are; and grew as they grow, in stature and strength, as well as in wisdom. He had a child's mind, as well as body. Both were symmetrical and beautifully perfect in every stage of his progress, through childhood on to ripe manhood. No violence was done to the human rationality by the divine. There were no ruptures in the development. Though it may have been preternaturally rapid, there was in it no forcing of the child's will, or of the man's. The wisdom in which, as man, he increased, was limited, yet it was sufficient in every emergency for the purpose of the divinity that shaped his ends.

He was also "tempted in all points like as we are," and "he learned obedience by the things that he suffered." But temptation, strictly speaking, is predicable only of the finite rationality. The purely divine is not temptable, either in the sense of enticement to sin or of learning obedience by suffering. Neither is the animal organism of man. It has no consciousness of law as a moral rule, or of love, and is incapable of either transgression or allurment to it. Duty is ethical and personal. So are temptation and sin. Hence, the temptations of our Lord to distrust his Father's care in the wilderness and the garden, to yield his purpose of sublime love, and submit to the ruling evil of the world, were genuine human experiences, in which his strong but tenderly sensitive nature was set upon by all the unrestrained powers of darkness. What else could they have been? And he saw, in these assaults, more clearly than any other man ever saw all the incentives to evil. He conceded their force; he felt But he withstood them all; he

them to his heart's core.

steadily confronted and defeated them all.

But how acute were his sufferings! "Now is my soul sorrowful." 66 My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straightened till it be accomplished." But it was neither a superhuman nor a brute anguish that he endured. It must have been a sorrow of the intelligent, conscious spirit, either the human or the divine, that forced the cry "My

God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and the prayer, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me." Which was it? What could it be, but that same veûμa, the essence of human rationality, which from the cross he "yielded up," and breathed into the keeping of his Father? Could the infinite Spirit give up itself to itself; or breathe itself out of itself; or in any way be separated from itself? If not, these last words of the divine man, uttered in the agonies of the crucifixion, must stand as the culminating proof of his genuine and complete humanity.

The theory of divine sorrow, should it be admitted, makes nothing against this evidence of a veritable human nature and human sorrow. For if the divine in Christ could suffer, much more could the human. But the theory is not admitted. I do not find it in reason or revelation, in faith or any sound philosophy. It is not in the scriptures, explicitly or by implication, any more than it is that God hungered and ate, was weary and slept, was crucified and died. Nor is it a necessary deduction from the compassionate tenderness of the Divine Being. Yet it is maintained, "we are not to conclude that only the human can suffer," that "no pang can touch the divine nature." We speak of God as displeased; and "this displeased state of course, is a painful state."1

1 God in Christ. By Dr. Bushnell. In his late volume, "Christ and his Salvation," Dr. Bushnell advances to a more positive inculcation of the doctrine of divine sorrow. "Is there any sensibility in God," he asks, "that can suffer? Is he ever wrenched by suffering? Nothing is more certain. He would not be good, having evil in his dominions, without suffering, even according to his goodness." Then as his goodness is infinite, his sufferings also must be infinite, and this, too, from the first incoming of evil into his dominions. "His love sharpens into a pain when it looks upon evil." It "becomes an agony, in that it is a love to transgressors." Since the fall of the angels, it follows, then, that this agony has been unceasing, and must continue forever, in that God will be always looking on evil and transgressors. God's "dislikes, disgusts, indignations, etc. are mingling and commingling as cups of gall for the pure good feeling of his breast." “And here precisely is the stress of the cross." Nature had no power to "express this moral pain of God's heart, though the ancient providential history was trying vainly to elaborate the same. Nothing could ever express it but the physical suffering of Jesus." "Here is the precise relation of the agony of the cross." The burden, the mental and moral pain, of the cross is

But since suffering, as a painful state, implies mutability and dependence, we must conclude that it cannot touch the Immutable and Absolute, that the finite and dependent only are subject to it. Human anger may be painful, but God's displeasure, which is his disapprobation of evil, is not human. It is a painless element of his infinite holiness and blessedness, from which there can be neither subtraction nor diminution. Else his hatred of sin must be the occasion of an unmitigated misery, and the most holy, as being the most sensitive, would be the most unhappy. The theory has recently culminated in the impossibility of an unmingled divine happiness. "The highest enjoyment," says a late writer, "always involves an element of pain as the condition of its being," God's cup of felicity is not pure, but " is mingled with drops of bitterness." The God over all, blessed forever, is not, then, entirely happy. He is subject to evil. His felicity is marred by bitterness, through a necessity of his nature. The pain is organic and chronic, for which there is no relief. And, as a recommendation, it is claimed that this view brings us nearer to God, assures us more of his sympathy, and is adapted to soften the heart and lead us to repentance. It may be adapted to awaken our commiseration that God should suffer so much; but, as this pain is a condition of his "highest enjoyment," I see in it no element of conviction, or occasion for repentance. Even our pity finds some relief in the fact that this pain "does not obliterate" God's felicity. And as it is a condition of his highest enjoyment, there are no motives for us to remove or lesson it, if either were possible;

God's, the "wrenching" of the Deity, the "gall" in his breast; the physical suffering, the animal pain which gives it expression, this is man's. Although it is maintained that these agonies make many subtractions from the divine blessedness, it is not allowed that they cause any diminution of it, since God's consciousness of suffering brings with it a compensation, which fully repays the loss. The essential defect in this theory of Christ, is the exclusion of the rational human. Hence, as in all one-nature theories, comes the attempt to make the divine supply its place, and hence comes also the loss of a really God-man Redeemer. The doctrine of loss and gain may be appropriate to finite natures, but not, we think, to the Infinite.

"Dare I say

Creator, Thou art feebler than thy work;

Thou art sadder than thy creature?"

In respect to God's sympathy, how does it appear that it is conditioned on his being subject to suffering any more than to sin? Strictly speaking, God has no sympathy, no fellow-feeling, with the wicked, and can have none—the Allholy with the unholy. How could the Crucified sympathize with his crucifiers; or feel other than moral disgust and repulsion? Yet precisely here, in this utter absence of sympathy with the wicked, is the marvel of God's mercy. It is the nature of love to desire to relieve suffering; but it does not follow that it must share, in order to relieve, it. It is not necessary to success in surgery that the operator should experience the pains of amputation, or in ministering to "a mind diseased" that we should become subject to the glooms of melancholy or the horrors of remorse. Moral and physical suffering in the human organism are not identical. The gout is not the same as a grief of heart, nor does the mind have the tooth-ache, the asthma, or a fever when the nerves report these ills to it. No more was the Divine in Christ necessarily cast into agony by the pains of the human nature with which it was united.

Would it not, on this theory, bring God nearer to us to suppose that he sinned as well as suffered with us? Would not this seem a still greater condescension? Oh no! you say, this would bring him too near, and make him too much like ourselves. So does the idea of divine bitterness, agonies, and pangs. It reduces the Absolute to the mutable and dependent, and imports a finite feebleness into the Omnipotent. It destroys God's self-consistency, and subtracts from his infinite blessedness. It shakes our faith in the stability of his government, to be told that he can have no pure and perfect joy that does not root itself in some deep sorrow; that his tranquility is disturbed, his nature wrenched by the evil which he permits; that he fluctuates from pleasure to pain, from blessedness to bitterness.

And what is the ethical necessity which demands this Apollinarian dogma? The reality of divine sympathy, which it is supposed cannot be realized through the sufferings of the human nature. But it is just this sympathy which the regenerate secure through Christ's human soul, which was made a perfect medium of communication through suffering, and more fully than would be possible through a mere body of opaque, passionless matter.1 Through the refined, sympathetic, human intelligence of Jesus, God has the most perfect fellow-feeling everywhere with the strugglers after truth and holiness, humanizing thereby his love, and making it responsive to every pang they feel, and every prayer for help they utter, a love not a whit less divine for coming to them through the victorious struggles of a complete and glorified human nature.

The exigencies of Christ's work, which required in him an example of virtue, also demand a full humanity. Matter can be wrought into exquisite forms and models of art,— has been divinely organized into the matchless beauty of the human body. But no art can make of it an example of virtue. Nor is the physical in man, the mere animal life, capable of the moral qualities indispensable to an example of truth and piety. All the elements of Christ's perfect character existed in matchless harmony and beauty in the Supreme before the incarnation. But they were no proper example for fallen man. They were unappreciable; too lofty and distant for his imitation. They needed to be brought down and softened, and made to live and breathe again in the very humanity from which they were lost. Then, a new moral power was added to the world's recovering influences, in him who thus became "the first-born among many brethren."

If, now, against all this evidence, external and internal, exegetical and historieal, we must conclude that the finite

1"Deitas autem nec absque corpore patiente passionem unquam admittit, nec absque anima dolente et perturbata, perturbationem et dolorem exhibet; neque absque mente anxia et orante anxia est aut orat."-Athanasius contra Apollinarium, p. 950.