ferred from his own blessed oracles. His causeless suffering might, therefore, exceed perhaps even the limits of his omnipotence. He is ever moved by that benevolence, which forms a ruling element of his nature, to elevate, to the highest practicable point, the general happiness of the universe. Of that universe he is himself the soul; the infinite, to which all creation is but the finite. His needless suffering, then, would unspeakably subtract from the totality of universal bliss, and might thus transcend the immutable limits of his moral being.

But if one of the persons of the Trinity elects voluntarily to suffer for some adequate cause; some cause deeply affecting the happiness of the universe; some cause intimately connected with the glory of those who sit upon the throne; some cause sanctioned in the conclave of the Highest; some cause worthy to move a God: dare human reason interpose her puny veto against the mighty resolution? Would reasoning pride scale the highest heavens, and, standing at the entrance of the divine pavilion, proclaim, in the hearing of astonished cherubim and seraphim, that Omnipotence lacks physical or moral ability to become the willing recipient of suffering, prompted by its own ineffable love, and sanctioned by its own unerring wisdom?

On the abstract question of the capacity of the divine nature to suffer of its own free volition, we would not, for ourselves, have ventured gratuitously to speculate. Upon a theme so lofty and so sacred, we should have chosen to preserve a profound and reverent silence. But when we find it, as we suppose, recorded in the sacred oracles, that the second person of the Godhead actually suffered for the redemption of our fallen race; when our credence to that august truth is interdicted by the hypothesis, "God is impassible," with a voice of power heard, and echoed, and reverberated along the track of ages; when that hypothesis, to retain its own claim to infallibility, must change into figures of speech some of the plainest declarations of holy writ, it becomes the right and the duty even of a private Christian to explore respectfully, yet fearlessly, the foundations of a dogma deeply fortified, it is true, in human authority, and hallowed by the lapse of hoary-headed Time, yet scarcely claiming to repose itself on the basis of revelation.

That the Son of God should have suffered in his divine nature for the redemption of man is not more startling to human reason than the stupendous fact of his incarnation. If, at the time of the first manifestation of divinity in the flesh, the angel of the Lord, instead of announcing the event to

the humble shepherds of Bethlehem, had appeared in the midst of an assemblage of Athenian philosophers, made up from the schools of Zeno, Aristotle, and Epicurus, proclaiming to them the "good tidings of great joy," and benignly expounding the spirituality, the ethereal nature, and all the infinite attributes of the infant Deity, the incarnation of such a being for the remission of mortal sins must have seemed "unto the Greeks foolishness." The heavenly envoy would have been held "to be a setter forth of strange gods."-Acts, xvii., 18. Philosophic incredulity would have treated as a fable of mythology the mysterious message of grace. Peripatetic subtility might boldly have sought to scan the spiritual anatomy of the revealed God, and dared to pronounce its puny decree, that the holy enigma of his. incarnation was a physical or moral impossibility. Yet, if there is demonstration on earth, or truth in heaven, the Son of God, the second person of the glorious Trinity, did, in very fact, become incarnate for the redemption of man.

We have promised to notice the brief argument of Bishop Pearson on the divine impassibility. That we may be sure to do him justice, we give the substantial parts of his remarks in his own words. He says: "The divine nature is of infinite and eternal happiness, never to be disturbed by

the least degree of infelicity, and therefore subject to no sense of misery. Wherefore, while we profess that the Son of God did suffer for us, we must so far explain our assertion as to deny that the divine nature of our Saviour suffered; for, seeing the divine nature of the Son is common to the Father and the Spirit, if that had been the subject of his passion, then must the Father and the Spirit have suffered. Wherefore, as we ascribe the passion to the Son alone, so must we attribute it to that nature which is his alone, that is, the human. And then neither the Father nor the Spirit appears to suffer, because neither the Father nor the Spirit, but the Son alone, is man, and so capable of suffering. Whereas, then, the humanity of Christ consisteth of a soul and body, these were the proper subject of his passion; nor could he suffer anything but in both, or either of these two."

"Far be it, therefore, from us to think that the Deity, which is immutable, could suffer; which only hath immortality, could die. The conjunction with humanity could put no imperfection upon the divinity, nor can that infinite nature, by any external acquisition, be any way changed in its intrinsical and essential perfections. If the bright rays of the sun are thought to insinuate into the most noisome bodies without any pollution of themselves, how can that spiritual essence contract the

least infirmity by any union with humanity? We must neither harbour so low an estimation of the divine nature as to conceive it capable of any diminution, nor so mean esteem of the essence of the Word as to imagine it subject to the sufferings of the flesh he took, nor yet so groundless an estimation of the great mystery of the incarnation as to make the properties of one nature mix in confusion with another.”*

It will be perceived that Bishop Pearson's first ground of argument is, that the divine nature of the Son of God being common to the Father and the Holy Spirit, if the Son suffered in his divine nature, then the Father and the Spirit must have suffered. It is an inflexible rule in the science of logic that if an argument proves too much, it proves nothing. Its proving too much is an infallible sign that it is intrinsically and radically erroneous. The whole argument is condemned. Now the fatal disease of the argument under consideration is, that it proves too much. It touches even the holy incarnation itself. Test the argument, by applying it to the incarnation instead of the suffering of the Son. The argument, thus applied, would stand thus: The divine nature of the Son is common to the Father and the Spirit. If, therefore, the divine nature of the Son had become

* Pearson on the Creed, p. 311, 312, and 313.