According to the former, Christ is only a creature, finite and from nothing. Between him and the Godhead the distance is infinite, and no conceivable pre-existence can annihilate or diminish it. He knows not God or himself perfectly, and cannot be relied on as revealing either. The ethical sonship which the theory allows can give to a mere creature no title to be called God, or the Son of God; nor can it bring him into any essentially different relation to God from that in which believers stand to him. It is professedly in the interest of the divine Unity, and in opposition to the Trinity. But the unity which it maintains is ethnic, and not Christian. It is mathematical, not living and moral. It is a rigid, inarticulable uniformity of substance, shut out from the world and man by a remote and lofty absenteeism. Its boasted simplicity is fatal to its claim as a Christian doctrine; for it is simpler than the Trinity only as Deism is simpler than Christianity, as a merely human Saviour is simpler and feebler than our divine-human Lord and Christ. History, which in the long view is the best critic, pronounces it fluctuating and self-contradictory. Now, it presents Christ as a creature, and then, in deference to the scriptures, as a subcreator. Here, by its philosophy, he is from nothing; there, in its apologetics, he is a derivative God. Theoretically, it opens an impassable gulf between this creature and the Creator. In its evangelic moods it has tried to span the abyss, by throwing half way across it this created Saviour, allowed, in a kind of theologic strategy, as deutero-divine. In its mutations it has never taken any strong hold of a truly Christian consciousness, or for any length of time held a prominent place in the church. It comes in as a disturbing element when the faith-principle languishes, and speculation rules. It is cast out when faith revives and philosophy is baptized at the altar of Christian, instead of Deistic, science. Practically it lacks depth and power, because its Christ has no proper divinity.

The Sabellian view, by its denial of the personality of the Logos-Son, claims to be in the interests of the same Unity.

It allows a modal distinction in the Divine Being, as hidden and revealed, as silent and speaking, God in himself, and God out of himself, but not an immanent and real one. A favorite illustration of this distinction is, " Brahma sleeping, and Brahma waking," or actionless and active. Prior to his creative work God dwells in undisturbed silence, "sleeping on eternity." He is reasonless and motionless, without thought, consciousness, reflection, or memory. From the capacity of self-revelation in his waking hour came forth the Father, Son, and Spirit, with stars, suns, and trees as finite revealing media. By means of these, alike finite and instrumental, the Absolute dramatizes himself before himself on the plain of the finite. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as dramatis personae, take the leading parts, and the stars, trees, flowers, and man, the subordinate. All are alike implemental, all equally finite and phenomenal. There is no difficulty in a trinity of such finite impersonations. Nor, on the same principle, is there in a multiplicity of them. But in thus reducing the Father and Son to finite, dramatic impersonations, the theory denies a truly divine in Christ, and leans towards Deism. And in affirming these impersonations to be outgoings of the Absolute, and therefore one in essence with it, it runs in the opposite direction into Pantheism-the identity of God and the world—as its logical climax. The scheme, in this latter phase, shows an extraordinary boldness of speculative adventure, and an immense generalization. Its pathway down the ages lies through the Pagan polytheisms of the pre-Christian period and the insurrectionary philosophies and disbeliefs of later times. In some of its recent Germanic forms it exhibits great metaphysic subtilty and dialectic skill, and, as a system of mental gymnastics, is not without its use. But for a specific and permanent incarnation, in either aspect, Sabellianism has no need, and allows no room. The Logos, at best, is only a spark of divinity magically finited, and the incarnation its temporary twinkle on the Judean hills, when it throws off its shadowy human, and falls back into its native abyss of substance and silence.

Dorner calls it "the medium between Deism and Pantheism, dazzling but shallow."

The doctrine of the Bible and the church stands between these errors, in the truths which they both affirm and deny, with none of their self-contradictions or vacillations. It neither reduces the unity of God to a dead uniformity, nor confounds him with man and the universe. There is identity of substance, and also personal distinction. The Being is one, the persons three, and without contradiction or confusion. The one Being is not three beings, but one; nor are the three persons one person in the same sense that they are three. The Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Spirit, nor the Spirit the Father, yet each is God, and together make up the eternal self-consciousness and blessedness of the absolute Divine.

The problem of the divine and human in Christ falls back, therefore, for solution upon the prior problem of the divine. The one was not and could not be scientifically solved until the other had been. The Incarnation of God, and the Trinity stand or fall together. A doctrine which is most metaphysical is here seen to hold the closest connection with the great fundamental and practical fact in Christianity. The tri-personal unity finds its most luminous revelation and proof in the incarnation of God; and the church now holds and has ever held it in this vital form, through its faith in a veritable divine-human Saviour.

Eighteen centuries of critical discussion, believing, unbelieving, and disbelieving, have made it evident that there is no escape from a deistic humanitarianism on the one hand, or a nebulous pantheism on the other, except in the Christian conception of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All movement from this central idea is towards one or the other of these anti-Christian extremes. In all the Christian ages this has stood between a dead Judaism and a deader heathenism; between a sciolistic naturalism and a theosophic spiritism; between the positive philosophies and the negative; the "broad churches" and the narrow. It has repeatedly fought

with, and conquered, them all, and is advancing, through agonisms and antagonisms, to a final victory.1

The defence of the Trinity, as the basis of incarnation, has served the double purpose to the church of sharpening its intellect, of ripening and enriching its practical judgment, and of making it acquainted with the self-repeating and contradictory nature of all fundamental errors. The very heresies against which it has maintained the divinity of Christ have been often overruled as wholesome retarding or accelerating forces, by the emphasis of some half-truth which the decline of church-life was suffering to escape, or was leaving in the background, and which it has been thus roused to seize anew, and incorporate into the unities and vitalities of the system. In her successive contests, the church has taken a manlier grasp of just the weapons by which her enemies are sure to be won over to this truth, or to be worsted. More and more she lays hold on a power which is appropriating to its sublime ends all the advancements in art, science, and philosophy, which draws truth from all departments, freshly and livingly, to the divine in Christ, as the source and centre of all.

II. I pass now to the second part of my subject - the human nature of Christ-contained in the term "flesh."

In its restricted use oáp, translated flesh, denotes one of the constituents of the bodily organization. But in a comprehensive biblical sense it expresses sometimes the condition of the race as depraved, and sometimes the rational and

1 "It is becoming ever more universally discerned that all the essential determinations of the conception of God must be settled in the light and under the influence of the doctrine of the Trinity. So also is the conviction becoming every day more general that, for Christology, the matter of prime consequence is to conceive the divine in Christ in the absolute, the highest, that is, in the personal form, and that the divine in Christ is to be distinguished both from the divine in the world and the divine in believers." "We can affirm that the pantheistic, no less than the deistic, contradiction to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity has been, as to principle, overcome for the evangelical church." — History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ. By Dr. J. A. Dorner. Vol. iii. pp. 229, 221.

corporeal natures conjoined. This last I understand to be its use in the text, to express the entire humanity of Christ, a true body and a reasonable soul.

That the human nature of Christ included a true body is so evident that few, except some of the old Gnostics, have ever denied it. But that he possessed a reasonable soul, a real and complete humanity, is a proposition that meets with more objection and dissent.

As rationality constitutes the essence of the human nature, the question is simply one of Christ's finite rational existence. And it is to be determined by his own testimony and that of the apostles, as we determined the question of his divine nature. What, then, is the testimony?

1. Jesus was the son of Mary :

He recognized her as his mother; not the mother of an abridged, but of a complete human nature. There is no intimation in the history that he was a soulless, half son, or she the mother of a mere shred or shell of humanity. That the conception was supernatural does not indicate that it was incomplete. The son of Mary, according to the evidence, was as completely human as the son of Elizabeth.

2. Jesus was the son of man :

This was his most familiar designation of himself. It is as "the son of man" that he "hath not where to lay his head," that he must "suffer many things and be put to death," and must finally "sit on the throne of his glory." This human sonship enters into his entire work as a mediator, and runs through his whole history.

It was the paradox of the two sonships conjoined, the human and divine, that so staggered the wise men of his time, who "by wisdom knew not God"; yet he fearlessly propounded it to friend and foe. He pushed it to the very front of his claims, and held it as essential to the explanation of his person, and the true idea of his work.

3. Jesus was a man:

The one Mediator between God and man is "the man Christ Jesus." "As by man came death, by man came also