e, an altogether gratuitous addition, an unnecessary miracle. That
is, so far as I can understand it, the idea of Incarnation
entertained by moderns who reject or question the Catholic Faith.

But let me say as clearly as possible that this is not, and never
has been, what the Christian Church means by Incarnation. The New
Testament does not tell us of a deified man: no, we begin with a
Divine Person. "The 'I' in Him, His very self, is Divine, not
human; yet has He condescended to take our humanity into union
with His Divine Person, to assume it as His own." He who was from
all eternity a single Divine Person took upon Him our nature, and
was "made man;" and if this be so, what other entrance into
our condition is imaginable save that which we confess in the
Creed--that He was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary"? "The Creeds pass immediately from confessing Jesus
Christ to be 'the only Son of God' to the fact that He was 'born
of the Virgin Mary,' and neither of those articles of the Catholic
Faith can be abandoned without disturbing the foundations of
the other."*

--
* Swete, Church Congress Report (1901), p. 164.
--

If Christ was born naturally of human parents, He must, one would
think, have taken to Himself a human personality; He must have
existed in two persons as well as in two natures. But what we are
to insist on in thinking of and teaching this mystery is this
truth of the single Divine Personality of our Lord. The old
Nestorian heresy (with certain important modifications) is
being resuscitated among us. Nestorianism, new and old, begins
from below, and speaks of a man who by moral "association"
became "Divine;" it speaks, that is to say, of a deified man.
The Christian Faith begins from above-it speaks of Him who from
all eternity was God, taking upon Him our flesh. He took upon Him
our nature, but He did not assume a human personality. He wrapped
our human nature round His own Divine Person. On the Nestorian
theory, God did but benefit one man by raising him to a unique
dignity; on the Catholic theory, He benefitted the race of men,
by raising human nature into union with His Divine Person.

Those who speak, somewhat incautiously surely, of Incarnation,
while they deny or question the Virgin-Birth, should be asked to
consider what they say and to reflect what their words imply. A
man born naturally of human parents but taken up, on account of
a wonderfully high moral character,