the notion of the human nature having any personal centre of its own; to him it was merely the periphery of the Divine centre, which was its sole, real point of unity. It had, therefore, no independent substance; the Divine substance had taken the place of the human, and the human nature continued to subsist merely in the form of a congeries of accidents, held together solely by the Logos as their centre. The human nature of Christ never had an independent centre of unity, and therefore there was no need for its being absorbed ; from the very commencement the human nature was brought into existence and constituted by the Logos alone. In Cyril's view, accordingly, Christ was simply God, with the appearance of a man, but not a real man; it was—if we may use the comparison-as the manifestations of Christ in the Old Testament, to the Word made flesh of the New Testament. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown bound into the fiery furnace, there was a fourth seen beside them, and His appearance was as the Son of God.

"Thou seemest human and Divine."

It was a theophany, a prophecy of the incarnation, not the mystery itself: so with all Eutychian views of the Person of Christ, and Eutychian views-for such they really are of inspiration. "Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have." At this invitation the Eutychian shrinks back from excess of reverence, and thereby discredits the truth which he really believes at heart. The doubting of Thomas is far more akin to real faith, and receives its reward in discerning the Godhead while apprehending the manhood. "My Lord and my God!" is the exclamation of the disciple who wanted proof of a material fact rather than a spiritual truth, but who was rewarded by the discovery of both, because he sought to learn Christ in the right order-the spirit through

the flesh, the Godhead through the manhood. It is the same with inspiration. If from mistaken reverence for the Word of God we shrink from submitting it to the ordeal of criticism; if we are afraid of recognising the personality of Moses, David, Isaiah, and Paul; and quote the Bible, not as a whole made up of many parts-a body with many members, and every member not the same office, but as a mechanical, homogeneous whole, like a bar of iron or a block of wood—then we discredit it by the mistaken homage we pay it. No error is more popular, but more pernicious, than the error on the right side. All the will worship of the Church of Rome-the invocation of saints and angelsis only an error, as they suppose, on the right side. It can do no harm, and it may do good, they reason, to have the mother of our Lord on our side, together with His apostles, prophets, and martyrs; to go to Him with a train of intercessors, to smoothe the approaches to the Deity. But if the approaches require thus to be smoothed, where is the union between God and man? What has become of His high-priesthood, and of His ever living to make intercession for us? All this is practically lost to the Church of Rome. The Epistle to the Hebrews is as good as a dead-letter, and the doctrine of His continued humanity quite obliterated from their belief, if not from their creeds. The Church of Rome is thoroughly Eutychian. So, also, are those well-meaning, but mistaken, advocates of verbal or mechanical inspiration. They take the same external view of the Bible which the Eutychians did of the Lord's Person: it is human only in appearance; there is no individuality in the writers. As the human

nature of Christ never had an independent centre of unity; it was the Godhead which supplied all the volitional and moral instincts which make up the higher nature of man; it was an incarnation of body, only not of body, soul, and spirit; so of inspiration; it is suggestion from without, dictation from above. As

the four Evangelists are seen in medieval pictures looking up and receiving the Gospels, let down as the vision of the great sheet, tied at the four corners. The Eutychian party would have the whole of the Psalms interpreted as Messianic. All reference to the experience of David, or to the story of the Exodus, or Captivity, is overlooked by them, or unnaturally allegorised. For instance, a writer of that school entitles his commentary on the Psalms, "The Psalms restored to the Messiah," as if their Messianic meaning, being denied in toto by the old school of Rationalists, could justify an uncritical application of them in toto as prophecies of the Messiah. Chimaera Chimaram parit-one extreme produces the other. These excellent men forget that the opposite of error is also error, as, on the other hand, it is a mark of truths that they are complementary the one of the other. The Nestorian view exactly made up the element deficient in the Eutychian, and so the Church, in condemning both Eutyches and Nestorius, did not mean, as the old dogmatic historians of the school of Mosheim suppose, to condemn the positions of both, but rather only to condemn the negations. The truth came out, not by compromise so much as by combination of the theology of Cyril and Theodore. As in the controversy of the freedom of the will the Arminian and Calvinistic schools have fought to exhaustion, and when the controversialists dropped beneath their weight of armour, lassati necdum satiati, common sense and Christian piety have stepped in between, and unbuckled their vizors, and showed that they were friends and brothers who had mistaken each other for enemies; so it should be about inspiration. All who hold the plenary authority of the Word of God are agreed; they may differ among each other in details, but they differ in fundamentals from two other parties-the one of which recognises no authority at all, and leaves man with no guide higher than conscience or the religious consciousness; and the

other, which admits a co-ordinate Church authority, which allows a man to search the Scriptures only on the absurd condition that, like a prisoner of war on his parole, he never breaks bounds or differs from the doctors of the Catholic Apostolic Church.

So remarkably alike are the two controversies, that the same cast of mind which inclines to Nestorianism inclines also to Humanitarian views of inspiration; while, on the other hand, the ancient Eutychian and the modern asserter of verbal inspiration are generally men of the same tendencies. Probably the Haldanes, Gaussens, and men of that school, would indignantly repudiate the charge of Eutychian tendencies; nor would the followers of Maurice and Robertson admit their affinity with the followers of Nestorius. But these affinities of mind are too real to be thus repudiated. The views of inspiration held by Theodore of Mopsuestia, the great Nestorian doctor, were nearly identical with those which pass current in the school of Maurice and Robertson. In the same way, the Nestorian view of the Person of Christ, in Robertson's Sermons, is unmistakeably plain. A reference would show a parallelism which is the more remarkable, as it was no doubt unconscious, on Robertson's part. According to Theodore, the mission of Christ was to be that the true and real image of God which Adam ought to have been, but failed to become. Man is the crowning work of creation, the image on earth of the invisible God. When he fell, the whole Cosmos became disorganized; and thus it was necessary to head up all things again in a new man, the Lord from Heaven. This new man must pass through all the stages of development of the first man; and like Adam (here differing decidedly from the Eutychian view), He was created, not so much morally perfect, as capable of moral perfection-the perfection in both cases coming through practice and suffering; and thus, being made perfect, He became the author of everlasting salvation to all that obey Him. This is that

;

view of the Person of Christ which we find in Robertson's Sermons, and which Professor Ellicott designates as painfully Humanitarian. Like that of Theodore, it is right in what it asserts, wrong in what it denies or passes by. It is not surprising that the same school should handle the subject of inspiration from the same Humanitarian point of view. Not to speak of the extreme party, who only see in the Bible the voice of the Jewish congregation, even the more moderate men of that school regard inspiration, not as suggestion from without, but as elevation from within. It is akin to sanctification; it differs from it in degree, not in kind. Holy men of old, they say, wrote as they were moved and while the Eutychian party consider the latter as the emphatic word in the sentence, the Nestorian consider the former. The words of the Collect, "Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit," is seized on by Mr. Maurice as indicating the nature of Biblical inspiration. Good men were lifted above their former selves, not out of themselves, their errors were restrained, their conceptions elevated, but their personality remained the same as before. As the human is the centre or ego of the Nestorian conception of the Person of Christ, so it is of their conception of Theopseustia. Accordingly, this view of inspiration is rather negative than positive. Bishop Hinds, in his work on Inspiration, adopts this moderate view, that the writers were guarded from error, so that what they wrote is rather accredited by God than the message itself from God. According to Archbishop Whately's illustration, if the message is faithfully delivered, it is immaterial whether it is conceived in the ipsissima verba of the sender or not. We have our orders, though the aide-de-camp cannot produce the handwriting of the commander-in-chief. He comes from

his side; he wears the uniform and feather of office. This is enough for us-the lines written by the finger of God would not make the message more verily and