LII. It is not in man’s ability either to express perfectly or conceive the manner how this was brought to pass. But the strength of our faith is tried by those things wherein our wits and capacities are not strong. Howbeit because this divine mystery is more true than plain, divers having framed the same to their own conceits and fancies are found in their expositions thereof more plain than true. Insomuch that by the space of five hundred years after Christ, the Church was almost troubled with nothing else saving only with care and travail to preserve this article from the sinister construction of heretics. Whose first mists when the light of the Nicene council1 had dispelled, it was not long ere Macedonius transferred unto God’s most Holy Spirit the same blasphemy wherewith Arius had already dishonoured his co-eternally begotten Son; not long ere Apollinarius2 began to pare away from Christ’s humanity. In refutation of which impieties when the Fathers of the Church, Athanasius, Basil, and the two Gregories, had by their painful travails sufficiently cleared the truth, no less for the Deity of the Holy Ghost than for the complete humanity of Christ, there followed hereupon a final conclusion, whereby those controversies, as also the rest which Paulus Samosatenus, Sabellius, Photinus, Aëtius, Eunomius, together with the whole swarm of pestilent Demi-Arians had from time to time stirred up sithence the council of Nice, were both privately first at Rome in a smaller synod3, and then at Constantinople4, in a general famous assembly brought to a peaceable and quiet end, seven-score bishops and ten agreeing in that confession which by them set down remaineth at this present hour a part of our church liturgy, a memorial of their fidelity and zeal, a sovereign preservative of God’s people from the venomous infection of heresy.
Thus in Christ the verity of God and the complete substance of man were with full agreement established throughout the world, till such time as the heresy of Nestorius broached itself, “5dividing Christ into two persons the Son of God and the Son of man, the one a person begotten of God before all worlds, the other also a person born of the Virgin Mary, and in special favour chosen to be made entire to the Son of God above all men, so that whosoever will honour God must together honour Christ, with whose person God hath vouchsafed to join himself in so high a degree of gracious respect and favour.” But that the selfsame person which verily is man should properly be God also, and that, by reason not of two persons linked in amity but of two natures human and divine conjoined in one and the same person, the God of glory may be said as well to have suffered death as to have raised the dead from their graves, the Son of man as well to have made as to have redeemed the world, Nestorius in no case would admit.
That which deceived him was want of heed to the first beginning of that admirable combination of God with man. “The Word (saith St. John) was made flesh and dwelt in us6.” The Evangelist useth the plural number, men for manhood, us for the nature whereof we consist, even as the Apostle denying the assumption of angelical nature, saith likewise in the plural number, “He took not Angels but the seed of Abraham7.” It pleased not the Word or Wisdom of God to take to itself some one person amongst men, for then should that one have been advanced which was assumed and no more, but Wisdom to the end she might save many built her house of that nature which is common unto all, she made not this or that man her habitation, but dwelt in us. The seeds of herbs and plants at the first are not in act but in possibility that which they afterwards grow to be. If the Son of God had taken to himself a man now made and already perfected, it would of necessity follow that there are in Christ two persons, the one assuming and the other assumed; whereas the Son of God did not assume a man’s person unto his own, but a man’s nature to his own Person, and therefore took semen, the seed of Abraham, the very first original element of our nature8, before it was come to have any personal human subsistence. The flesh and the conjunction of the flesh with God began both at one instant; his making and taking to himself our flesh, was but one act, so that in Christ there is no personal subsistence but one, and that from everlasting. By taking only the nature of man he still continueth one person, and changeth but the manner of his subsisting, which was before in the mere glory of the Son of God, and is now in the habit of our flesh.