in connection with a given corporeal organization. On neither view is there any real dualism between God and the world, or God and man except as occasioned by sin. The oneness of God and man is affirmed by both classes, by Cousin and Ullman for ex- ample, with equal earnestness. This is a oneness which admits of diversity ; it is a unity in plurality ; but it is a oneness of life ; and such a unity of nature that God may become man, and man God.
The individuality or personality of man depends on the body. Generic humanity is not in itself a person. It becomes personal only by its union with an organized body. It loses its personality when it has no body ; and therefore the immortality of the soul, as distinct from the body, is pronounced by Olshausen an anti-Chris- tian or pagan idea. Whatever of conscious existence the soul has between death and the resurrection must be connection with its body, which is not the prison, or garment, or shell, or hull of the soul ; it is not in any way one form of existence and the soul another ; both form one life. The soul to be complete to develop itself, as a soul, must externalize itself, throw itself out in space ; and this externalization is the body. All is one process, one and the same organic principle, dividing itself only that its unity may be- come the more free and intensely complete. The soul and body are one ; one and the same organic principle.1
The same principles are applied to the explanation of the doctrine of the person of Christ. According to the decisions of the ecumenical councils of Chalcedon and Constantinople, which have been accepted by all Christendom, the Eternal Son of God became man by taking to Himself a true body and a reasonable soul, and so was, and continues to be, both God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever. By nature (^uo-i?) is meant substance (ovo-i'a), as these words are used interchangeably. By the one nature He is consubstantial with us men ; and by the other He is consubstantial with the Father.
This dualism, this hypostatic union of two distinct substances in the person of Christ, involves, as taught by those councils and believed by all Christendom, two cVcpyeieu, two operations, two wills. There is no mixture or confusion of these two natures ; no transfer of the properties of the one to the other, but each retains its own peculiar attributes.
On the other hand, the modern German theology rejects this
1 The commonly received distinction of mind and matter on this theory must be given op. They are not two distinct substances having distinct and incompatible properties or attributes.
652 PART HI. Ch. XX. — the means of grace.
distinction of natures in Christ. It denies all dualism in the con- stitution of his person. It teaches that Christ did not assume M a reasonable soul " into personal union with Himself, but either that He himself became, by a process of self -limitation, such a soul, or that He assumed generic humanity, so that He did not become a man, but the man. His assumption of humanity was something general, and not merely particular. The Word be- came flesh ; not a single man only as one of many ; but flesh or humanity in its universal conception ; otherwise He could not be the principle of a new order of existence for the human world as such. By this assumption of humanity, the divine and human, God and man, become one in such a sense as to exclude all dual- ism. There are not a divine and a human, but there is a thean- thropic, or divine-human nature or life. As in man there is not one life of the body and another of the soul, but the two are one and the same organic principle, so in the case of Christ the divine and human are one and the same. The divine nature of Christ is at the same time human in the fullest sense. Humanity is never complete till it reaches his person. It includes in its very constitution a struggle towards the form in which it is here ex- hibited, and can never rest until this end is attained. Our nature reaches after a true and real union with the nature of God, as the necessary complement and consummation of its own life. The idea which it embodied can never be fully actualized under any other form. The incarnation, then, is the proper completion of humanity. Christ is the true ideal man. Here is reached ulti- mately the highest summit of human life, which is of course the crowning sense of the word, or that in which it finds its last and full significance.
The first man, Adam, is to be viewed under a twofold character. In one respect he was simply a man ; in another, he was the man, in whose person was included the whole human race. His in- dividual personality was limited wholly to himself ; but a whole world of like separate personalities lay involved in his life, at the same time, as a generic principle or root. All these in a deep sense, form at last but one and the same life. Adam lives in his posterity as truly as he ever lived in his own person. They participate in his whole nature, soul and body, and are truly bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. So the life of Christ is to be viewed under the same twofold aspect. He, as was Adam, is an individual person. But as Adam included in himself the race, he included all other human persons in his life ; so Christ, having