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our opponent if he had so determined; for, notwithstanding his confident bearing, proofs of the reality of those disqualifications meet us in every page. These we mean not to draw out, and only refer to one in each class, which will sufficiently prove the fact: and these, we again repeat, are not introduced by us either in triumph or in controversy, but only to justify our disregard of such an opponent, and to deny his right to enter into the lists of controversy. That man has certainly nor name nor place among the learned," who (in p. 220) translated ov dos ανθρωπος, no common man." That man is "weak in doctrine," who asserts (p. 166) "that Christ, as to his humanity, never received, either at his conception or at his resurrection, a different nature from his mother; that his humanity now is just as truly human nature as ours is." And he has no right to express an opinion on the question of heresy, who is so ill informed as to suppose that the Monothelite heresy took its name from a man! "Monothelus himself: who in this wide world was he?" (p. 32.) And, finally, we shall endeavour to dismiss that man from our thoughts, as well as from our notice, who, after taunting us repeatedly with our "seventeen pages of quotations from the Fathers," concludes with the following memorable passage, which we hope the religious periodicals will be impartial enough to quote, as they have so many passages against us: purposely abstained from producing more than two or three authorities, which seemed to be necessary, because we would fain promise to shew him, at full length, on which side lies the testimony of the primitive church. That, however, requires more books than we are at present quite sure of being able to procure, and more leisure than we are at present quite sure of being able to command, and, we fear we must also add, a more intimate acquaintance with the subject than we are at present quite sure of being able to bring to the task" (p. 167). Till these indispensable requisites are attained, and brought to bear upon the question, this gentleman must excuse us if we decline noticing his lucubrations and we have not named either himself or his publication, being sincerely desirous of his coming to a better mind in all respects, and wishing to amend and not to expose him.

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The quotations from the Fathers in our First Number were very short, because we thought it good to make them numerous. This had the disadvantage of subjecting us to the suspicion of quoting partially, and so disguising their real sentiments. To do away with this suspicion, we shall now bring forward some of their shorter pieces entire, translated with all the care and fidelity we can command. Had we followed our own inclinations, we should have printed them in the original languages, but some of our most judicious friends have advised translations. In carrying into effect their recommendation, it will be our endeavour

to express the sense as literally and accurately as we are able, without attempting elegance, and least of all paraphrase or modernizing, either in language or thinking. Some such we have now in hand, but the press of matter prevents their insertion in the present Number; and we desire to preface them with a few general observations on the circumstances which have given occasion to many of the mistakes of our opponents.

We would first say a few words on the confidence with which it has been asserted by our opponents, that the Fathers of the church condemned the doctrine which we hold; and the certainty of our conviction, that, so far from condemning it, they strenuously maintained it. Some passages have been found in their writings, which, if detached from the argument of which they form a part, or if transferred from the times and circumstances to which they did apply, to our times and circumstances, to which they do not apply, would produce an impression very different from that intended by the holy men from whose writings those passages are extracted. From the beginning of the Christian church it has been uniformly maintained, by all the orthodox, that the mystery of the incarnation lay in the Eternal Word taking our flesh; incarnation necessarily signifying coming into flesh already existing; taking flesh necessarily implying that it was already created in order to be taken. This constituted it a mystery. For God to be manifested in an angelic form, is not called a mystery, and it had often taken place. For God to shew himself in Shekinah glory, to be seen in the lightnings and thick darkness of Sinai, or to be heard in the thunderings and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud, is not called a mystery. Nor, had the Son of God appeared in the glory which he had with the Father before the world was, would that have been a mystery, for this he ever had. But herein lay the mystery, THE GREAT MYSTERY, that GOD was manifest in THE FLESH; that He who was the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of his person should become flesh, and dwell among us; and that he should say to his disciples, "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.. Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." This is the mystery,-" God manifest in flesh; "-" God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.

But the act of incarnation is but the beginning of the mystery, which continued to be unfolded by his life of holy obedience-for, "though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered "-and is still continued to be unfolded in his members, the church, who are appointed for the very end of making known to an encompassing cloud of wit

nesses (Heb. xii. 1), unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places (Eph. iii. 10), the manifold wisdom of God. Accordingly, when the fulness of time came "to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy," Christ the Anointed first appeared. Of him the angel declares to Mary, "Thou shalt conceive, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus: he shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest....also, that Holy Thing* which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." This anointing of Christ the Head, is communicated by him to the church, his members: "Ye have an unction from the Holy One," saith the beloved Apostle: "The anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you:" Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." At his first advent he was sent by the Father in the likeness of our sinful flesh; at his second advent our sinful bodies shall be made like his now glorious body, for we shall be then like him.

The substance of this doctrine has always been held, and any thing hostile to it protested against, in the church; but the form of protestation must of necessity shape itself according to the error protested against. The early heresies concerning the person of Christ, the God-Man, denied either his Divinity or his humanity; but the quality of his humanity was not discussed till about the fourth century, the preceding disputants having on both sides assumed that the flesh which was wounded and bruised and slain for us was the same kind of flesh as ours, and derived from his mother. In this age of the church, therefore, or for the first three centuries, it is vain to expect direct and detailed refutations of an error which had not yet arisen; though we may, and can, find its indirect refutation, in the positive and clear assertion of the literal, proper, and true identity of our Lord's human nature with that of his mother, and which he took into union with his Divine nature by the Holy Ghost. But about 360 Macedonius, though he allowed a Divine and a human nature in Christ, denied that the Divine nature in Christ was in all respects the same with the Godhead of the Father; allowing that Christ's Divinity might be the likeness of, but denying that it was consubstantial with, the Godhead of the Father (concedit oμo

This "Holy Thing" our opponents limit to the human nature, but it evidently denotes the whole person, which in its totality, and not in the human nature alone, was "called the Son of God." It was the Son of the Highest, it was the Christ, the Most Holy; it was Messiah the Prince; it was the God-Man. He was the Holy Thing; and his body, his flesh, his human nature, was but one of the constituent parts of that Holy Thing.

esse, sed non oposatov). Apollinaris, about 370, and still more Eutyches, about 440, carried the same error into the human nature of our Lord; saying that his humanity had a likeness of ours; so that he might, they said, be called without falsehood God and man, though he had only a likeness of both, and was not consubstantial with either the one or the other. These heresies were not evaded or palliated by the Fathers, but they met them in the front, as, by the grace of God, we will endeavour to do. They maintained that there is but one God; and that there is but one likeness of God, namely, man; who, being created at first in the image of God, shall, though now fallen, be ultimately transformed into the same image-the "new man," "which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness." There being but one God, and every thing which can be said respecting his attributes necessarily excluding the idea of another, it becomes a flat contradiction in terms to talk of another whom they call God, while yet contending that he bears only a likeness to, but is not consubstantial with, God the Father. For as God is not a material thing, but a Spirit; form, or any of the other qualities of matter, cannot be given to God; but the likeness to an attribute is the attribute itself: likeness of Infinite is infinite; likeness of Eternal is coeternal; likeness of Almighty is almighty, and so on. An equal, though not an equally obvious, absurdity is involved in the other half of the error, namely, Likeness of man, not very man. For Adam being the only man created, and he having fallen, the whole species is fallen; nay more, the whole earth fallen too: "cursed is the ground for thy sake:" and the whole creation by Adam's sin: "the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same." So that, before we can allow an unfallen being to be truly man, we must not only overleap the objection that a new creation, however like, is not the same; but we must find a new world, from the unfallen dust of which he must be formed; and a new paradise, from the uncursed productions of which his life must be sustained.

The writings of the Fathers of this age of the church, (the fourth and fifth centuries,) abound with passages full to the point in the present controversy: short portions of which we have already adduced; and entire treatises will be still brought forward by us, as far as our limits will allow. In the beginning of the fifth century, some of the greatest errors of the Papacy began to shew themselves: one of the earliest of these was the excessive exaltation of the Virgin Mary. It took characteristic form in the Collyridiani; but it infected nearly all the theological writings of the age. Those of Augustine are much tainted with it, and furnish an additional reason, with many better, why he is so great a favourite among the Ro

manists. From the age of Augustine, in the fifth century, the Papists proceeded for a thousand years blasphemously heaping upon the Virgin Mary all the attributes of God. This we may take some future occasion for exposing; but our present object is only to shew the bearing it had on the human nature of our Lord; and this was most extensive and most important: for having, in their zeal for the immaculacy and dignity of "our Lady,' "the Queen of heaven," exalted her human nature above that of any mortal; nay, above that of Adam in paradise! it became, of course, necessary to exalt in the same manner the human nature of Christ: and this is the real key to understand those hyperbolical expressions on the subject, of which some are found in Augustine, and still more in the later Fathers, and which have misled our opponents and perplexed some of our friends. But let this one point be set right, and every thing else falls into its proper place; or, if our opponents insist on binding themselves to the letter of these expressions of the super-human humanity of our Lord, we will insist on binding them to the super-human humanity of Mary: and how she came by her unfallen nature it may puzzle them to explain. With this exception of the deification of Mary, all the Roman Fathers, and all the schoolmen, are quite clear and unhesitating on this point, and some of them have used bolder and stronger language than we have dared to employ. As a sample of which we extract the following question from Peter Lombard, with the comment of the Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas, untranslated, to avoid offence. He has just been shewing that God judged it better to take the nature of fallen man, rather than create a new species: "Melius judicavit et de ipso quod victum fuerat genere assumere hominem; per quem hominis vinceret inimicum *." And he goes on to inquire," Si homo ille potuit peccare: vel non esse Deus;" and proceeds to reason thus: "Hic distinctione opus est utrum de persona an de natura agatur. Si de persona agitur: manifestum est quia peccare non potuit: nec Deus non esse potuit. Si vero de natura: discutiendum est utrum agatur de ea ut verbo unita: an de ea tanquam non unita verbo: et tamen enti. 1. an de ea secundum quod fuit unita verbo: an de ea secundum quod esse potuit, et non unita verbo. Non est ambiguum animam illam entem unitam verbo peccare non posse : et est sine ambiguo videtur eandem et si esset non unita verbo posse peccare." He then inquires, "Utrum Christus potuit peccare? Ad primum sic proceditur, videtur quod potuit peccare. Ber. n. dicitur quod tantum descendit Filius Dei quantum descendere potuit preter peccatum; sed ultimus gradus circa peccatum est posse

"He judged it better to take manhood of the very kind which had been overcome, by which he might overcome the enemy of mankind."