that, although the Arians are delivered from that direct contradiction to their system which the translation in our Bible bears, yet even their own translation does not give any essential support to their system. For το είναι ίσα Θεφ refers to the same thing with μορφη Θεον, and, being set in opposition to the appearance of a creature which Christ assumed, implies an essential equality with God. But if he had no right to this equality, it is a strange instance of humility in Christ, that he had not the presumption to lay hold of it. Whereas if he had a right, his not eagerly retaining it, but laying aside the appearance of it, was the greatest humility. So that the apostle's argument turns upon the right of Christ to be like God; and the only difference created by the two translations is this-according to our translation, the last clause of the 6th verse is a continuation of the description of the prior state of Christ: according to Dr. Clarke's, it is the beginning of the description of his humiliation. You will perceive the course of the apostle's argument in the following paraphrase: "Jesus Christ, who, before he appeared upon earth, was in the form of God, i. e. possessed all the glories of the divine nature, was not tenacious of this equality with God, did not consider it as a thing to be eagerly grasped, but emptied himself. He could not cease to be God, but he divested himself of those glories which constitute the form of God, having taken the form of a servant. Had he appeared as an angel, this would have been taking, in respect of God, the form of a servant; and therefore it is added as the specific description of that form of a servant which he took, having become in the likeness of men; and although he retained the nature of God, yet, as to outward appearance or fashion, being found by those who sought to take away his life, such as man is, he humbled himself so far, that, when he had power to retain his life, he surrendered it, and submitted to an ignominious death."

By this natural interpretation, the succession of propositions contained in this passage teaches us that the same person who was God became man; and since he who was once God must be always God, the nature of God being unchangeable, it follows that he was at the same time both God and man.

The same thing is intimated less clearly, but with a little attention it will appear, not less exclusively, in the third passage, Heb. ii. 14, 16. The apostle is giving a reason why the Captain of Salvation took part of flesh and blood. The reason is, that he might have it in his power to die, because his death was to be the instrument of our deliverance from death. But as nobody thinks of giving a reason why a man should be a man, the apostle's giving a reason why Christ took part of flesh and blood, implies that this was not the necessary condition of his being, but that it was a matter of choice; and therefore it follows not only that he existed before he made the choice, but that he had it in his power to make a different choice, i. e. that he existed in a state which admitted of his choosing a more splendid appearance, had he so inclined. That this state was superior to the condition of angels, is made plain by the 16th verse, the most literal and proper rendering of which is, "For truly he lays not hold of angels, but he lays hold of the seed of Abraham," v, upon account of his making which choice, it was necessary that he should in all

things be made like his brethren. Now whether "laying hold of angels" implies, as the Socinians are fond of interpreting the phrase, "helping angels," because they do not suppose that Christ had it in his power to be like an angel; or whether it means, according to our translation, laying hold of them, so as to assume their nature and form, the phrase is very improper, unless the Being to whom it is applied was so far superior to angels, that he had it in his power to pass by them or not, to lay hold of them or not, as he pleased. And this Being, who, in his antecedent state of existence was superior to angels, it is here said, took part of flesh and blood, which are the characteristics of men; and because he was thus made in all things like them, they are called his brethren.

The review of these three passages suggests the whole of the argument upon this subject, which may be thus stated in a few words. The names, the characters, the actions, and the honours of God are ascribed to Jesus Christ: the affections, the infirmities, and the sufferings of man are also ascribed to Jesus Christ; therefore in him the divine and human natures were united, or the same Person is both God and man.

It would seem that this inference should be admitted by all those who pay a due regard to the plain declarations of Scripture; and, had Christians rested in this inference, there could not have been much variety of opinion upon the subject. But when men began to speculate concerning the manner of that union which the Scriptures teach us to believe, they soon went far beyond the measure of information which the Scriptures afford. They multiplied words without having clear ideas; their meaning being, in this way, never perfectly apprehended by themselves was readily misunderstood by others; and the controversies upon this point, which, at the beginning, involved a fundamental article of the Christian faith, degenerated at last into a verbal dispute, conducted with much acrimony, in the mere jargon of metaphysics.

Those sects who considered Jesus as merely a man, whatever was the date of their existence, or whatever were the numbers that embraced their tenets, escaped by the simplicity of their system from this controversy. But the great body of Christians, who learned from Scripture that Jesus Christ was more than man, differed widely in their speculations as to the manner of reconciling the opposite descriptions of his Person; and, in the early ages of Christianity, the dispute was of much importance, because it turned upon the reality of the two natures, or the permanency of their union.

In the history of this controversy our attention is first engaged by the opinion of the Gnostics. All the Gnostics agreed in considering the Christ as an emanation from the Supreme Mind, an Æon of the highest order sent from the Pleroma, i. e. the space inhabited by those spirits who had emanated from the Supreme Mind, to deliver the human race. But as the fundamental principle of their system was the inherent and incorrigible depravity of matter, all of them agreed also in thinking it impossible that so exalted a spirit was truly and permanently united to a gross material substance. Some of them, therefore, supposed that Jesus, although made in the likeness of men, was not really a man; that the body which the Jews saw was either a

phantasm that played upon their senses, or, if it had a real existence, was a spiritual substance, not formed of the same corruptible materials as our bodies, standing in no need of those supplies which it seemed to receive, and incapable of those sufferings which it seemed to endure. Those Gnostics, who considered Jesus as a man only in appearance, are known by the name doxnta. Other Gnostics, who found it difficult to reconcile the mere phantasm of a body with the history of Jesus Christ, followed the more substantial system of Cerinthus, who held that Jesus of Nazareth was a man born like other men, and not distinguished from his countrymen, till he was thirty years of age, in any other way than by the innocence of his life; that when he came to John to be baptized, that exalted Æon called the Christ, descended upon him in the form of a dove, or in the manner in which a dove descends, and continued to inhabit his body during the period of his ministry; that the person called Jesus Christ was a man, all whose actions were directed by the Eon who dwelt within him, but that when he was delivered into the hands of the Jews, the Christ returned to the Pleroma, and Jesus was left to suffer and to die.

It is a tradition derived from the earliest Christian writers, that the Apostle John lived to witness both these branches of the Gnostic heresy, and that he wrote his gospel and his epistles on purpose to correct their errors; and this tradition is very much confirmed by our observing that by means of the continual reference which his writings bear to the tenets that were then spreading among Christians, we are able to derive from them the clearest proofs both of the divinity and of the humanity of our Saviour. Thus, in his gospel, as he begins with declaring "the word was God," so he says at the 14th verse, "the word was made flesh :" and in his 1st Epistle, v. 20, as he says of Jesus Christ, "This is the true God," so he bears his testimony both against the Cerinthians, who separated Jesus from Christ, (ii. 22,) and against the Docetæ, who said that Jesus Christ was not truly a man. (iv. 2, 3.) The phrase used in the last of these passages, "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," furnishes an argument which Dr. Horsley has urged with his wonted acuteness against the modern Unitarians. The argument is this: Unless the words "in the flesh" are mere expletives, they limit the words "is come" to some particular manner of coming. This limitation either is nugatory, or it presumes a possibility of other ways of coming. But it was not possible for a mere man to come otherwise than in the flesh; therefore Jesus Christ is more than man. And thus in this proposition," Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," the denial of which John makes a mark of Antichrist, there is an allusion both to the divinity and to the incarnation of our Saviour. While the general principles of the Gnostics led them to deny the reality of Christ's body, it is the character of that system which is known by the name of the Apollinarian, to ascribe to our Saviour a true body, but not a human soul. We have reason to believe that the ancient Arians, who held Christ to be the most exalted spirit that had proceeded from God, considered this spirit as performing the functions of a human soul in the body which it assumed, so that, as in all mere men, there is the union of a body with a human soul, there was in the person of Jesus Christ the union of a body with an angelical

spirit. Apollinaris did not hold the distinguishing tenet of Arius. He was the friend of Athanasius, himself an able and zealous assertor of the divinity of Christ. But he conceived that the most natural way of explaining the incarnation of the Son of God was to consider the Godhead as supplying the place of a soul, and the body which the Godhead animated, as in all respects like the bodies of other men; and as this system appeared to degrade the Godhead, by subjecting it to all the sensations of a human soul, Apollinaris endeavoured to obviate the objection arising from this degradation, by recurring to a distinction well known in the ancient Greek philosophy; a distinction between 7, the sensitive soul which man has in common with the other animals, and vous, the rational soul by which he is raised above them. Apollinaris held that Christ assumed, together with the body, the 7, or principle of animal life; but that he did not assume the vous, the principle of thought and reason, because all the offices which belong to this higher power were in him performed by the Godhead.

The modern Arians, who, in the last century, have revived the ancient tenet, that Christ the Word is an exalted angel, incline to adopt the Apollinarian system. It appears to them superfluous to place the spirit of an angel and the spirit of a man in the same body; and they say, that the easiest explication of this phrase, "the Word was made flesh," that which preserves the most proper unity of person, and renders Jesus Christ, strictly speaking, one intelligent agent, is this, that the spirit of the angel, who is called the Word, inhabited and animated a human body. The modern Arians defend this Apollinarian system by the following arguments. As the body is the only part of human nature which we perceive, and as we are entirely ignorant of the manner of the union between body and mind, the name man is properly applied to every being which possesses a human body, performing its functions under the guidance of a spirit, whatever the origin or rank of that spirit be: and accordingly those inhabitants of heaven who appeared frequently under the Old Testament, and the angels who appeared at the resurrection of Jesus, are called men, because they had the appearance of men, although it was never supposed that they had a human soul. The Scriptures speak of Christ's coming in the flesh, of his being made flesh, of his taking part of flesh and blood: they never speak of his taking a soul; and all the phrases in which the soul and spirit of Christ are mentioned, do not denote different parts of the same person, but are Hebrew idioms which mean nothing more than Christ himself.

The answers to these arguments of the modern Arians which readily occur are the following: that Jesus Christ was not truly a man, unless he assumed that kind of spirit which is characteristical of the human species; that man is what he is, by his mind more than by his body; and that if our Lord stooped to the external form, it is not likely that he would disdain to connect himself with the spiritual inhabitant; that there is no analogy between the transient appearances of angels recorded in Scripture, and the permanent complete humanity manifested in the words, the actions, and the sufferings of him who "dwelt among" men; and that the expressions of Scripture referring to the soul of Christ are so many, and repeated in such a variety of forms, that a great part of the history of Jesus is enigmatical and illu

sory, unless he was truly a man in respect of his soul as well as in respect of his body.

Such are the arguments which our habits and modes of thinking suggest, and which the Athanasians and Socinians of our days conspire in opposing to the Apollinarian system. But there is another. argument which was considered in ancient times as a more effectual refutation of the Apollinarian system than any that I have mentioned. It was universally believed in the first ages of the Christian church, that there is a place for departed spirits, where the souls of the righteous rest in joy and hope, although they are not put in possession of the complete happiness of heaven, until they are re-united to their bodies at the last day. This place was called Hades, hell, a word which, in ecclesiastical writers, denoted originally not a state of punishment, but merely the habitation of departed spirits, as the grave is the receptacle of the body. Of this place David was supposed to speak in Psalm xvi. "For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption ;" and, as the Apostle Peter expressly applies these words to Jesus, Acts ii. 31, when he says, "David, seeing this before, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither did his flesh see corruption,' it was believed on this authority, that when the body of Christ was committed to the grave, his soul went to the place of departed spirits, and remained there till his resurrection. But if the soul of Christ went to the place of departed spirits, it follows that he had a complete human soul, and was in this respect, as well as in respect of his body, made like his brethren. For the xn, the sensitive soul of animals, does not enter that place: the Godhead cannot be supposed to have been confined there; and therefore it could be nothing but the vous, the reasoning soul, which the Apollinarian system denied to Christ, that waited, in the same place with other souls, the resurrection of his body.

When the council of Constantinople, in the end of the fourth century, the second of those which are called general councils, condemned the opinion of Apollinaris, they declared that they considered Christ as being ούτε άψυχον, ούτε ανουν, and that they did not hold ατελη την της σαρκος axoquar, i. e. that they believed him to be truly and completely a man. The church did not long rest in this acknowledgment of that truth which the Scriptures seem to teach upon this subject, but soon began to speculate concerning the manner in which this complete human nature is united with the Godhead, and from their speculations upon this incomprehensible point there arose different sects, whose peculiar tenets are still retained in some parts of the Christian church. It is the business of ecclesiastical history to trace the origin and the progress of these sects. I shall content myself with marking their distinguishing opinions, and, instead of attempting to follow them through the labyrinth of metaphysics, in which they contended with one another, I shall barely suggest the general views upon which the different opinions proceeded.

Nestorius, who had been taught to distinguish accurately between the divine and human nature of Christ, was offended with some expressions commonly used by Christians in the beginning of the fifth century, which seemed to destroy that distinction, and particularly