d meditation: and that it is not a very foreign idea that these
heresies are the loud thinking {121} of a mighty host, as it outgrows
its childhood, and comes to years of discretion.
I will yet more briefly indicate the course of Historical meditation on
deep things, by treating similarly one of the other great
controversies, viz. that concerning the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
II. _About the Two Natures of our Lord_.
1. _The Jew_. We bear witness that Jesus of Nazareth died at Jerusalem.
2. _The Catholick Church_. And we aver that He rose again from the
dead, and was the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
3. _The Gnostic_. Probably He was one of the Aeons of whom our
forefathers have told us--the leading emanation from the Most High.
4. _The Catholick Church_. He is no Aeon, Manifestation, nor Creature.
He is God as truly as He is man.
5. _The Manichaean_. Then, of course, if He was God, He could have
nothing really material about Him. Matter is evil.
6. _The Catholick Church_. On the contrary He had a body like ours.
7. _The Docetae_. No! That was only in appearance. You must leave
out all about His Baptism, Circumcision, and Crucifixion. They were
only pretence.
8. _The Catholick Church_. Not pretence at all, but real. He derived
Very Manhood from the Blessed Virgin Mary, as truly as He derived Very
Godhead from God the Father.
{122}
9. _The Arians_. Perhaps He took a human body, but not a human soul.
"The Divine Word was in the place of the soul."
10. _Nestorius_. Perhaps if these things be so--since He derived the
Person of God from God, and the Person of man from Mary--then we must
not say that He was one Person, but two.
11. _The Catholick Church_. These ideas are contrary to the Truth: for
(Council of Ephesus 431) Christ was but one Person, in whom two natures
are intimately united, but not confounded.
12. _The Eutychians_. Granting there were not two Persons, we suppose
that there were not two Natures. We hold that there was but one Nature
_mono physite_ (_mono physis_)--originally two distinct natures, but,
after union, only one: the human nature being transubstantiated into
the divine.
13. _The Catholick Church_. This also is faulty. For (Council of
Chalcedon 451) in Christ, two distinct natures are united in one person
without any change, mixture, or confusion.
14. _Honorius Bishop of Rome and the Monothelites_. Then perhaps the
human wi
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