English writers, of whom Mr. Martineau may be cited as an example, abundantly prove this. They are one and all impatient of the poverty of their creed, and almost every sentence they write concerning Christ is a confession of despair. Not that they make any approach towards a Divine Redeemer. So long as they apply their prerogative of reason to the doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement, and find them incredible, Christ can never be God to them. Their Jesus has ceased to be the Jesus of Priestley and Belsham; He is animated by some higher potence of the Divine than mere human nature can account for. But they have no doctrine, and therefore, as before once and again observed, they have no right to a place in this sketch.

The same might be said of the teaching that proceeds from a considerable section of the clergy of the English Church, or, it might be said, of the English churches. The "Essays and Reviews"

are not Ebionite, or Socinian, or Humanitarian, or Arian, in their presentation of Christ's Person, simply because they have no positive doctrine at all, only a negative abandonment of the faith of the Christian world. “In theology," says one of these Essays, "the less we define the better. Definite statements respecting the relation of Christ either to God or man are only figures of speech; they do not really plerce the clouds which

'round our little life.'" If the writer of these words stood alone, or was a man whose wavering words were soliloquies, like Prospero's in his quotation, there would be no reason to pause for a moment to think of him; he might be passed by like a thousand other representatives of free thought. But he is, in a special sense, a representative, and speaks for great numbers of teachers, as well as to great numbers of hearers. Their doctrine never helps the people to answer the great question,

"Whom say ye that I am?" The teaching given in the Articles, and Prayers, and Homilies, and the great writers of their church, is discredited; and nothing is substituted that simple minds can grasp. Our Lord is saluted by all His titles, and His Person and work are both often spoken of in the language of conventional theology. But the heart and soul of the old doctrine is gone.

When some members of the party, less discreet than the leaders, venture on discussions and definitions, the result is a conglomerate of Mysticism, Pantheism, Transcendentalism, Hegelianism (as some delight to avow), of which the most undisciplined of Schleiermacher's disciples would have been ashamed. Perhaps no thinker has spent the energies of a more powerful mind, or of a more sincere will, upon this great subject than Mr. Maurice. But it is impossible to bring his definitions of Christ's Person and relation to our race into harmony with any creed, formula, or confession, that is found either in Scripture or in the church.

Returning again to Germany, it can scarcely be regarded as farfetched when we trace the influence of the Ideal Philosophy upon the theories of the divines who are now endeavouring, in the Lutheran church especially, to construct a true and philosophical conception of the union between God and our nature in Christ.

The effort has reference to the state of humiliation especially; and the self-emptying of which St. Paul speaks when writing to the Philippians is made the object of a scrutiny which even the scholastics scarcely ventured upon, but which the thinkers of Germany consider not only as permitted but as essential to the vindication of the Christian faith. The Logos then is by one class of theories supposed to have limited Himself in the incarnation, undergone a self-depotentiation in love, amounting to a surrender of His eternal, self-conscious being; thus to have found Himself in our nature, and in it to have gradually expanded again into one Divine-human existence, unchangeably the same, though proceeding onwards in its development to the ascension: for ever, be it remembered, remaining in the unity of a Divine-human life. The relation of the Holy Ghost is called in to support this wonderful theory, which seems like one of the old Gnostic heresies risen again with its Divine potence in the embryonic nature of man. The gradual restoration of the Logos to Himself, as His human faculties expanded, is supposed to be conducted by the energy of the Holy Ghost, whose peculiar office in regard to our Lord's human nature is thus accounted for.

There is a modification of this theory which does not press the depotentiation of the Logos, but prefers the limitation of His self-bestowment on the man, according to the gradual ability of his faculties to receive the Divine. Thus a Divine-human Person is not the result of the incarnation as such, but the result of the final development of the manhood; the union not being completely accomplished until the human consciousness could grasp it, could appropriate it, and be by it appropriated.

German theologians exceedingly delight in this new stage of the Christological problem. Many of the greatest of them are partisans of the doctrine in some of its forms: Nitzsch, Konig, Ebrard, Lange, Martensen, Thomasius, Hoffmann, Delitzsch, Schmieder, Kahnis, Liebner, Rothe—are names of some of the most laborious and generally orthodox theologians of the Continent; and most of them are teaching among ourselves through translations of their works. It would therefore be inconsiderate to brand as folly the labours of such men, especially as the works in which these theories are evolved are for the most part of great value in other respects. But it is not to be denied that this, the last phase of Christological doctrine, is full of the germ of almost all the heresies that have passed in review before us, and of other's the composite of these. To get rid of one difficulty, that of the double consciousness of our Lord belonging to one indivisible Person, they bring a thousand equally great into existence. In reading the history of the controversy, and especially in studying the writers themselves, one old heresy after another lifts its horrid semblance to scare us, as it were, from an interdicted part of the garden of theology. In this chapter of speculation it sometimes seems as if almost every form under which the commerce of God and man has been depicted in mythology, heathen and Christian, were reproduced to play its part again, on paper at least, in this nineteenth century. Sometimes the incarnation is spoken of as the entrance into our race of One who must die out of existence in the Trinity before He could live in the flesh; who thus therefore rehearsed as Divine the great wonder of His self-sacrifice on the cross. No marvel that the supplementary question then arises as to what resources there are in Deity for the renewed generation of the Eternal Son. Shocked by such consequences, others nevertheless insist on the suspension of the personal Godhead of the Son, which for a season is either given back to God, or latently existent in the incarnate Christ. All this seems simply heathenism; the same which the Fathers so earnestly condemned under the name of Patripassianism in earlier times and of Theopaschitism at a later date. In some of its defenders it begets Apollinarianism; the potence or power in the Divinity which is called the Son disdains the limits that a human soul would have imposed—such moral and intellectual, and spiritual limitations as are deemed unworthy—but consents to the limitations of the flesh, which are physical only, and give an organ for the experience of human sorrow, and make Him who lives in it capable of death. Convicted of this error, the theorist glides into Sabellianism. The ablest adherent of this many featured hypothesis, Thomasius, so felt the pressure of this difficulty that he devised the expedient of a difference between the immanent and the œconomical Logos. The essential Son did not undergo depotentiation or self-constriction; but the œconomical Logos, with whom, when once in some undefinable way severed from the essential Logos, theory can disport at pleasure. That œconomical Son may undergo the whole lot of man's infirmity, from the unconsciousness of sleep to the infinite agony of the desertion of God. Other aspects of the theory, which, as in the hands of Hoffmann and others, borrow the ideal Christ of Kant and Schleiermacher, might be introduced. They would show, if space and patience allowed of their illustration here, that this system of theorizing on the manifestation of God in Christ is a product of the false philosophy that has for a hundred years, indeed ever since Spinoza, and, to go still further back, since Alexandrian thought infected Christianity, disported with the Person of our Lord as the identity of God and man.

Two lines of error, it has again and again been remarked, have run through Christological thought from the beginning: one that melts the Divine and the human into one form and mode of existence; the other that makes God a close ally and companion of a chosen member of the human family. The doctrine whose history is here sketched oscillates between these two errors, and has its zone of truth between them. The theory that has just been dismissed is the modern form of what used to be termed Apollinarianism, Eutychianism, and Monophytism. In it everything—philosophy, Scripture, reason, common sense—is sacrificed to the making the Christ mechanically or physically one. Now this error has never been encountered by theology without the concurrent danger of a recoil into the opposite.

Hence, the most vigorous opponents of the depotentiation theory, with Dorner at their head, renounce, as it were, with one consent the impersonal manhood of Christ, and are putting forth vigorous efforts to defend their own theory of a unity that shall belong to two persons. Slowly and surely they are constructing hypotheses on the Nestorian side which will rival those of their opponents on the Eutychian side, if not in their unthinkableness, at least in their contrariety to Scripture. A fair beginning is made in the distinction of Dorner between the union of the two natures and the perfection of the unity. The union goes on more and more perfectly, taking possession of the humanity to the end.

It is not possible to show in few words what the results of this principle may prove in other and more incautious hands than Dorner's. The union will be, by degrees—indeed, it is already by many apparently sound divines—conceived of as a simply Nestorian union between the Son of God and the man he has "formed for Himself:" a union which becomes more and more strict the more capable the developing faculty of Christ becomes, and which therefore—for the theory must not halt—gradually strengthens the human intellect into unfaltering power, and releases it from the uncertainties of ignorance, and becomes perfect—when? at the passion, or before it, or after? At what point—and no question that man may ask is of more transcendent importance—does God take our nature to Himself in Christ for its infallible guidance into truth, and its perfect atonement for sin?

That region of perfect truth, where the Doctrine, with its mystery, is to be found, lies midway between these. And, while the Chalcedonian formula that we confess defines it well fo the theologian, its best, safest and sufficient expression for all Christians alike is to be found in the "words which the Holy Ghost teacheth."

PRINCIPLE DATES IN CHRISTOLOGY.

70-150. Apostolical Fathers.

150-200. Justin Martyr, Irenæus: Gnosticism, Docetism.

160-180. Praxeas : Patripassianism.

200-250. Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Origen.

250. Sabellius.

261. Paul of Samosata: Unitarianism (Monarchianism).

325. I Œum. Council, Nicaœ: (Homoousion).

358. Homoiousion Condemned: Ancyra (Semiarianism).

38]. II. Œum. Council, Constantinople: Apollinaris Condemned (Divinity of Holy Spirit).

431. III. Œcum. Council, Ephesus: Nestorius Condemned.

441-461. Leo Magnus: Epis. ad Flavianum.

451. IV. Œcum. Council, Chalcedon: Nestorius and Eutyches Condemned.

482-5]9. Monophyticism, Theopaschitism.

589. Filioque added to Nicœno-Constantinopolitan Creed.

638. Heraclius: One Will.

680. The Monothelite Heresy Condemned: VI. Œcum. Council, Constantinople.

730-760. Johannes Damascenus.

794. Adoptionist Controversy ended: Council of Frankfurt.

831-85]. Paschasius Radbert.

1050-1100. Anselm, Our Deus Homo.

1160 (circ.) Peter Lombard (Magister Sententiarum), Nihilianist Controversy, Rupert of Deutz.

1255-1274. Thomas Aquinas.

1300-1400, Duns Scotus, Tauler, Suso, Rusbrock.

1489. John Wessel.

1522-1586. Chemnitz and Lutheran Doctrine.

1525. Sacramental Controversy.

1530. Augsburg Confession.

1580. Formula Concordirœ.

1539-1604. F. Socinus.

1619. Kenosis Controversy.

1689-1772. Swedenborg.

178]. Kant.

1800-1835. Schleiermacher, Strauss.

NOTES.

NOTE. I.—NATURE AND PERSON.

"BEFORE the time of Arius the term hypostasis had that meaning, and that only, which is here assigned to it, viz., a real personal subsistence.' But the idea of 'reality' also applies to substance and being, and this was the application that Arius gave to it. 'There are three hypostases,' he said, but he meant natures, substances, and that the nature of the Son and Spirit were different from each other and different from the nature of the Father; the nature of the Son is one with the nature of the Father; the Hypostasis of the Son is derived from the Hypostasis of the Father, as Sonship is derivative from Paternity. This Arius denied, and affirmed that the Son was ξ

τέρας o σίας and ξ τέρας πoστάσεως. Therefore the Council of Nice anathematized in him all who said that the Son was qua nature ξ

τέρας o σιας of any other substance but the One Godhead, or qua Person ξ τέρας τιvoς πoστάσεως of any other person save the person of the Fat4er. Up to this point the language of the Church had always been the same. But the clamorous assertion of three hypostases in an heretical sense by Arius introduced confusion.

The Latin Church had hitherto continued free from error. In any case of difficulty the eyes of the Catholic reverted to the ‘See of the Apostles.' In this instance, however, it only increased the confusion. 'Persona, the equivalent for prosopon, was the term that expressed to the Western Church the Catholic meaning of hypostasis. There was no Latin word for ousia until Hilary coined the term 'essentia;’ in the meantime the language of theology could not remain incomplete, and the want was supplied by taking hypostasis, the philosophical equivalent for ousia, and translating it sometimes as 'substantia,' sometimes as

'subsistentia.' Both of these words seem to express with equal accuracy the force of the Greek term; but there is a clear distinction to be observed between them. ‘Substantia' means the essence of a thing, the very root and foundation of its being; whereas in 'subsistere' is contained the inherent idea of

'check,' ‘making a stand,' as we should say. And there is the idea of ‘limitation' in 'personality;' it has an 'idiosyncracy'

that is wholly its own. The limitation involved in

'subsistentia' is the definition that marks the distinction of each Person in the Holy Trinity. The idea of Father is limited by Paternity; that of the Son by Filiation; that of the Holy Spirit by Procession from both Father and Son. So Hooker: ‘The substance of God with this property, to be of none, doth make the Person of the Father; the very self-same substance in number with this property to be of the Father maketh the Person of the Son; the same substance having added to it the property of proceeding from the other two, maketh the Holy Ghost. So that in every Person there is implied both the substance of God which is one, and also that. property which causeth the same Person to be really and truly to differ from the other two. Every Person hath his own subsistence which no other besides hath, although there be others beside that have the same substance.' [Eccl. Pol., v.

51.] Hence from poverty of language [Basil, Ep. 349, ad Terent.]

the terminology of the Western Church became confused

‘substantia’ being held to be the equivalent for hypostasis, and the confusion did not fail to re-act upon the East. Thus Athanasius, as standing in close communication with the Roman Church, adopted its mode of speaking, and makes hypostasis to be synonymous with ousia; though elsewhere he speaks of three hypostases. The great Council held at Sardica [A.D. 347], allowed the use of hypostasis in the sense of ousia; for whereas Ursacius and Valens, as Arians, affirmed three hypostases, in the sense of substance, the council declared that in that sense the Divine Hypostasis was One. In the Meletian schism both that and the Eustathian party were orthodox in their faith, but while the latter adopted the Roman mode of speaking, and held that there was only one hypostasis, meaning substance, in the Deity, the former used the language of primitive antiquity, and declared that there were three hypostases, meaning Persons. The Council of Alexandria [A.D. 362], on examining the two parties, affirmed both to be equally orthodox, and that the difference was only verbal; though for the future it ruled that the words as well as the faith. of the Nicene Council were to be held binding. Jerome deprecates the use of the expression 'three hypostases' as savouring of Arianism. Perhaps, however, the time from whence uniformity of expression is to be dated is the Council of Alexandria [A.D. 3621 where the term ousia was applied to

'substance,' and hypostasis restricted once more to personal subsistence. The first synodal definition of 'hypostasis’ as

'person,' in contradistinction to substance, was at the Council of the Dedication, at Antioch [A.D. 341; Hilary, de Syn., 334]; and the writer who enforced the accurate distinction between o σία

and πόστασις was Basil [Ep. 349, ad Terent.]."—Blunt's Dict. of Doct. and Hist. Theology, Art. Hypostasis.

"There is a somewhat different sense, or rather a different usage, of the term 'Divine Nature' from that above explained.

The distinction may, perhaps, be thus stated: we have used the word thus far as implying What God is: it is used to imply what anyone has in virtue of which he is Divine. When we speak of our Lord's Divine Nature, in relation to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the term is obviously used in a different manner from that in which we say that the Divine Nature includes the Trinity of Persons. In the one case, to say that we are speaking of the Divine Nature means that we are stating essential or analytical judgments of which God is the subject: to say so in the other means that we are speaking of a subject of which Deity may be predicated. In the former case, the Divine Nature is conceived as the whole essence, the sum total (directly or by implication) of all the true propositions that can be made concerning God; in the second, it is (speaking logically) an attribute of the Person of Christ that He is Divine: His Divine nature is not the sum total, but only a part of the qualities in virtue of which He is What He is. It is only necessary to point out the distinction to prevent confusion between the two senses of the term."—Ibid., Art. Natures Divine.

The articles in this Dictionary on the various theological terms by which the mysteries of the Trinity and the Person of Christ are formulated are of great value. The above are only extracts, and the references are generally omitted. To other parts of this laborious and learned work less satisfactory reference will have to be made.

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NOTE II.—THE SON INCARNATE.

"Each of these expressions, the 'Word' and the 'Son,' if taken alone, might have led to a fatal misconception. In the language of church history, the Logos, if unbalanced by the idea of Sonship, might have seemed to sanction Sabellianism. The Son, without the Logos, might have been yet more successfully pressed into the service of Arianism. An Eternal Thought or Reason, even although constantly tending to express Itself in speech, is of Itself too abstract to oblige us to conceive of It as of a Personal Subsistence. On the other hand, the filial relationship carries with it the idea of dependence and of comparatively recent origin, even although it should suggest the reproduction in the Son of all the qualities of the Sire. Certainly St. John's language in his prologue protects the Personality of the Logos, and unless he believed that God could be divided or could have had a beginning, the Apostle teaches that the Son is co-eternal with the Father. Yet the bare metaphors of ‘Word’ and 'Son'

might separately lead divergent thinkers to conceive of Him to Whom they are applied, on the one side as an impersonal quality or faculty of God, on the other as a concrete and personal but inferior and dependent being. But combine them, and each corrects the possible misuse of the other. The Logos, Who is also the Son, cannot be an impersonal and abstract quality; since such an expression as the Son would be utterly misleading unless it implied at the very least the fact of personal subsistence distinct from that of the Father. On the other hand, the Son, Who is also the Logos, cannot be of more recent origin than the Father; since the Father cannot be conceived of as subsisting without that Eternal Thought or Reason Which is the Son. Nor may the Son be deemed to be in aught but the order of Divine subsistence inferior to the Father, since He is identical with the Eternal Intellectual Life of the Most High. Each metaphor reinforces, supplements, and protects the other; and together they exhibit Christ before His incarnation as at once personally distinct from, and yet equal with, the Father; He is That personally subsisting and Eternal Life, Which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us."—Liddon, Bampton Lectures, p.

350.

"This is the first instance in John where the Logos is termed the Son of God. Seyffarth is mistaken in supposing that the expression merely has reference to the incarnation of the Logos. Schleiermacher expresses himself in a similar manner:

'The Divine alone in Christ could not have been called Son of God, but this term always designates the entire Christ.' Ver. 18

shows the contrary, where the words 'Who is in the bosom of the Father,' are to be referred to the eternal existence of the Son with the Father. The difference between this expression and the term Logos consists in this,—that the term 'Son of God' points out more distinctly and expressly the personality of the Word."—

Olshausen, on John i. 14.

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NOTE III.—REASONS FOR THE INCARNATlON OF THE SON.

"And the reasons of the fitness and meetness of this Second Person are: First, if we consider the relations of the Three Persons among themselves, He is of all the fittest to undertake this work. 1. It was meet the Idiomata, or the proper titles by which the Persons of the Trinity are distinguished should be kept and preserved distinct, and no way confounded. He that was to be Mediator it was meet He should be the Son of Son, the Son of a woman as His mother, as I shall show anon; and the title and appellation will fitliest become Him that is a Son (though of God) already. 2. It was meet that the Son of God should be this Mediator, that the due order that is between these Three Persons be also kept. The Father is the first, the Son the second, the Holy Ghost the third; and He that is to be mediator must be called to it, and sent by another person, therefore the Father is not to be Mediator . . . and therefore He that is to be Mediator to redeem must be the Son, who may send the Holy Ghost to apply His work, who being the last Person, is to appear last in the world, and take the last work, which redemption is not, but the application of it.

"And, secondly, as thus to preserve the due decorum among the Persons, so also in respect of the work itself; it was most proper to Him. 1. He being the middle Person of the Three bears the best resemblance of the work to be a Mediator. He was from the Father, and the Holy Ghost from Him, and it is He in whom, as it were, the other two are united, and are one, and so He is able to lay hands on both. As the nature of man is a middle nature between the whole creation, earthly and heavenly; and as for one and the same Person to be both God and man was a middle rank between God and us men, so is the Son of God a middle Person between the Persons themselves."—Thomas Goodwill's Works, vol.

v., p. 42. (Nichol's Edition.)

In his work on "The Knowledge of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ," the same Puritan divine says, expounding John i.

4: "First, In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.'

The evangelist descends from the creation in general unto the giving of life, both of reason and holiness, unto men, at their first creation, whiles they were in innocency. He speaks not of that essential life in Himself; for that which follows in the next words, where he calls Him 'the Life' is so to be understood.

But when here he says, in Him was Life,' the meaning is, He was a fountain of Life to us, being first Life in Himself. It is one attribute of Christ's, as He is God-man, yea, as He is man taken up into that union, to have life independently in Himself, even as God the Father hath. Secondly, 'The life was the light of men.' The light: that is, of holiness or God's image. Of men: that is, of men in their primitive state of innocency. For he joins it with the creation of all things, he useth the word was, as noting a state past. Now Adam's holiness was from Him; for he was made after God's image. When Adam was created, all the Persons of the Trinity acted their several parts; and the Son acted the part of God-man: and so the Father, eyeing Him as such, and as Him who was in that respect the image of the Godhead, He thereupon says, ‘Let us make man after our image,' Christ's human nature being the prototupon and exemplar."—Vol. iv., p. 560.

This style of writing may not be altogether according to modern taste. But it at least shows—being only one specimen among multitudes that might easily be presented from Puritan writers—

that the men who wrote most about the cross and the atonement had their speculations also about the eternal ideal of man in Christ's Person. In fact, the sentences from above strike a note that is heard in all ages and schools of theology: Irenreus, Clement, and Augustine join with Rupert and Bonaventura; and these again with modern transcendental Christian thinkers in declaring what none have better set forth than our own old English divines of almost every class. These older writers grasped very firmly the principle that the New Testament almost always carries the predicates of the God-man up into eternity,—by a very legitimate application, quite independent of the Lutheran, of the communicatio idiomatum. The “Archetypal Man," the "Ideal of Humanity," the "Primordial Ideal of Human Nature," and other such phrases, are but the transcendental perversions of a truth that no theology can dispense with—that man was never in the mind of the Creator apart from Christ.

It will be said that Goodwill and Dorner generally speak of the new man as seen or foreseen in Christ. And that is undoubtedly true. But it is hard to deny that behind and beyond the New Man in Christ, man as such was created after His image with special reference to His personality as the Son. Bengel's pithy note on Colossians i. 16, says: "_ v, in, denotat prius quiddam, quam mox δι et ε ς: notatur initium, progressus, finis."

All things, and man especially, were in Christ, then through Christ, then for Christ. "He," says Olshausen, "must have been born of the substance of the Father before all the creation, for all things are created in Him"—giving this as St. Paul's argument. "In the creation they come forth from Him to an independent existence, in the completion of all things they return to Him."

As to the "First-born of every creature," the elaborate and satisfactory note of Meyer may be read to advantage. "It is,"

says Dr. Braune, "joined with the first predicate, closely uniting with God and distinguishing from the creation.

First-begotten as to God; before every creature, when He turns towards the creation, and mankind especially with whom He is for ever allied. It will well repay the reader to study this crucial word thoroughly; for instance, in Ellicott, or the Gennan Cremer. The latter says (Worterbuch d. N. T. Gräcität): “Not that He is put on a level with the creature, but because the relation of the creature to Him is defined that without Him the creature would not and could not be. That neither is it said that Christ was 'created,' nor of the creature that it was

'begotten,' is plain from this, that the temporal relation in which He stands to the creature is afterwards expressly introduced: which would have no meaning if the prototokos did not refer to Christ's preeminence. 'He is before all things' shows that the point in first-born' has nothing to do with time, as if He were the beginning of the series." The more clearly and precisely these expressions are examined the more certainly is the eternal generation established. And it is an evil that our authorized translation has been so vague. It is satisfactory to be able to confirm most of the substance of this text and note by Canon Liddon's eloquent words (Bampton Lec., p. 475): “As the

‘Image,' Christ is, in that one substance, the exact likeness of the Father, in all things except being the Father. The Son is the Image of the Father, not as the Father, but as God: the Son is 'the Image of God.' The Image is indeed originally God's unbegun, unending reflection of Himself in Himself; but the Image is also the Organ whereby God, in His essence invisible, reveals Himself to His creatures. As the Image, Christ is the πρωτότoκoς

πάσης κτίσεως: that is to say, not the First in rank among created beings, but begotten before any created beings... In Him: there was no creative process external to and independent of Him; since the archetypal forms after which the creatures are modelled and the sources of their strength and consistency of being, eternally reside in Him. By Him: the force which has summoned the world out of nothingness into being, and which upholds them in being, is His. For Him: He is not as Arianism afterwards pretended, merely an inferior workman, creating for the glory of a higher Master, for a God superior to Himself. He creates for Himself; He is the end of created things as well as their immediate source: and living for Him is to every creature at once the explanation and the law of its being."

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NOTE IV.—-THE SON OF GOD AND THE SON OF MAN.

The articles in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible are of great value as to the meaning of these terms severally. Their use in the New Testament may be studied in Schmid's Biblical Theology.

"Wherefore our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, may be considered three ways:

"I. Merely with respect unto His Divine nature. This is one and the same with that of the Father. In this respect the one is not the image of the other, for both are the same.

"2. With respect unto His Divine Person as the Son of the Father, the only-begotten, the eternal Son of God. Thus He receives, as His personality, so all Divine excellencies, from the Father; so He is the essential image of the Father's person.

"3. As He took our nature upon Him, or in the assumption of our nature into personal union with Himself, in order unto the work of His mediation. So is He the only representative image of God unto us—in whom alone we see, kn!>w, and learn all the Divine excellencies-so as to live unto God, and be directed unto the enjoyment of Him. All this Himself instructs us in."—Owen on the Person of Christ. (Goold's edit:, vol. i., p. 72.)

"When Christ designates Himself the Son of man, He undoubtedly describes His human mode of existence, as in one respect other than and inferior to, that which was originally His; for which reason He generally employs this designation in speaking of His sufferings. And yet, on the other hand He characterises His human mode of existence as the fulfilment of His eternal destination, as the perfection of His glory. When He speaks of the glory which He had with the Father ere the world was, He refers not alone to the pure Divine glory, but to the Divine human glory on which He was to enter through His resurrection and ascension, and which He possessed eternally in the Divine idea. For it was eternally involved in the idea of the Son that He should become incarnate, that He should become the Head of the kingdom of love. When He says, 'Before Abraham was, I am,' He speaks not merely of the pure glory of the Logos, but of the glory of Christ; further, not merely of the glory of Christ in the eternal idea; but of the glory which He possessed in the midst of the unbelieving Jews of His own day. As the One, into whom, as the ultimate goal of creation, all things were made, He is the presupposition for Abraham, the presupposition for every period of history. For Him, who is the personal Eternity in the midst of the ages, nay more, in the midst of the entire creation, the sensuous difference between past and future has but a vanishing significance; for all the ages of the world, all the æons, revolve around Him as around the all-determining centre to which each owes its peculiar character and force.

Martensen's Christian Dogmatic, p. 268.

Let us go back again to English divinity: this time to one equal, though not superior, to Owen, in the exhaustiveness of his treatises on the Incarnation.

"All those places wherein God promised to be their God; all those sacred hymns and prophecies which instil Him God, even our God, in the exquisite or sublime literal sense, refer or drive to that point which we Christians make the foundation and roof of our faith, to wit, that He was to be God with us, or God in our nature or flesh, God made man of the seed or stock of Abraham, like us in all things, sin excepted. This new and glorious temple was, according to strict propriety, erected in medio Israel, or interiore Israel, that is, in one that was truly an Israelite, the very centre or foundation of Abraham's seed, or of Jacob's posterity: but being erected in the midst of Israel, or in the seed of Abraham after this sense, it was not erected only for the sons of Abraham, or of Israel by bodily descent, but all were to become true Israelites that should be united by this seed, and worship God in the sanctuary. For in that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, He was more truly the Israel of God than Jacob had been, and all that are engrafted into this temple of God, all that receive life from Him, are more truly the children of Israel than any of Jacob's sons were, which refuse to be united to Him."—Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vii., p. 28.

(Oxford Edition.)

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NOTE V.—IMPERSONALITY OF THE HUMAN NATURE.

"The anhypostasia, impersonality, or, to speak more accurately, the enhypostasia, of the human nature of Christ.

This is a difficult point, but a necessary link in the orthodox doctrine of the one God-man; for otherwise we must have two persons in Christ, and after the incarnation, a fourth person, and that a human, in the Divine Trinity. The impersonality of Christ's human nature, however, is not to be taken as absolute, but relative, as the following considerations will show.

"The centre of personal life in the God-man resides unquestionably in the Logos, who was from eternity the second Person in the Godhead, and could not lose His personality. He united Himself, as has been already observed, not with a human person, but with human nature. The Divine nature is, therefore, the root and hasis of the personality of Christ. Christ Himself, moreover, always speaks and acts in the full consciousness of His Divine origin and character, as having come from the Father, having been sent by Him, and, even during His earthly life, living in heaven and in unbroken communion with the Father. And the human nature of Christ had no independent personality of its own, besides the Divine; it had no existence at all before the incarnation, but began with this act, and was so incorporated with the preexistent Logos-personality as to find in this alone its own full self-consciousness, and to be permeated and controlled by it in every stage of its development; But the human nature forms a necessary element in the Divine personality, and in this sense we may say with the older Protestant theologians, that Christ is a persona σύvθετoς, which was Divine and human at once.

"Thus interpreted, the church doctrine of the enhypostasia presents no very great metaphysical or psychological difficulty.

It is true we cannot, according to our modern way of thinking, conceive a complete human nature without personality. We make personality itself consist in intelligence and free will, so that without it the nature sinks to a mere abstraction of powers, qualities, and functions. But the human nature of Jesus never was, in fact, alone; it was from the beginning inseparably united with another nature, which is personal, and which assumed the human into a unity of life with itself. The Logos-personality is in this case the light of self-consciousness, and the impelling power of will, and pervades as well the human nature as the Divine."—Schaff's History of the Christian Church, vol. i., p.

757.

"The precise distinction between nature and person. Nature or substance is the totality of powers and qualities which constitute a being; person is the Ego, the self-conscious, self-asserting and acting subject. There is no person without nature, but there may be nature without person (as in irrational being). The church doctrine distinguishes in the Holy Trinity three Persons (though not in the ordinary human sense of the word) in one Divine nature or substance which they have in common; in its Christology it teaches, conversely, two natures in one person (in the usual sense of person) which pervades both.

Therefore it cannot be said the Logos assumed a human person, or united Himself with a definite human individual: for then the God-man would consist of two Persons; but He took upon Himself the human nature, which is common to all men; and therefore He redeemed not a particular man, but all men, as partakers of the same nature or substance. The personal Logos did not become an individual vθρoπoς, but σάρξ, flesh, which includes the whole of human nature, body, soul, and spirit. The personal.

self-conscious Ego resides in the Logos."-Ibid., vol iii., p.

751.

"The common prevalent expression of it at present in the church is the hypostatical union, that is, the union of the Divine and human nature, having no personality nor subsistence of its own.

"With respect unto this union the name of Christ is called

‘Wonderful,' as that which hath the preeminence in all the effects of Divine wisdom. And it is a singular effect thereof.

There is no other union in things Divine or human, in things spiritual or natural, whether substantial or accidental, that is of the same kind with it;—it differs specifically from them all.

“(1.) The most glorious union is that of the Divine Persons in the same being or nature; the Father in the Son, the Son in the Father, and the Holy Spirit in them both, and both in Him.

But this is a union of distinct Persons in the unity of the same single nature, and this, I confess, is more glorious than that whereof we treat; for it is in God absolutely, it is eternal, of His nature and being. But this union we speak of is not God; it is a creature,—an effect of Divine wisdom and power. And it is different from it herein, inasmuch as that is of many distinct Persons in the same nature; this is of distinct persons in the same nature. That union is natural, substantial, essential in the same nature; this as it is not accidental, as we shall show, so it is not properly substantial, because it is not of the same nature, but of diverse in the same person, remaining distinct in their essence and substance, and is, therefore, peculiarly hypostatical or personal. Hence, Austin feared not to say, that

'Homo potius est in filio Dei, quam filius in patre;' De Trin., lib. i., cap. 10. But that is true only in this one respect, that the Son is not so in the Father as to become one Person with Him. In all other respects it must be granted that the inbeing of the Son with the Father,— the union between them, which is natural, essential, and eternal,—doth exceed this in glory, which was a temporary, external act of Divine wisdom and grace.

"(2.) The most eminent, substantial union in things natural is that of the soul and body constituting an individual person.

"There is, I confess, some kind of similitude between this union and that of the different natures in the person of Christ; but it is not of the same kind or nature. And the dissimilitudes that are between them are more and of greater importance than those things are wherein there seems to be an agreement between them. For,—1st, The soul and body are essential parts of human nature; but complete human nature they are not but by virtue of their union. But the union of the natures in the person of Christ doth not constitute a new nature that either was not, or was not complete before. Each nature remains the same, perfect, complete nature after this union.

"2. The union of the soul and body doth constitute that nature which is made essentially complete thereby,-a new individual person, with a subsistence of its own, which neither of them was nor had before that union. But although the person of Christ, as God and man; be constituted by this union, yet His Person, absolutely, and His individual subsistence, was perfectly, absolutely antecedent unto that union. He did not become a new person, another person than He was before, by virtue of that union; only that Person assumed human nature to itself to be its own, into personal subsistence.

"3. Soul and body are united by an external efficient cause, or the power of God and not by the act of one of them upon another. But this union is effected by that act of the Divine nature towards the human which we have before described.

"4. Neither soul nor body have any personal subsistence before their union; but the sole foundation of this union was in this, that the Son of God was a self-subsisting Person from eternity."—Owen's Person of Christ, vol. i., p. 228.

"Some school divines and followers of Aquinas will have the former similitude of Athanasius to consist especially in this: that as the reasonable soul doth 'Use the body of man, so the Divine nature of Christ doth use the manhood as its proper united instrument. Every other man besides the other man Christ Jesus, every other creature, is the instrument of God; but all of them such instruments of the Divine nature as the axe or hammer is to the artificer which worketh by them. The most puissant, princes, the mightiest conquerors which the world hath seen or felt, could grow no farther in titles than Attilas or Nebuchadnezzar did—

malleus orbis et ftagellwm Dei, hammers or scourges of God to chastise or bruise the nations. But the humanity of God doth use such an instrument of the Divine nature in his person, as the hand of man is to the person or party whose hand it is. And it is well observed, whether by Aquinas himself or no I remember not, but by Viguerius, an accurate eummist of Aquinas' sums, that albeit the intellectual part of man be a spiritual substance, and separated from the matter or bodily part, yet is the union betwixt the hand and intellectual part of man no less firm, no less proper, than the union between the feet or other organical parts of sensitive creatures and their sensitive souls or mere physical forms. For the intellectual part of man, whether it be the form of man truly, though not merely physical, or rather his essence, not his form at all, doth use his own hand, not as the carpenter doth use his axe, that is, not as an external or separated, but as his proper united instrument: nor as the union between the hand, as the instrument and intellective part, as the artificer or commander of it, an union of matter and form, but an union personal, or at the least such an union as resembles the hypostatical union between the Divine and human nature of Christ much better than any material union wherein philosophers or school divines can make instance."—Jackson on the Creed, Works, vol. vol, p. 288.

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NOTE VI. JOHN'S INCARNATION-PHRASES.

It is probable that St. John's 'First Epistle is the last document of revelation. At any rate, this Gospel, as an appendage of the Gospel, completes the apostolic testimony. In 1

John iv. 2 the confession of faith on which life or death hangs, and by whtch the extreme antithesis of being in God, or in the world, or in the devil, becomes manifest, lies in the words,

“Jesus Christ come in the flesh." All are agreed that the general meaning of this formula points to the veritable manhood of Jesus Christ, the true Messiah; but there is the greatest diversity in the exposition of the individual words. It is doubted whether v σαρκι is equivalent simply to ες σαρκί. It has also been disputed whether the text does or does not declare the preexistence of the Logos. The phrase demands a careful consideration in relation to the preposition v, and the participial ληλυθτα. “In flesh" might be referred to the incarnation; Düsterdieck, the ablest commentator on these Epistles, enters into an elaborate discussion of all extant expositions, and establishes his own conclusion that the confession is of Jesus Christ, who, as true man, has lived, and taught, and laboured upon earth. "But this has meaning only on the supposition that the veritable humanity of this Jesus Christ presupposes something altogether different from that of the common humanity of any other who is flesh, that is, on the supposition that He who appeared in the flesh is the Son of God (chapter iii. 23), who Came into the flesh, became flesh, in order afterwards to accomplish His work as One in the flesh. The words ‘come in flesh' expressly refer only to the conversatio Jesu Christi in verd natur_ human_; but they obviously pre-suppose the incarnation. But that the incarnation is not meant by the expression itself is evident from 2 John 7, where the word is in the present tense. There the timeless tense suits well enough the whole course of Christ's life, but not the one definite fact of His incarnation. In. our present passage it is the perfect participle; in chapter v. 6, it is the aorist."

There can be no question of the accuracy of this exposition, if it be understood that the "come in the flesh " makes the whole manifestation of Christ nothing more than the full exhibition of the fact that He was incarnate. The word "come" is used by St.

John in his Gospel with direct reference to the descent of Christ from heaven. This indeed does not disprove that the whole of His

"conversation" on earth is meant, but it lays the stress on His first appearing.

As to St. John's two other phrases, the one "became flesh"

has been as unduly exaggerated as the other, "dwelt among us" has been emptied of its meaning. By the Eutychian commentators of all shades "became flesh" has been made to signify "was made, or converted, into flesh." The comment of Meyer is to the point:

"The expression flesh, not man, is purposely chosen; in opposition, not so much to the Divine idea of man, which is absent here, but to the immaterial nature of the Divine Logos.

He became flesh, that is, He became a bodily material nature, by which it is self-understood that the material human existence is meant into which He entered. The same thing is meant by ‘came in flesh' in the Epistles, but, according to the point of view of the form of His coming, as conditioned by His becoming flesh.

But 'became' shows that He was made what He was not before. The incarnation, therefore, cannot be a mere accident of His substantial nature, but is the assumption of another nature, through which the purely Divine Logos-Person became a bodily real personality, that is, the Divine-human Person, Jesus Christ."

Meyer goes on to show that the flesh does not merely imply the soul, but the spirit also; that St. John distinctly and repeatedly introduces both: the spirit being the substratum of the human self-consciousness. So far so good; but when he expounds "dwell among us" as limited to the Christian fellowship, in the midst of which the Redeemer displayed His glory—a limitation which is very common among the expositors of this passage—he fails to remember that St. John has given precedence to the universal relations of the Word in his prologue. Not all

"beheld His glory," because not all entered the holiest in Christ. But His tabernacle was "with men." Here we must introduce the well-known words of Hooker (Eccl.Pol., book v., chap. lii.). "The Word (saith St. John) was made flesh, and dwelt in us. The evangelist useth the plural number, men, for manhood, us for the nature whereof we consist, even as the apostle denying the assumption of angelical nature, saith likewise in the plural number, ‘He took not angels, but the seed of Abraham.' It pleased not the Word, or Wisdom of God, to take to itself some one person amongst men, for then should that one have been advanced which was assumed, and no more; but Wisdom, to the end she might save many, built her house of that nature which is common to all; she made not this or that man her habitation, but dwelt in us. The seeds of herbs and plants, at the first are not in act, but in possibility, that which they afterwards grow to be. If the Son of God had taken to Himself a man now made, and already perfected, it would of necessity follow that there are in Christ two persons, the one assuming, and the other assumed, whereas the Son of God did not assume a man's person unto His own, but a man's nature to His own Person, and therefore took semen, the seed of Abraham, the very first original element of our nature, before it was come to have any personal subsistence. The flesh, and the conjunction of the flesh with God, began both at one instant. His making and taking to Himself our flesh was but one act, so that in Christ there is no personal subsistence but one, and that from everlasting. By taking only the nature of men He still continueth one Person, and changeth but the manner of His subsisting, which was before in the mere glory of the Son of God, and is now in the habit of our flesh."

This extract leads to the consideration of the other incarnation passages to which this note refers. Hooker gives the traditional rendering of Hebrews ii. 16. Strictly speaking the incarnation is not the subject of that passage, save as it follows upon the former, "He likewise Himself took part of the same," that is, of the children's flesh and blood. That Christ, the Son of God, partook verily of the common nature of man that He might effectually "take hold of" and help all who are of the

"seed of Abraham" by faith, is the obvious meaning of the words when combined. But they refer rather to the design of the incarnation than to the incarnation itself. The same may be said of the last passage referred to, Galatians iv. 4, where "made of a woman" is the same Greek word as "made flesh;" but the saying is introduced for the sake of the redemption and adoption that follow. The passages in St. John remain the specific and distinctive formulæ of the incarnation.

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NOTE VII.—-APPOLLINARIANISM IN MODERN THEOLOGY.

In Mr. Plumptre's "Boyle Lectures" on Christ and Christendom, the human development of our Lord is traced with great care by one who is deeply impressed With the importance of avoiding the error that loses the Man in the God. While reading the early part of this volume the uneasy thought sometimes arises that the author is going towards the opposite error; but the volume read as a whole effectually silences the suspicion. One of the admirable dissertations at the end is on The Influence of Apollinarianism on Modern Theology; and I must quote a sentence or two in preference to some rougher notes prepared on the same subject. After a vindication—if such a word may be used—of the Lord's limitation in knowledge, which is not quite satisfactory, the following paragraph occurs: "Such has been the history of this attempt to substitute the supposed inferences from a dogmatic truth for the simpler teaching of Scripture. Had the matter rested here, it would have been interesting as an illustration of the intrusive restlessness of the understanding when it enters, even in the spirit of the devoutest reverence, upon speculations winch transcend it. But the evil did not end here. In proportion as the influence of Apollinaiianism pervaded, however indirectly, the theology of the church, men lost their hold on the truth of the perfect human sympathy of Christ, and they turned more and more to one in whom they hoped to find it. If the reaction against Nestorianism was one cause of the growth of Mariolatry, this was undoubtedly another. There was, as Dr. Newman has said, 'a wonder in heaven—a throne far above all created powers, mediatorial, intercessory;' and the thoughts of men turned to her, whom they had before learnt to reverence and love, as being ‘the predestined heir of that Majesty.' The human life, even the teaching of Christ, became comparatively subordinate, and the devotion of men turned rather to the beginning and the end—the Infancy and the Crucifixion.

Doubtless, at the worst of times, and under the fullest cultus of the Virgin, the other and truer thought was at times awakened into life. Men have sung of the love of Jesus, and found their refuge in the heart of Christ. But in the popular religion of the Latin Church men and women have turned to the Virgin mother rather than to the Son, as believing that they would there find a fuller sympathy, and a more benignant reception of their prayers.

"With others, the reaction against the unreality which the adoption, partial or complete, of Apollinarian thought has led them to feel in popular statements as to the gospel history, has taken another form. Not having been taught to feel that it was a human Mind and a human Heart that spoke to their minds and hearts there, they have turned with an eagerness which we ought to welcome, to those who have restored the humanity of Christ to its life and power, even when, in doing this, they have sacrificed the truth of His being also the Eternal Word. In proportion as any Life of Jesus has brought this as a living reality before men, they have welcomed and accepted it. In the language of current theology: they could trace no recognition of the growth in wisdom, no pattern life unfolding in affections, intellect, wisdom, as ours unfolds, brought by degrees into fullest fellowship with the Divine Nature, illuminated by the pervading presence of the eternal Light, and growing, as our nature grows, in the power of receiving and transmitting it; and so they have found what met the cravings of their hearts in the clearer, more vivid pictures, of those, even, who thought of the Christ, not as manifesting His Father in heaven, but as being altogether, even in ignorance of truth, and infirmity of purpose, and acquiescence in evil, such an one as themselves. The remedy for that perversion or denial of the truth—the safeguard against that danger—are to be found, not in falling back upon the partial suppression of the truth, the history of which has been here traced, but in proclaiming in its fulness the church's faith—that in that union of the Godhead and the manhood the latter is indeed taken into the former, yet not so as to lose its distinctness.

The Christ is perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul, and human flesh subsisting.'" (p. 371.) These hints are suggestive as to some special aspects of the Apollinarian tendency. The following extract may well give a glance of its unconscious influence on the exposition of Scripture. It occurs in the Biblical Studies of the Rev. W.

Robinson, of Cambridge,—an able and suggestive work.

"Without controversy, great is the mystery of the eternal Word; but not greater than the mystery of the incarnation of our own spirits. The former surprises us much more than the latter, but is not more truly out of the reach .of our understanding.

Mr. Watson pleads warmly against the notion that the Sonship of our Lord is a merely human distinction; or, to use his own words, against the supposition that it refers ‘to the immediate production of the humanity by Divine power.' And, so far, he has Scripture to sustain him. The flesh is not the Son of God. That designation denotes the Word made flesh. But there is no part of Scripture which says that the Word of God was the Son of God. Of the origin of the existence of the Word of God, by whom the Father made the worlds, we are left in ignorance. It may be given us in another world, to know that the Nicene inquirers came as near to the truth as in this world men can; or we may hereafter find that their theory of eternal Sonship is wholly baseless. On such a subject, unless revelation be indisputably plain, man cannot innocently be confident. Deeply therefore is it to be regretted that the bald dogmatism of the Nicene era should be thrust into popular confessions of faith, or, indeed, into any confessions. How long will the people, parrot-like, follow the priest as he says, ‘I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father before all worlds?' Let all who are alive to their own responsibility to God, as the God of truth, remember that the standard of faith is the Bible; not the Bible supplemented by the Nicene Creed. If the doctrine of eternal Sonship be not taught in Scripture, the utterance of that creed is superstition and sin.

“It perhaps deserves serious consideration whether the Nicene dogma have not the effect of thrusting out of sight one of the most wonderful facts disclosed by Divine revelation; for the testimony of Scripture is, that the human body, born of Mary, was, through the wonder-working power of God, to whom all things are possible, animated by the Word of God. ‘The Word was made flesh, . . . and we beheld. . . the glory of the only begotten of the Father.' Men have added to this statement, and maintained that our Saviour had not only a body made in the likeness of sinful flesh, but a human soul; whereas, according to Scripture, Jesus of Nazareth was not the son of Joseph and Mary, but the incarnation of the Word, which was in the beginning with God.

How the two—the human and the Divine—should dwell together in such combination we know not; but we may reasonably expect to gain some further light on this mysterious subject, as the result of our future experience; and, while we are here let the faith firmly grasp such suggestions as the word of God contains, and wait for the grand discoveries of eternity. There is ‘one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus:' which must not be interpreted to mean that the mediation is by humanity alone; for the Man Christ Jesus was the Word made flesh. So when we read that He who was in the form of God, was made in the likeness of man we have probably before us the most wonderful of facts. It was not in a figure, but really, that ‘He who was rich for our sakes became poor;’ nor is the Immanuel of Scripture two persons, but one person. ‘In the beginning was the Word;, by Him the Father made the worlds: without Him was not anything made that was made. He, the Word Divine and everlasting, was made in the likeness of sinful flesh. In Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and, having given Himself for our sins, He rose to reign ‘God over all things.' Without controversy, ‘great is the mystery of godliness.' ‘The Word was made flesh.'”—

Biblical Studies, p. 116.

Without the aid of the Nicene Creed we know the origin of the Word and Image of God (John i. 18, Colossians i. 15, Hebrews i. 2). See Note II.

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NOTE VIII.—"THE EXINANITION."

"That we rightly understand the use made of the example of Christ, as the model after which the Christian life is formed, we must first endeavour to bring the model itself clearly and distinctly before our minds. Before the eye of the apostle stands the image of the Whole Christ, the Son of God, appearing in the flesh, manifesting Himself in human nature. From the human. manifestation he rises to the Eternal Word (as John expresses it), that Word which was before the appearance of the Son of God in time—yea, before the worlds were made; in whom, before all time, God beheld and imaged Himself: as Paul, in the Epistle to the Colossians calls Him, in this view, the Image of the Invisible, i.e. ‘the incomprehensible God.' Then, after this upward glance of his spiritual eye, he descends again into the depths of the human life, in which the Eternal Word appears as man. He expresses this in the language of immediate perception, beholding the Divine and the human as one; not in the form of abstract truth, attained by a mental analysis of the direct object of thought. Thus he contemplates the entrance of the Son of God into the form of humanity as a self-abasement—a self-renunciation—for the salvation of those whose low estate He stooped to share. He, whose state of being was Divine—who was exalted above all the wants and limitations of the finite and earthly existence—did not eagerly claim this equality with God which He possessed; but, on the contrary, He concealed and disowned it in human abasement, and in the form of human dependence. And as the whole of the human life of Christ proceeded from such an act of self-renunciation and self-abasement, so did His whole earthly life correspond to this one act, even to His death—the consciousness, on the one hand, of Divine dignity, which it was in His power to claim; and on the other, the concealment—the renunciation of this—in every form of humiliation and dependence belonging to the earthly life of man.

The crowning point appears in His death—the ignominious and agonising death of the cross. Paul then proceeds to show what Christ attained by such self-renunciation, thus carried on to the utmost limit by such submissive obedience, in the form of a servant; the reward which He received in return; the dignity which was conferred upon Him. Here too is presented the universal law, laid down by Christ Himself, that whoso humbles himself, and in proportion as he humbles himself, shall be exalted."—Neander on Philippians ii. 7,8.

This admirable extract gives a good specimen of the temperate treatment of a subject which, as the next note will show, has been very rashly handled in Germany and France. It will bear study as well as reading. For the exegesis of the great kenosis passage—Philippians ii. 7-9—on which a little library of monographs have been written, besides the dissertations in the Commentaries, the reader cannot be directed to a safer and more exhaustive dissertation than that contained in Dr. Lightfoot's recent Commentary on the Philippians. The two instalments of St. Paul's Epistles which this faithful and evangelical scholar has issued have excited great expectation as to the still more important sequel.

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NOTE IX—DEPOTENTIATION.

The modern theory of a Depotentiation of the Eternal Son, in which His incarnation is the passing out of one condition (the Divine) into another (the human), has been referred to at some length in the preceding History of the Doctrine of Christ's Person. A few illustrations of the manner in which the theory is applied to the New-Testament exhibition of Christ Incarnate will here be added. In his Commentaire sur l' Evangile de Saint Jean, M. Godet thus writes on chapter i. 14: "Protestant orthodoxy, whether Lutheran or Reformed, refuses to take the term γέvετo in its full force. The former eludes it by the Communicatio Idiomatum, by virtue of which the Divine Subject, the Word, alternating in some way between the two modes—Divine and human—of existence, lends at will the attributes of each nature to the other. The latter maintains strictly the distinction of the two natures, and, placing them in juxtaposition in one and the same Subject, thinks it has satisfied the meaning of the Word ‘became flesh.' It seems to us that these methods do violence to the text, instead of developing it. The term 'was r8I1e flesh'

includes more than the fact of becoming visible; it indicates the entrance into a mode of being and of development entirely human.

It excludes, as I think, not less positively, the co-existence of two opposed natures, alternating or simultaneous, in the same subject. The natural sense of this proposition is, that the Divine Subject entered into the mode of human being after having renounced the mode of Divine being. . . . If it is asked how a fact so prodigious as that of the passage of a Divine Subject into a state really human was possible, we reply that the Word, having impressed His own type of humanity in creating it, there was, in this primordial homogeneity, the condition of the real and organic union between Him and man which is taught by the sacred writers, and supposed by the whole evangelical history."

Here it is plain that the expositor is, in reality, paying homage to the doctrine of two natures in one Person, while denying it in words. He cannot mean that the Logos renounced His nature when He laid aside the glorious manifestations of His nature. M. Godet dwells much on His baptism as the restoration to the Incarnate Lord of the consciousness of Himself as Son: "He could say what He could not previously have said, ‘Before Abraham was, I am;’" but he forgets the deep significance of the word in the temple in His twelfth year, and the fact that throughout—

before St. John begins his narrative of the Son's revelation of the Father—he declares that "He is" essentially and eternally" in the bosom of the Father." This writer I quote, because he is the clearest and best example among a number of expositors who base their exposition on this view. He illustrates the delusion under which they all write: the—delusion, namely, that something is gained by a rejection of the ancient doctrine, and that this vague and indefinite idea of the descent of the Logos out of Divinity for a season is the solution of an immense difficulty.

What then means such a sentence as this, "The notion expressed by the title of Son of God is simply that of a personal and mysterious relation between this infant and the Divine Being"?

But the paragraph in which M. Godet dismisses the subject convicts his hypothesis of unreasonableness:—“It is impossible to see in what this conception of the incarnation wounds the true humanity of our Lord. Man is a vessel destined to receive God, but in time, and in the way of a free progress. It is a vessel which enlarges in the measure that it is filled, and which must be filled in the measure that it is enlarged. The Logos is also the vessel of the Divinity, but eternally equal to Hill1Self, and perfectly filled. Conformably with this affinity, and this difference between the Logos and man, the following is the formula of the Incarnation, as St. John teaches it:—The Logos has realised in Jesus, under the form of human existence subjected to the law of development and progress, that relation of dependence and of filial communion which He realised in heaven under the immutable form of the life Divine." These are beautiful words, and true. But the two vessels must, by the proposition, be always distinct while united, and thus the natures are for ever Two.

Let us turn from the evangelical M. Godet to a theologian of a far more liberal type, and see how he brings out the truth.

The following is on The Relation between the Condition of the Logos in the Flesh and His Condition as Preexistent, from Kostlin, Der Lehrbegriff des Evangeliums und der Briefe Johannis:—

"While His opponents knew not whence He came, and whither He was going, and therefore could give to themselves no account of His person, He Himself knew, and could cut off all contradiction by His I know (chap. viii 14). He is related to men as the heavenly to the earthly (chap. viii. 23), as the spirit to the flesh (chap viii. 14, 15), only with the difference that the Higher in Him is not only by nature distinguished from the earthly, but at the same time what is, as to before and behind, infinitely above it (chap. viii. 58). Hence the immediate vision of God which, before His incarnation, He enjoyed (chap. iii. 32).

But there are also passages in which the Son even now seeth the Father in an absolutely immediate manner (chap. v. 19). In fact the distinction between the existence of Jesus before and His existence after the incarnation sinks to a minimum, and absolutely vanishes. Jesus does not use the term Logos of Himself, but 'The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father' is used at once of the preexisting and the manifested Logos. It is said in ver. 14 that we had 'beheld the glory of Him,' the Logos, and that the Only-begotten, in the bosom of the Father, revealed Him; hence the same 'Only-begotten' has two predicates, one pre-historical, ‘in the bosom,' and one historical, ‘hath declared.' So, in the First Epistle, ‘Jesus Christ come in flesh' admits of no distinction between the Logos and Jesus. In John iii. 13 there is ascribed to the Son of Man a perennial being in heaven. The Son of Man, or Christ, during all His life upon earth, is at the same time in heaven, with or in the Father. By His descent from heaven He left not the Father, for with Him, as with God, the relations of space have no application, So the Father is in Him, and He in the Father.

According to chap. vi. 62, the Son of Man goeth up whither He was before; the Logos, therefore, may bear this name even before His incarnation. But that former estate was one of δόξα, the fulness of Divine glory. We find no trace that Christ's 'becoming flesh'

was in itself a humiliation (Philippians ii. 8). Christ rather is as man, ‘glorious,' ‘full,' not 'emptied,' ‘equal with God,' and not robbed of that equality. Even in His death we see only in John the dignity of glory, and, during His whole presence among us, all the finite and limited among men vanishes. Especially is there no idea of development; He learned nothing (chap. vii 15), but is the Logos who hath seen God, and always seeth Him. Thus only can we understand the ascending and descending of the angels on the Son of Man (chap. i. 51). In the Old Testament (Genesis xxviii. 12) angels accompany the Divine glory between heaven and earth; but there the glory is above, while in the New Testament it is below, and upon earth."

This goes to the other extreme. It must not be forgotten that it is St. John who records the Lord's prayer for the restoration of His glory; that it is St. John who gives us the most affecting record of our Saviour's pure humanity (chap. xi.); and that the human agony of Christ is in no gospel more affectingly recorded. There is absolutely no contrariety between St. John and St. Paul in their view of the Exinanition, nor between St. John and the Synoptists in their view of Christ's purely human development. Remembering this abatement, nothing can be nobler than Kostlin's tribute to the unity of our Saviour's Divine and human manifestation. The refutation of the Depotentiation theory is, by implication, complete.

One of the ablest essays which the subject has called forth is Das Dogma vom Gottmenscen, by Woldemar Schmidt. After giving a sketch of the various theories lately propounded, he turns to the Scripture itself for a solution, and comes to the only sound conclusion, which he gives in very well selected words. With them we also shall drop the subject.

"If we establish that at the very beginning of the life of Jesus the perfect unity of the Divine and the human took place in the manner stated, then will all in the process of it appear to be Divine, and yet human, the Divine in the human, and the human in the Divine, in all the stages of His development. The passages which speak of the Son's 'coming forth from the Father,'

'coming down into the world,’ being given and sent of the Father,' declare that the Eternal Son, distinguished from the Father as a Recipient, enters into time and its belongings, and suffers Himself to be affected by human things. Hence when He says, 'The Father is greater than I,' or, 'One only is good, that is, God,' when He cries, 'Not as I will, but as Thou wilt,' when generally He prays to God, we must understand all this of His Divine-human person. The Son of God can and will be what He became in the incarnation, flesh of our flesh, and blood of our blood. . . . [But in all the acts of His life of submission] He remains the same that He was from eternity, only it was His will to receive in time what was still His own from eternity.”

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NOTE X.—THE UNCHANGED MANHOOD.

See the History of Doctrine," V. The Lutheran theology surpasses all other in the precision of its statements regarding the two estates of Christ, that of His humiliation, and that of His exaltation. The necessity of their sacramental doctrine required the Lutherans to etherealise, as it were, the Saviour's human nature, and make it the physical nourishment of His saints, However incongruous their doctrine appears when thus stated, the theory of Lutheranism was faithful to the continuance of our Lord's true humanity. For it was only the Divine ubiquity which thus diffused the unchanged body of Christ. On Hebrews ii., the great Manhood chapter in New Testament Christology, Dr.

Wordsworth and Delitzsch seem to me by far the best expositors; and with deep earnestness should that chapter be studied.

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NOTE XI.—BIBLICAL THEOLOGY.

The study of the Doctrine of our Saviour's Person as the Incarnate Son, who is, strictly speaking, known to theology only as One Christ, must, of course, be supremely a Biblical study.

Traced first in the sacred Record, where it has a rich development, it then is carried into dogmatic theology, where its influence is seen in the construction of every department of Christ's saving work. This already opens up the controversial history of the Doctrine in what may be termed Historical Theology. The present Essay has traced the subject through these three theological courses of study severally, but only in a cursory and suggestive manner. The development of the doctrine in Scripture is a branch of the subject to which the student is bound to give his best attention. It will yield him inexhaustible fruit. But he must clearly understand what it is that he is to trace in the Scripture.

1. It is not the proof of the Divinity of our Lord so much as the specific characteristics of that Divine Person, who in the mystery of redemption became man, and whose names as the Divine Incarnate Person are peculiarly His own. It is not, therefore, the Godhead of Christ generally that should be elaborately deduced from the Bible, but the Godhead of the God-man. There is no section of Scripture consecrated to the proof that Christ was God, but every section of its Christology declares that Christ, as the Son of God incarnate, is Divine. Hence the extreme importance of weighing well and carefully classifying the specific terms that bear the weight of our Lord's Divinity. The unbeliever may be able to contest the direct application to Christ of the few passages in which, as we believe, He is named God absolutely. Biblical criticism may render one or two of them doubtful, and scepticism may smile at the credulity which rests the belief of so stupendous a doctrine on a single passage in St.

John, or St. Paul, or the Epistle to the Hebrews. The fact is, that the strength of our argument does not lie there; of our argument, I say, for our own tranquil faith rejoices greatly over these single sayings in which the absolute Divinity of our Lord cannot be hid. But the defender of Christian doctrine must learn to feel in their full strength, that he may urge with irresistible force, the names of our Lord's glorious preexistence "the Son," "the Image," "the Word," "the Only-begotten," "the First-begotten before every creature, the πρωτότoκoς, before the πρωτόκτιστoς or the πρωτόπλασµα before that first personal or inanimate creature, be it who or what it may."

2. He must learn also to perceive and state clearly the fact that the Incarnate Person is the only Christ that the Scripture knows. There is not a sentence in the Bible that rests for a moment—if a moment, it is no more—upon the Divine Second Person as such and alone. "The Word was God" seems the only exception; and there the evangelist lingers on that supernal thought only long enough to prepare our minds for the counterpart of the sentence, "the Word was made flesh." Hence there is found what I may call a communicatio idiomatum among the names of the Incarnate as belonging respectively to eternity and to time. The

"Word" belongs to both, as we see in comparing the exordium of St. John's Gospel with that of his Epistle. The "Son" belongs to both, and with such literal undistinguishableness that the doctrine of the Eternal Sonship has been impugned by some who accept the Eternal Word. The "Image" belongs to both, for the

"glory of God is seen in the face of Christ Jesus" in the Gospel.

3. Once more he must imprint upon his mind by careful, very careful, study the fact that with all their abundant variations of statement there is but One Form evidently set forth throughout the Scriptures. A casual glance may observe differences between the Three and the One in the four Gospels; between these four and the Acts; between St. Paul's, and St. Peter's, and St. James's Person of Christ; between St. Paul's in the Romans and St. Paul's in the Colossians. But an intent scrutiny shows that they are all "gathered up into one" by a wonderful άvακεφαλαίωσις. If we retreat to a little distance and look, there is but one outline, the Figure of Him whom, if our eyes be not holden, we know to be the Son of God incarnate.

As aids to this manifold task, the reader may be directed to the Introduction of Dorner's History, and to the Biblical Theology of Schmid: I cannot add any home-born English work. But his best help will be the inexhaustible Greek-Testament Concordance.

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NOTE XII.—REVELATION.

"The conception of sacred history is inseparable from that of miracles. The full discussion of this subject must be reserved for the dogmatic system itself; but we may here, in general terms, designate the miracle of the incarnation—of God becoming man in Christ—as the fundamental miracle of Christianity. Christ Himself is the prime miracle of Christianity, since His coming is the absolutely new beginning of a spiritual creation in the human race, a beginning whose significance is not only ethical, but cosmical. The Person of Christ is not only a historical miracle—

not merely a new starting-point in the world's moral development; as such it would be only relatively a miracle, a wonder, in the same sense as the appearance of every great genius may be so termed, not being analogous to anything preceding. But Christ is something new in the race. He is not a mere moral and religious genius, but the new Man, the new Adam, whose appearance in the midst of our race has a profound bearing, not only on the moral, but on the natural world. He is not a mere prophet, endowed with the Spirit and power of God, but God's only-begotten Son, the brightness of His glory, and the express Image of His Person, for whose redemptive appearance not only man, but nature, waits. The Person of Christ is, therefore, not only a historical, but a cosmical miracle; not to be explained by the laws and forms of this world, this world's history, and natural phenomena. But in order to be able to appropriate to itself the new revelation in Christ, the human race must receive a new sense, a new spirit.

The Spirit of Christ must enter into a permanent union with man, as the principle of a new development, a development conceivable only as proceeding from an absolutely new beginning in the conscious life of the race.

"The miracle of the Incarnation is hence inseparable from that of Inspiration, or the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, through which the principle of the new Development is implanted in the human race, and from which the new life of fellowship, and the new sense of fellowship take their rise. The miracle of inspiration is the same in the subjective, as the miracle of the revelation of Christ in the objective, sphere. To these two new commencements, which form two sides of one and the same fundamental miracle, the miracle of the new creation, the Christian church traces its origin. All the individual miracles of the New Testament are simply evolutions of this one; and all the Old Testament miracles are only foretokens, anticipatory indications of the new creating activity, which, in the fulness of time, is concentrated in the miracle of the incarnation, and of the founding of the church."—Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 18.

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NOTE XIII—LATITUDINARIAN THEORIES.

An excellent examination of modern Latitudinarian theories will be found in Dr. Fairbairn's Appendix to Dorner's History of the Development of the Doctrine of Christ's Person, an Appendix which adds much to the value of that work. Professor Smeaton's two Treatises on the Doctrine of the Atonement may be read with great advantage. They are books of great value in the department of Biblical Theology, and the references to modern theories are terse and good. Dr. Crawford's recent work on the Atonement contains an exhaustive examination of these modern theories, and, as a whole, has no rival. But there are some aspects of the question, in the treatment of which my friend Dr. Rigg's Modern Anglican Theology still holds the first place.

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NOTE XIV,—MODERN THEOPASCHITISM.

The name of Thomasius has been mentioned as connected with this subject. His treatise on the Person and Work of Christ is the ablest and most comprehensive on the subject that Lutheran divinity has latterly produced. I have translated the following passages, which will not be found uninteresting as giving an aspect hitherto unnoticed.

"The entirety of these acts we call the humiliation. In it the Divine act of the beginning became the Divine-human act of His whole life. The difference between this and the self-limitation involved in the incarnation itself consists in the fact, that it has for its subject not the Logos unincarnate, but the Logos in the flesh, that is, the whole Incarnate Person: it is the Divine-human continuation of that original self-limitation into the way of humiliation and suffering, into the way of the cross, and thus only more deeply into the course that began in the incarnation. It was not absolutely necessary that the Mediator should pursue this way: He might even as man have walked otherwise through life. But He surrendered Himself voluntarily to the way of sorrow, because it was required by the atoning design; or rather, all this was already bound up in that one voluntary act of the exinanition. Hence it might be said that there was an ethical necessity for the assumption of all the forms of sorrow, a necessity of freedom. Thus, as the ethical, not the physical, act of holy obedience and compassionate love, must the whole course of humiliation be viewed.

“From this arises the wonderful peculiarity which the whole earthly life of the Redeemer exhibits. As the Divine-human continuation of the incarnation it is at once revelation and exinanition.

"It is a revelation of the immanent Divine properties, of absolute might, truth, holiness and love. For, as the Son did not in the incarnation surrender these Divine essential properties, which as such are inseparable from the essence of God, so He does not as the Incarnate refrain from their use; they shine forth through His whole self-manifestation, and diffuse over His life in the flesh that heavenly radiance which beams clear and bright even through poverty and humiliation. And this applies not merely to the last two of those perfections, holiness and love, but to the former also, power and truth; absolute might, as the freedom of self-determination, as the will perfectly commanding itself; absolute truth, as the clear knowledge of the Divine concerning itself, more particularly as the knowledge of the Incarnate concerning His own being and the Father's will. He learned not this in any human school; internally, by virtue of His unity with the Father, He beholds His eternal thoughts, which He speaks of as objects of His, own immediate contemplation. For if it is said that these Divine thoughts come gradually into His consciousness through the mediation of the Holy Ghost, that is only the development of what is already bound up in His own essence: in the form of human knowledge it so becomes gradual. As His word, so also His whole self-testimony, yea His whole manifestation, is the revelation of that essential communion which He has with God.

"But not the less is the humiliation at the same time a self~inanition, a continuous renunciation of the Divine manner of existence which He gave up in the incarnation, and of the relative Divine attributes in which the immanent properties manifest themselves outwardly—omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. . . . He renounces possession of these properties.

. . . The Divine omnipotence He neither used nor possessed; He did not actually rule the world while He walked upon earth as man; He exercised no other dominion than the ethical one of truth and love, and used no other means than the word of the gospel for the establishment of His kingdom. Not as if He ruled the universe in a hidden manner, He used the absolute power which dwelt in Him only for His mediatorial calling. He could not because He should not. He was not an Almighty Man. Even the miracles which He performed are no argument to the contrary: they are among the works of His vocation for which His humanity was anointed by the Holy Ghost. Not otherwise with His knowledge.

The penetrating insight into the being of nature and the deep knowledge of human hearts which He exhibits, is not Divine omniscience. It grew with His growth, and ripened under natural instrumentalities and conditions, and had its limits in the mature man. The Mediator was not an omniscient Man. So also with His omnipresence . . . . Accordingly the humiliation was not a mere concealment but an actual kenosis, not only of the use of those relative perfections, but in their possession: the distinction is not applicable here. Surrender of the use is also surrender of the possession of omniscience and omnipresence. The Redeemer during His earthly life was neither almighty, nor omniscient, nor everywhere present.

"But all this we say of the whole undivided Person. No distinction can be made between the manhood which renounced, and the Godhead which exercised them still. Otherwise the self-consciousness of the Logos and that of the man fall asunder: and the result would be a man in whom God dwells. So far as the God-man renounced the Divine glory, the God-man also renounced it. . . . The distinction between the absolute and the relative perfections must be maintained: it is necessary if God is not to be made dependent on the world. Omnipotence is no plus of absolute power, omniscience is not an extension of the immanent Divine knowledge; and when the 5on as man renounced these attributes, He deprived Himself of nothing which is essentially necessary to God in order that He be God. And it was His own Divine free determination to renounce them: thus He was not almighty, not omnipresent, not omniscient—because He willed not to be so."

An immense amount of reasoning has been expended upon the question of the immanence and relativity of the Divine attributes. But it must appear obvious to every one who thinks that the matter is literally unsearchable by our faculties. How this great master of the modern German Christological theosophy feels the pressure, will appear from the concluding extract:

"The difficulty lies in another direction: in this, that the Divine-human consciousness of the Redeemer absolutely ceases sometimes,—whether for a longer or shorter time is indifferent—

for example, in sleep, or in the first beginnings of His Divine-human life, or in death. The last two especially bring out the difficulty. For, in the former, while He ripened unto birth, the self-consciousness is present only as a potence, which comes to effect afterwards; in the latter it sinks into the night of death, goes out as an extinguished light, though but for a moment. These are facts which we must acknowledge, unless we give the Lord's life a Docetic appearance, and deny the reality of His birth and of His death. But these facts of perfect passivity are at the same time the supreme points of His activity: they are the highest expressions of His obedience to God, the great acts of Hia redeeming love, by Himself conceived, and willed, and done. There are no others in which the energy of His Divine-human will could have more strongly and gloriously approved themselves, none in which it could have more absolutely declared its independent power: in this will they had their ground. Thus we may say with regard to this, as with regard to the incarnation, that in the profoundest self-surrender the Subject remains the same, Himself; and if the how is concealed from our view, the fact itself is firm, that what, from without, seems to be the extremest subjection is in its deep significance the highest freedom.

"Both may be included and summed up in the idea of the Potence, concerning which we said that the Logos, becoming man, constricted Himself into it. For the Potence is, as the expression itself means, not anything powerless and empty, but Being condensed into its inmost element and principle. . . . It is involved in the free act of will, by force of which the God-man gives Himself up for the world."-Thomasius: Christi Person und Werk, T. ii., s. 141.

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NOTE XV. AND XIX. 52, 78.—THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS.

The question ever arises, Did the veritable temptation of Christ infer the possibility of His sinning? Does the unity of our Saviour's Person render His sinning absolutely impossible?

If so, must we not assume that, so far as Christ's conflict with Satan was an example, it was an example to show us in whose strength we must conquer, not the example of One who conquers as we must conquer. The fallacy that the Messianic tribulation and trial included the victory over the possibility of sinning—a possibility removed by the very fact of the Incarnation—runs through nearly all modern German theology. Take the following words from an untranslated work of Dr. Stier:—

"What does it mean that Christ became man, and not an angel?

Because He laid hold of man, and not the angels, for salvation?

There is a human nature which is compared with the angelic, when the Saviour says of the children of the resurrection, ‘They are like the angels (Luke xx. 36). But He assumed not that, for to bring us children of death to that glory He died for us in that humanity which may die, and to that end was born. We further avow that He was born of the Virgin, and exclude all inherited sin thereby; but the Virgin was also a woman, and the apostolical word lays stress upon this, that God sent His Son, born of a woman (Gal. iv. 4). And do we not know what man's inheritance is, as born of woman? . . . It is wrong, though rightly intended, and leads to pernicious consequences, when some good men say that Christ bore in Himself the sinfulness of our human nature that He might destroy it. The apostle carefully chooses his expression that He came 'in the likeness of sinful flesh'

(Rom. viii. 3)—not in the form, but in the likeness; as the brazen serpent was not a real, poisonous serpent. But that weakness, though having in it no sin, had, as weakness, the susceptibility for the seduction of sin. He was so fashioned in our flesh, as it became after the fall, that actually all which excites sin in us could solicit Him with the possibility of sin.

Hence in Him the striving against sin—that word denying, however, any participation in it—even unto blood {Heb. xii. 4). For, though our Lord had no positive tendency to sin, yet there was in Him a sluggishness and slowness [Trägheit und Unlust zum Gehorsam, which the translation understates] of inclination to the obedience of the Eternal Spirit, in His spirit, which His wrestling soul must overcome. If we do not admit this contest, we fail to understand the Lord's life from beginning to end.

Yea, verily, in His whole life, from childhood, this was His task, to become strong in spirit through the overcoming of the flesh."

I am aware that injustice is done to Stier's presentation of the case by giving these extracts without their abundant illustrations. But I have only to do with the issue of all, which is this: "Yet more: a power must be given to Him who renews the great temptation, greater than Adam's race had known before; for the higher the Incarnate Son of God stood through the indwelling Godhead, the more pressing must the legitimate testing of this God-man be. Because all that He obtained through His endurance and victory was to avail for all men, it must become a merit that should defy all the objections and protests of hell.

So must it be, in order that no Satan might blaspheme in eternity and say: God did not exercise the right that my sin experienced in the sin of man; if the Redeemer had encountered this or that, He might have fallen into my power, and been put to shame! We go far, dear readers, with our poor thoughts, but not beyond Scripture. And the tremendous question rises here to our thoughts on this dizzy height: Could then Christ, the Son of God in the flesh, have been put to shame, and fallen before temptation? And we dare not shrink from the bold answer, Yes, He could have fallen. For, to say it once more, temptation without the possibility of fall is no temptation; and the full eternal value of the victory of Jesus Christ would vanish if this victory was a self-understood necessity. Among all the dark possibilities which the abyss holds this is the most fearful, that the Second Adam might have fallen even as the first did.

What then would have become of the human race,—what judgment would have passed upon the man Jesus, whole union with the Eternal Son the first actual sin had broken-we need not ask; but rather exult in the triumphant thought, that He has conquered."

(Stier, Der Brief an die Hebrär, ch. ii. 14-18).

Stier was a profoundly reverent author. He went no farther than his theory carried him. But his theory was wrong; and that it was wrong is proved by the healthy recoil of every Christian heart, his own evidently included, from the conclusion to which he here gives expression. Difficulties there are doubtless in the temptation of our Lord; but not so many difficulties in the scriptural account itself as dogmatic prepossessions find in it.

We never read that as Christ conquered we must conquer; that He is the pattern of our victory, or anything of that kind. He was tempted in all points as we are, solar as "without sin" and

"separate from sinners" He might be tempted. Surely the agony of a perfectly sinless Being must be very different from the struggle of one in whom the germ of sin has burst into development. Hence, to be consistent, one step more must be taken,—from Stier, to Irving.

Edward Irving published, in 1828, a volume of sermons on the Incarnation, in which he asserted that the Son assumed our nature in its fallen sinful state; that the flesh of Christ was in its proper nature mortal and corruptible; that it was liable to sin, nay, was "instinct with every form of sin." Its incorruption and its sinlessness were imparted "by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost." The eloquent unreason which bewilders this subject in Irving's pages we have nothing to do with: suffice that the incarnation is entirely lost as the union of the Divine and human at the outset of the Incaruate Person's history. The reconciliation between heaven and earth was not so properly wrought by Christ as "wrought in Him, while tabernacling in flesh, and wrestling with its infirmities." As his chimrera leads him hither and thither, the hallucinations of Mr. Irving assume the forms of most of the heresies that have been condemned by the Christian church. But all that he says or dreams is justified on the assumption that our Lord took into alliance with Himself a human person in whom He wrestled with the sin of our race.

The noblest book written on the sinlessness of our Lord—a subject with which we have only indirectly to do—is that of Ullmann, the translation of which in the recent edition is a book for which the English theologian ought to be very grateful. If not sustaining the very highest theory, this volume practically establishes all we could desire.

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NOTE XVI—THE EXINANITION INCOMPREHENSIBLE.

Woldemar Schmidt says very forcibly:

"Our age groans beyond any other under the burden of distortions of our Lord's life. Some bring Him down to what has no semblance of it, of true humanity, others rob Him of the glory of His Divinity; not to mention those who resolve the life into fable and myth, and the Docetism which is often found united with the most repulsive forms of Ebionism. If we look at the consequences of both tendencies of thou~ht, we must regard them as equally dangerous; for peace and reconciliation are only to be found in the God-man. Luther's saying, 'The Saviour would be a poor Saviour if He had only suffered for me in the human nature'

he joined to another, ‘If Christ were a hundred times God, and not true man also, it would be of no use; for then He would not be ours, not our fellow in all things excepting sin.' If we are to learn anything nom the struggles of the last century, it is we think this, that the perils of our church are not to be obviated by the labours of a purely historical criticism, which looks at the matter externally, but by the study of the Sacred Form as presented in our most holy faith as not merely ideal but historical. The problem which this sets before us is the problem of the entire gospel. Melanchthon. on his death-bed longed for eternity, because he hoped it would solve this problem for him.

We say with Dorner: "We stammer before this centre of wonder.

But only by stammering do we learn to speak. And the Word made flesh, as the highest speech of God to man, will give the evermore perfect knowledge of Himself, and effect that language concerning Him shall more clearly reflect His Person and more harmoniously speak concerning it; yea, shall hear and receive it as the thankful answer of mankind made blessed in f&ith."—Das Dogma vom Gottmenchen, p. 23.

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NOTE XVII.—THE SACRAMENTAL PRESENCE.

The relation of our Lord's Divine-human Person to the Eucharistic Memorial rite is the test of all the sacramental theories that have been current in the church. A few illustrations may here be given of the simple statements in the text.

The doctrine of Transubstantiation—a word which for the present purpose may stand for the whole theory of which it is the centre—carries out with a perfect consistency the idea that Christ gives Himself and all the benefit of His redeeming Person to the recipient who partakes of what has the appearance of bread and wine. The word Transubstantiation strictly and primarily has the meaning assigned to it by the Council of Trent. The Thirteenth Anathema reads thus: "Whosoever shall say, that in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of bread and wine remains, together with the substance of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the species of bread and wine still remaining, which change the Catholic church very fitly calleth Transubstantiation: let him be accursed."

There lies the real conversion from which the word is derived; but the formation of the doctrine had been conducted by men whose doctrine of the unity of the One Person had been won at a great cost, and was jealously guarded. Hence, we find the Twelfth Anathema of the Tridentine Council, preceding that which has just been quoted, as follows: "Whosoever shall deny, that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood, together with the sou1 and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and, consequently, the whole of CHRIST, are truly, really, and substantially contained; but shall say that they are there only symbolically, figuratively, or virtually: let him be accursed."

This is clear, consistent, intelligible, and incredible.

The theory of Consubstantiation, into which the former was converted by Lutheranism, is, like all other modifications of it, a mere Apollinarian progeny—the body without the soul of the physical Christ in the Eucharist. Instead of investigating the Lutheran confessional formulæ—already referred to in the preceding "History"—I will quote Olshausen, one of the most luminous defenders of the modified theory established by the German Reformation, with special reference to our present doctrine of Christ's Person. He says (in his commentary on Matthew xxvi. 26): "One of the deepest metaphysical problems—the question of the relation of spirit to matter—comes under discussion in the doctrine of the Holy Supper; as it does eminently in the doctrines of the resurrection and glorification of the flesh. From the various principal views concerning this doctrine arise also, on account of their number and variety, the several theories regarding the Supper. Idealism appears in the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, in which the matter is volatilized into spirit. Dualism is expressed in the view of Zwinglius, in which spirit and matter are rigidly and absolutely dissevered. Realism distinguishes, on the contrary, the Luthero-Calvinistic interpretation, which conceives spirit and matter as neither changed nor dissevered, but as both existing in their true connection and mutual dependence. The doctrine of the two natures in Christ is, accordingly, the antitype for the doctrine of the higher and lower on the Supper.

As in Christ Divinity and humanity are united, without the one being deprived of its identical nature by the other, so also in the Supper the Word of God attaches itself to the matter, and consecrates it to the sacrament. 'Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum.' In these words of Augustine rests the only true canon for the doctrine of the sacraments."

This is consistent with the tendency of the Lutheran doctrine which makes corporeity, as one said, "the end of all the ways of God;" but it entirely subverts the design of the institution. At the outset, it is not true that the relation of spirit to matter enters into the sacramental idea: the flesh and blood of Christ remain matter still, since the identity of the crucified body and the body glorified and present in the Eucharist is assumed: it is as matter still, though glorified, that the flesh of Christ is supposed to feed the soul. Here, as in Transubstantiation, there is an incomprehensible confusion, rather, of matter and spirit. Nor is it easy to see how the Transubstantiation theory is idealistic, since there also the very substance of flesh and blood is supposed to be present under the accidence of another substance. As to the Dualism of Zwingli's view, that also is an inapplicable notion; for that view does not concern itself with the relations of matter and spirit at all, there is no connection whatever established between them. But there is Dualism, or rather for the present purpose it may be said Nestorianism, in the Lutheran doctrine which brings the glorified flesh and blood into presence with and under the earthly substances. But, passing by all this, the relation between the Divinity and the humanity in Christ, and the higher and lower in the sacrament, is misunderstood. It would seem that the elements in the Supper are the humanity, and the Divinity the glorified flesh and blood; which is contrary to every true conception of the Lord's Person. Moreover, if it is the access of the Word that makes the Sacrament, it is not the Presence of the flesh and blood; and the Zwinglian hypothesis is approached. In fact, by no artifice can the doctrine of Consubstantiation be rescued f1'om the charge of dividing the Christ. Whatever may be meant by the glorified corporeality diffused by Omnipotent virtue from heaven through the bodies and souls of believers, it is only the human nature of the Lord after all; and glorified corporeality cannot nourish the spirit which is incorporeal. Is Christ divided? He that eateth ME shall live by ME!

If the reader will turn the page of Olshausen's Commentary, he will see in what difficulty this theory is involved when viewed in the light of the institution itself. "It appears difficult, concerning the first Supper, to retain firmly the full signification of the sacrament; since, as the work of Christ was not yet completed, His body not yet thoroughly glorified, the Holy Ghost not yet shed abroad, we might believe that this first participation possessed only a representative character; that it was after the resurrection the entire power was for the first time to be experienced in the ordinance. A remembrance of the Lord's death could not have place in the first supper; for the event was still prospective. The breaking of the bread and the distributing of the cup possessed more of a prophetic character.

It was, in the first instance, an ante-type, after the death only became an after-type. . . . To those who admit that the glorification of the humanity of Christ did not begin till the resurrection or ascension to heaven, it is really incomprehensible how Jesus, before His passion, could have dispensed His flesh and blood. To them nothing remains but to say 'that Christ created His own flesh and blood out of nothing.'

According to our view of the glorified humanity—a view which appears to us to grow continually clearer upon closer examination—the true nature of the first supper becomes completely obvious. The Saviour already bore the glorified body within Himself. The model body enveloped it as the shell does the kernel. Therefore the influence of this glorified corporeity might even then have proceeded from Him."

Before leaving Olshausen, it may be observed that he is one of those Lutherans who deeply felt the difficulty of excluding the Whole Christ from the Supper. And why? Because, on the theory of an impartation of the glorified corporeal element, the doctrine of the communication of Divine properties to the humanity must be maintained; and this he could not admit. Hence, rejecting the communicatio idiomatum he discriminates "between the individual personality of the God-man and the efficiency proceeding from Him;" and says that "everything proceeding from Him, even His divinely human efficiency, partakes of His nature."

The subject may be dismissed with a single question: What is the efficiency of the Divine-human Person, but the Holy Ghost? What did He shed forth on His ascension? The boundless wealth of His glorified substance, or the Eternal Spirit common to His Person and the persons of His saints? He hath shed forth this, says St.

Peter, and this he spake of the Holy Ghost which, Jesus being glorified, His church should receive.

There is much here that reminds me of Dr. Thomas Jackson, to whom let us turn, as he expresses the Anglican view, and far more thoroughly and consistently than the moderns.

"This is a point which every Christian is bound expressly to believe—that God the Father doth neither forgive sins, nor vouchsafe any term or plea of reconciliation, but only for the merits and satisfaction made by the sacrifice of the Son of God, who, by the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself in our human nature upon the cross. In the next place we are to believe and acknowledge that, as God the Father doth neither forgive nor vouchsafe reconciliation, but for the merits and satisfaction of His only Son, so neither will He vouchsafe to convey this or any other blessing unto us which His Son has purchased for us, but only through His Son; not only through Him as our Advocate and Intercessor, but through Him as our Mediator, that is, through His humanity as the organ or conduit, or as the only bond by which we are united and reconciled unto the Divine nature. For although the Holy Spirit, or Third Person in Trinity, doth immediately, and by personal propriety, work faith and other spiritual graces in our souls, yet doth He not by these spiritual graces unite our souls or spirits immediately unto Himself, but unto Christ's human nature. He doth, as it were, till the ground of our hearts, and make it fit to receive the seed of life; but this seed of righteousness immediately flows from the Sun of Righteousness, whose sweet influence likewise it is which doth immediately season, cherish, and ripen it. The Spirit of Life, whereby our adoption and election is sealed unto us, is the real participation of Christ's body, which was broken, and of Christ's blood, which was shed for us. This is the true and punctual meaning of our apostle's speech (1 Corinthians xv. 45):—'The first man, Adam, was made a living soul,' or, as the Syriac hath it, animale corpus, 'an enlivened body;’ but the last Adam was made 'a quickening Spirit,' and immediately becometh such to all those which as truly bear His Image by the Spirit of Regeneration, which issues from Him, as they have borne the image of the first Adam by natural propagation. And this is again the true and punctual meaning of our Saviour's words (John vi. 63):—

‘It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.

The words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit, and they are life.' For so He had said in the verses before to such as were offended at His words, 'What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before?' The implication contained in the connection between these two verses and the precedent is this—

That Christ's virtual presence, or the influence of life, which His human nature was to distil from His heavenly throne, should be more profitable to such as were capable of it than His bodily presence, than the bodily eating of His flesh and blood could be, although it had been convertible into their bodily substance.

This distillation of life and immortality from His glorified human nature is that which the ancient and orthodoxal church did mean in their figurative and lofty speeches of Christ's real presence, or of eating His very flesh and drinking His very blood in the sacrament. And the sacramental bread is called His body, and the sacramental wine His blood. As for other reasons, so especially for this, that the virtue or influence of His bloody sacrifice is most plentifully and most effectually distilled from heaven unto the worthy receivers of the Eucharist; and unto this point, and no further, will most of the testimonies reach, which Bellarmine, in his books of the Sacraments, or Maldonate, in his

'Comments upon the Sixth of St. John,' do quote out of the fathers for Christ's real presence by transubstantiation, or which Chemnitius, that learned Lutheran, in his books, De Duabus in Christo Naturis, and De Fundamentis sanæ Doctrinæ, doth avouch for Consubstantiation. And if thus much had been as distinctly granted to the ancient Lutherans, as Calvin in some places doth, the controversy between the Lutheran and other reformed churches had been at an end when it first began, both parties acknowledging St. Cyril to be the fittest umpire in this controversy."—Jackson, on The Creed, Works, x. 40.

Here it will be obvious that there is a common element of doctrine between the Anglican Real Presence and the Lutheran, and the remarks already made will apply to both. But with all the stress laid upon the exclusiveness of the sacrament as the only ordinary channel of the bestowment of life, there is observable in this extract, and in the earlier theologians generally, a strong assertion of the direct agency of the Holy Spirit in this bestowment. Obviously these writers are embarrassed by the abundant teaching of Scripture as to the relation of the Spirit to the whole Christ, and by the fact that never is His agency connected with our Lord's lower nature alone. Upon this depends the whole controversy. "The flesh profiteth nothing," even the flesh of Christ, save as belonging to the Indivisible Person, whose merit, grace, and mysterious communication of Himself is committed to the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. He distributeth to each severally the Whole Christ.

Let the following words of Hooker be weighed in their full significance: "The first thing of His so infused into our hearts in this life is the Spirit of Christ, whereupon, because the rest, of what kind soever, do all both necessarily depend, and infallibly also ensue; therefore, the apostles term it sometime

'the seed of God,' sometime 'the pledge of an heavenly inheritance,' sometime 'the handsel,' or earnest, of that which is to come. From hence it is that they which belong to the mystical body of our Saviour, Christ, and be in number as the stars of heaven, divided successively, by reason of their mortal condition, into many generations, are, notwithstanding, coupled, every one, to Christ, their Head, and all unto every particular person amongst themselves, inasmuch as the same Spirit which anointed the blessed soul of our Saviour, Christ, doth so formalize, unite, and actuate His whole race, as if both He and they were so many limbs compacted into one body, by being quickened all with one and the same soul." (Eccl. Pol., v. 56.) The same writer guards his doctrine—albeit vainly, so far as its general results go—with such sentences as these, which are detached indeed, but not unfairly so, as each having its own weight:—"Thus much no Christian man will deny, that when Christ sanctified His own flesh, giving as God, and taking as man, the Holy Ghost, He did this not for Himself only, but for our sakes, that the grace of sanctification and life, which was first received in Him, might pass from Him to His whole race, as malediction came from Adam unto all mankind. Howbeit, because the work of His Spirit to those effects is in us prevented by sin and death possessing us before, it is of necessity that, as well our present sanctification unto newness of life, as the future restoration of our bodies, should pre-suppose a participation of the grace, efficacy, merit, or virtue of His body and blood, without which foundation first laid there is no place for those other operations of the Spirit of Christ to ensue. So that Christ imparteth plainly Himself by degrees." Himself, not "His flesh " was sanctified, but Himself. He received the Spirit, not His human nature only, which had its fulness in the incarnation act already; and grace, efficacy, merit, or virtue, are never in all the Scripture assigned to His "body and blood," but to HIMSELF. And, to conclude: "Thus, therefore, we see how the Father is in the Son, and the Son in the Father; how they both are in all things, and all things in them; what communion Christ hath with His church; how His church, and every member thereof, is in Him by original derivation, and He personally in them by way of mystical association, wrought through the gift of the Holy Ghost, which they that are His receive from Him, and, together with the same, what benefit soever the vital force of His body and blood may yield; yea, by steps and degrees they receive the complete measure of all such Divine grace as doth sanctifyand save throughout, till the day of their final exaltation to a state of fellowship in glory with Him, whose partakers they are now in those things that tend to glory. As for any mixture of the substance of His flesh with ours, the participation which we have of Christ includeth no such kind of gross surmise."

Reserving some remarks on the disparagement of the Holy Spirit's agency in the developments of modern doctrine, I close with the words of Irenreus, not omitting the peculiar Patristic theory of the Atonement with which they commence:—"The powerful Word and true Man, reasonably redeeming us by His blood, gave Himself a ransom for those who had been led into captivity. And since the apostasy unjustly ruled us, and when we belonged by nature to Almighty God, alienated us against nature, and made us His own disciples, the Word of God, being all-powerful, and not wanting in justice, dealt justly even with the apostasy itself, buying back from it that which was His own; not violently, as He had first gained dominion over us by snatching greedily what did not belong to Him, but by persuasion (or demonstration), as it became God to receive what He willed by persuasion, and not by force, so that neither might justice be violated, nor God's ancient creation perish. The Lord, therefore, redeemed us by His own blood, and gave His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh, and poured out the Spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God and man, bringing down God to men through the Spirit, raising men to God through His incarnation, and firmly and truly giving us incorruption in His advent through communion with God."

Canon Liddon, in his Bampton Lectures, is neither clear in the statement of his own doctrine, nor just to those whom he deems his opponents. As to the former, the phrases, "life-giving Humanity," "channels of grace that flow from His Manhood,"

applied to both sacraments, "Sacramental joints and bands;” as expository of Colossians ii. 19, Ephesians iv. 16; are loose and unconsidered phrases. The strength of the argument from the Eucharist to the Divinity of Christ is undeniable, and might have been put much more strongly than it is if the Divinity of the Incarnate Person had been the great idea distinctively seized.

But it is an argument that does not require the theory of a sacramental union with Christ, understanding by union the fellowship of His glorified flesh and blood. If instituted as a symbol, the Eucharist would imply a life of Christ imparted that none but a Divine Person could impart. If only a "sign" of our nourishment through the gift of Christ, it would require the

"thing signified" to be Divine. It is not true that this low, and in itself unworthy view, led Zwingli to waver in his confession of Christ's Divinity, or that Calvin's doctrine, which undeniably is at least as high as that which the Church of England, after a just balance struck between her formulæ, can be said to teach, led him, or has led his followers, to abandon the faith. The doctrine of the Eucharist held among the various sections of the Protestant Church, which do not hold the Sacramental theory, so-called, runs through a wide range of phases—from the very borders of that theory down to the Zwinglian, and even lower; but it is not seen that the measure of faith in the Holy Trinity fluctuates with the fluctuations of these views. Thousands of readers, whose hearts Canon Liddon causes to glow within them by his advocacy of their Saviour's Godhead, feel deeply grieved by language which classes Zwinglian and Socinian together, many of them being Zwinglian in their opinion of the Eucharist, but as little Socinian as the Bampton Lecturer could wish them. Moreover, it is unfair to speak constantly of the opponents of the "Real Presence" as denying the

"reality of sacramental grace; or "depreciating the sacraments."

Let Canon Liddon revive his remembrance of the Westminster Confession, or go for once into the congregation whose fenced ceremonial embodies the doctrine of that Confession, and he will modify his censure. "1. Sacraments are holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace, immediately instituted by God to represent Christ and His benefits, and to confirm our interest in H~ as also to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the church and the rest of the world, and solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ, according to His word. 2. There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation or sacramental union between the sign and the thing signified, whence it comes to pass that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other. 3. The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments, rightly used, is not confined by any power in them, neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it, but upon the work of the Spirit, and the word of institution, which contains, together with a precept authorizing the use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers."—Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter xxvii.

Finally, when Canon Liddon pointed to the downward course of the old Presbyterian congregations, he should not have forgotten that a large number of the members of the Establishment have not been kept by sound sacramental formularies from the error that lowers the Lord's Divinity; witness the clerical author of an Examination of Canon Liddon’s Bampton Lectures.

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NOTE XVIII—THE REAL PRESENCE BY THE SPIRIT.

"It has been a peculiar feature of English religion, and of many English theologians, to understand the presence of God Incarnate as the means of human sanctification, and to speak of the Holy Ghost in such a manner as to imply that, although He never became united to human nature by incarnation, yet there is some means by which He comes into direct union with it, and

‘dwells in’ each sanctified person. Hence there has been a tendency to interpret the word πvεµα as referring to God the Holy Spirit, wherever it is used in association with the idea of sanctification; and the tripartite nature of perfected human nature has been altogether ignored, the 'spirit' of man being taken as a synonym for the ‘soul' of man, or for that portion of his nature which is not corporeal. A more exact theology recognises the incarnation of God as the means by which God and man were brought into union in the Person of the Son of God; the mediation of Christ as the means by which that union is realised in the persons of Christians; the Holy Spirit as that Person of the Blessed Trinity who effected the union in our Lord by a miraculous conception, and who effects it in Christians by the work of sanctification; and the human ‘spirit' as the result of the Divine Spirit's work—the ‘building up' of a ‘new man,' the development of Christ's 'indwelling' in the soul."—Blunt's Dict.

of Doct. and Hist. Theo., Art.: Spirit.

It is not necessary now to prove that there is much confusion here, in fact as many misconceptions as there are sentences. Let him who fails to see that read the passage again, noting especially "some means by which the Spirit comes into union with human nature," and the "spirit in man" being made taken from man's nature, leaving him body and sensibility alone.

The passage is quoted for the sake of its quiet little appendage in the note. "It is a popular idea that there is a great deal about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul to be found in the New Testament, but this idea is dissipated by an examination of the New Testament itself. There are about sixty-four passages in all, which express, in some form or other, the idea of God abiding with Christians in the sense of indwelling, which can thus be classed." Then follows the classification, with which great pains have been taken. Result: The indwelling of God the Father, or the whole Blessed Trinity, ten times in the church, twice in the individual; the indwelling of God the Son six times in the church, twenty-five times in the individual; the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost ten times in the church, and in the individual NONE.

The reader will be much amazed to find that the "spirit" is that element of human nature which was lost in the fall; especially as the term, with some of its correlatives indicating man's rational nature, is used with regard to "man" generally, renewed and unrenewed, throughout the Scriptures. That the term

"spirit" is occasionally employed by St. Paul with relation to the renewed nature cannot be absolutely disproved, but the sweeping assertion above is not "good divinity." Passing that by, however, a few words must be said as to the indwelling Spirit—only a few words, as the subject lies rather wide of our proper scope. Not to speak of the pericphrasis by which the Holy Spirit in the Trinity must be a spirit within the individual Christian—not denied, indeed, by this theory—the assertion that the Holy Ghost is not indwelling in the believer is simply not true. The peculiar indwelling term is used in many passages, and although "in you" follows, the context imperatively requires that this "you" be individualised. The reader must, by the aid of his Concordance, verify this in the Greek Testament, and especially in the great chapter of the Spirit, Romans viii. The central saying of that chapter makes the Holy Ghost our Intercessor within us; within, for "He that searcheth the hearts" requires this internal meaning. Though the gifts of the Spirit are distributed by Himself as central in the body, some of those gifts are meaningless if they are not regarded as an internal benediction. The Holy Ghost is a witness within. Where else can His testimony be given as the "Spirit of the Son," the "Spirit of our sonship?" The "sealing" might be forced into an external meaning, but surely not the "earnest." When the Saviour spake of the Spirit coming after His own glorification, His words were,

"Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water," and this is the flow of an internal fountain. But the Spirit's own day proclaims the fallacy of this sweeping generalization. After the distributed tongues resting on the believers came the entrance into their hearts: "They were all filled with the Holy Ghost."

Dr. Moberly has made himself a high, though not always sound, authority on this question. Let him rebuke his fellows:—

"All this, and much more than can be specified, is his, because of his personal priestliness; and the secret origin of all this heavenly power—the real and only source of it—is in the undoubted presence of the Almighty Spirit of God in his separate soul, as he is a member of the Spirit-bearing body of Christ.

The single soul of the Christian man, duly planted into the Divine body, is a temple of God, or, shall I call it a chamber of the temple of God upon the earth, wherein His sacred presence dwelleth. As Christ walketh in the midst of His great temple built up of lively, spiritual stones, so is each single stone instinct with that living Spirit, and the Christian man, whosoever and wheresoever he be, and whatsoever he doeth, cannot; if he would, flee from the .Almighty presence. . . . The faith in his heart—in the strength of which he puts his whole trust and confidence in God, in Christ—the devout study and inward digesting of the Holy Scripture, the secret, sacred meditations upon the holy mysteries of the revelation of the name of God, the heart-deep confessions, the true, outpoured prayers, whether personal or intercessory, are but the details of that great inward activity and work wherein the conscious and willing spirit of a man, sanctified, lifted, ennobled, glorified if I may say so, by the indwelling Spirit of the most high God is continually rising to a nearness and closeness to God, which is itself the essence and perfection of the priestly condition. Won for him by the great sacrifice of the cross—brought home to himself through the agency of the organized body of Christ—the church, yet so won, and so brought home to him, it is absolutely his. The Spirit of God itse1f from his heart maketh intercession for him too profound, too Divine, too infinitely various, mingled, subtle, and delicate, to be capable of any adequate utterance in human :words. 'And He that searcheth the heart knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit; that He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’"—Moberly's Bampton Lecture on The Administration of the Holy Spirit, p. 257.

To the same effect, Alexander Knox, one of the fathers of modem Sacramentalism:

"As this operation, therefore, of the Holy Spirit, is, self-evidently, the noblest and the most valuable which can be conceived in this stage of our existence; so to this must we refer all that is said in the New Testament respecting the gift of the Holy Ghost, which was to distinguish the gospel dispensation. Whatever else may be included in that gift, or by whatever sensible demonstrations of omnipotence it was to be verified or signalized, still we must conclude from the whole tenour of the New Testament that the essence of that Divine gift was spiritual and heavenly; and that it was to consist in the accomplishment, through the Spirit of God, in our inner man, of all that had been purposed and provided for in the incarnation and mysterious ministry of the Son of God. Nothing short of this could glorify the Redeemer, or constitute the sealing of the spirit unto the day of redemption; and thus only could Christians be so strengthened with might by the Spirit, in the inner man, that Christ should (as it were) dwell in their hearts by faith, and that they should be rooted and grounded in the love of God."—

Remains, vol. ii., p. 59.

The secret of this anxiety to lower and limit the Holy Spirit's function is the difficulty of finding a place for Him in the human spirit, as the Indwelling God, if the glorified human nature of our Lord is the sole sanctifying Occupant: the two are incompatible. One or other must be chosen: either the whole Christ, as represented by the Holy Spirit is imparted; or we have a sacramental religion of carnal and mechanical and Capernaite materialism, which knows not the Trinity, and needs not a distinct and personal Holy Spirit of God. There is something that may be tolerated, and reasoned with, in the theory of a glorified humanity imparted through sacramental emblems by the power of the Holy Ghost within, taking of those "things of Christ." The unscripturalness of the doctrine that made the sacrament the only channel might be forgiven, or rendered innocuous so long as, after all, the Holy Ghost was the indwelling Vivifier of the sacred elements. But when the Holy Ghost is excluded from the sanctuary of man's spirit, and made only the Doorkeeper of the heart into which the Lord's humanity alone may enter, and thus dishonoured in His own dispensation, we ean only wonder what further outrage can be offered to the truth as it is in Jesus. This evil note has been of late sounded out very clearly, and we are on our guard. Long has there been observable a certain undefinable lowering of the doctrine of the Divine Spirit in works of that pseudo-sacramental tendency: a defect rather to be felt than described. But such plain language as the above throws all disguise away, and we know what to be prepared for.

In Romanist works the function of the Spirit is much limited to this office as towards the mystical Body. Archbishop Manning's work on the Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, contains not three sentences that directly concern the Spirit's indwelling in the believer. The fifth chapter of the first book has this for its thesis: "Before the Incarnation the Holy Ghost taught and sanctified individuals, but with an intermitted exercise of His visitations; now He teaches and sanctifies the Body of the Church permanently." The treatment of this most carefully avoids any reference to the individual sealing of the Spirit: so carefully that none but a suspicious eye would detect the absence. When quotations from the fathers are abundant, the truth cannot always be suppressed: hence a few rich sentences occur that will not be hid. For instance:

"S. Gregory the Great says: 'For the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, was present always and in all things. Him who also proceeds from Himself by substance, namely, the same Spirit, in the saints who declare Him He abides, but in the Mediator He abides in fulness. Because in them He abides by grace for a special purpose, but in Him He abides by substance and for all things." Such a sentence as this is utterly out of harmony with the rest of the book: we claim it as our own. It is, however, the only sentence in the whole of this elaborate volume that mentions the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost.

But in the Archbishop's doctrine there is a consistency which is utterly wanting in the Anglican. "The Holy Spirit, through the church, enunciates to this day the original revelation with an articulate voice, which never varies or falters. Its voice to-day is identical with the voice of every age, and is therefore identical with the voice of Jesus Christ.

‘He that heareth you heareth Me.' It is the voice of Jesus Christ Himself, for the Holy Ghost ‘receives' of the Son that which 'He shows to us'"

Long may the "popular feature" remain in English theology.

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NOTE XX.—0ONTROVERSY ON THE ETERNAL SONSHIP.

In the Appendix to Dorner, already referred to as containing the recent English history of the doctrine, Dr. Fairbairn gives a statement of this controversy which I shall thankfully borrow:

"Several respectable theologians, not doubting the article of our Lord's proper Divinity, yet began to dispute the fitness of the term 'Eternal Sonship,’ nay, argued the incompatibility of the term with Deity in the stricter sense, and explained it, where it occurs in Scripture, of His incarnation, or what belonged to Him as the Divinely constituted Mediator. Of this class were the commentator Adam Clarke, Drew, Moses Stuart, and several others. The leading argument of all these writers (as indeed of the Arians and Socinians before them) was, that generation necessarily implies production, or a beginning in time; father implies precedency in time, or priority in being, with reference to son; so that eternity is excluded by the very form of the statement. Stuart, however, who was certainly the most learned and ablest of the writers; who took this line of objection, did not go quite so far as the others; but he disliked the mode of representation, partly on account of what it seemed to imply, and of its apparent unintelligibility; but he did not absolutely reject it. ‘If the phrase eternal generation,' he said,' is to be vindicated. it is only on the ground that it is figuratively used to describe an indefinable connection and discrimination between the Father and the Son, which is from everlasting. It is not well chosen, however, for this purpose; because it necessarily, even in its figurative use, carries along with it an idea which is at variance with the self-existence and independence of Christ as Divine; and, of course, in so far as it does this, it seems to detract from His real Divinity.'"

It is to such statements, which had a certain superficial plausibility about them, and appeared to be producing some impression upon orthodox believers, that we owe the excellent treatise of Mr. Treffry, on the Eternal Sonship of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was written specially to meet this phase of incorrect representation, which would soon have glided into actual error, and is the fullest and most satisfactory vindication that has come from an English theologian, of the truth of Christ's Sonship, not as Messiah merely, but as the Second in the adorable Godhead. With the exception of some imperfect and partially mistaken representations concerning the views of Philo, the learning exhibited in the work, though not profound, was respectable, and adequate to the task which the author aimed at establishing; and as a controversial treatise the work is well entitled to commendation, both for the sound judgment and the Christian temper displayed in it. In regard to the specific point under discussion, Mr. Treffry shows that the exception taken by Trinitarians to the Eternal Sonship arises partly from pressing the human analogy too far, and partly from a want of discrimination in respect to the senses in which self-existence is predicable of the Three in the Godhead. There is much, he justly observes, in analogies derived from earthly relations that is wholly inapplicable to the Divine character; and priority of being, and pre-agency, which are inseparable from human paternity, having their ground in men's animal natures, cannot possibly have place with God. 'The essential ideas here are generative production, identity of nature, inferiority of relation, and tender endearment. These may all exist irrespective of time. When generation has a beginning, it is either because the generator is not eternal, or because he must exist previously to generation. But if he has himself no beginning, and if there is no evidence that a generative emanation may not be essential to his nature, it is clear that generation does not necessarily imply beginning. God is eternal; and Divine generation, for aught that can be alleged to the contrary, may be essential to the Deity.' On the point of self-existence Mr. Treffry showed how Stuart and others failed to discriminate between self-existence as predicable of each Person of the Godhead, and the same as capable of being attributed only to the Divine essence and unity. 'In the one case, the term is equivalent to necessary existence, and is true in application to the Divine subsistences severally considered. In the other, it signifies existence in absolute and separate independency, and is not correct except as spoken of the entire Deity. For the Father is not without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit. The attribution to each Person (namely, as apart from the others) of absolute independence and self-existence, is, in effect, the denial of all necessary and eternal relation in the Deity.'"—

Dorner, Doct. of the Person of Christ. v. 425.