fection of it! Is.
xl. 6. Dust it is, and what baser? Gen. xviii. 27. And corruption it is,
and what viler? 1 Cor. xv. 44. And yet God sent his Son in the flesh. Is
this a manifestation? Nay, rather, it is a hiding and obscuration of his
glory. It is the putting on of a dark veil to eclipse his brightness. Yet
manifested he is, as the intendment of the work he was about
required,--manifested to reproach and ignominy for our sin. This is one,
and a great point of Christ's humiliation,--that he took not on him the
nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham, Heb. ii. 16.

But yet, to complete this mystery more, the Son descends a third step
lower, that the mystery may ascend so much the higher, in the likeness of
flesh? Not so, but in the likeness of sinful flesh. If he had appeared in
the prime flower and perfection of flesh, in the very goodliness of it,
yet it had been a disparagement. If he had come down as glorious as he
once went up, and now "sits at the right hand of the majesty on high;" if
he had been always in that resplendent habit he put on in his
transfiguration; that had been yet an abasement of his majesty. But, to
come in the likeness of sinful flesh, though not a sinner, yet in the
likeness of a sinner,--so like as that, touching his outward appearance, no
eye could discern any difference, compassed about with all those
infirmities and necessities, which are the followers and attendants of sin
in us; "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" a man who all his
lifetime had intimate acquaintance, and familiarity with grief. Grief and
he were long acquaintance, and never parted till death parted them. Nay,
not only was he, in his outward estate, subject to all those miseries and
infirmities unto which sin subjects other men, but something beyond all,
"his visage was more marred than any man's, and his form more than the
sons of men," Isa. lii. 14; and therefore he was a hissing and
astonishment to many. He had no form nor comeliness in him, and no beauty
to make him desirable; and therefore his own friends were ashamed of him,
and hid their faces from him; "he was despised and rejected of men," Isa.
liii. 2, 3. Thus you see, he comes in the most despicable and disgraceful
form of flesh that can be; and an abject among men, and as himself speaks
in Psal. xxii. 6, "a worm, and not a man;" a reproach of men, and despised
among the people. Now this, I say, is the crowning of the great mystery of
godliness, whic