It was on behalf of mankind that this great sacrifice was made by the Son. While it separated Him from the Father, it united Him to men. We must now consider what was the spiritual constitution of the humanity which He assumed, as we have already considered the physical Man, as we saw (p. lxix.) is constituted of body and soul, an outward and an inward substance, the one earthly, the other heavenly [309] . The exact process of his creation has been revealed. First, man--that is, his soul--was made in the image of God; next, long afterwards, his body was fashioned out of dust; finally by a distinct act, man was made a living soul by the breath of God, the heavenly and earthly natures being thus coupled together [310] . The world was already complete when God created the highest, the most beautiful of His works after His own image. His other works were made by an instantaneous command; even the firmament was established by his hand [311] ; man alone was made by the hands of God;--Thy hands have made me and fashioned me.' This singular honour of being made by a process, not an act, and by the hands, not the hand or the voice, of God, was paid to man not simply as the highest of the creatures, but as the one for whose sake the rest of the universe was called into being [312] . It is, of course, the soul, made after the image of God, which has this high honour; an honour which no length of sinful ancestry can forfeit, for each soul is still separately created. Hence no human soul is akin to any other human soul; the uniformity of type is secured by each being made in the same pattern, and the dignity of humanity by the fact that this pattern is that of the Son, the Image of God. But the soul pervades the whole body with which it is associated, even as God pervades the universe [313] . The soul of each man is individual, special to himself; his brotherhood with mankind belongs to him through his body, which has therefore something of universality. Hence the relation of mankind with Christ is not through his human soul; it was the nature of universal flesh' which He took [314] that has made Him one with us in the Incarnation and in the Eucharist [315] . The reality of His body, as we have seen, is amply secured by Hilary; its universality is assured by the absence of any individual human paternity, which would have isolated Him from others [316] . Thus He took all humanity into His one body; He is the Church [317] , for He contains her through the mystery of His body. In Him, by the same means, there is contained the congregation, so to speak, of the whole race of men.' Hence He spoke of Himself as the City set on a hill; the inhabitants are mankind [318] . But Christ not only embraces all humanity in Himself, but the archetype after Whom, and the final cause for Whom, man was made. Every soul, when it proceeds from the hands of God, is pure, free and immortal, with a natural affinity and capacity for good [319] , which can find its satisfaction only in Christ, the ideal Man. But if Christ is thus everything to man, humanity has also, in the foreordained purpose of God, something to confer upon Christ. The temporary humiliation of the Incarnation has for its result a higher glory than He possessed before [320] , acquired through the harmony of the two natures.
The course of this elevation is represented by Hilary as a succession of births, in continuation of the majestic series. First there had been the eternal generation of the Son; then His creation for the ways and for the works of God, His appointment, which Hilary regards as equivalent in importance to another birth, to the office of Creator; next the Incarnation, the birth in time which makes Him what He was not before, namely Man [321] . This is followed by the birth of Baptism, of which Hilary speaks thrice [322] . He read in St. Matthew iii. 17, instead of the familiar words of the Voice from heaven, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.' This was in his judgment the institution of the sacrament of Baptism; because Christ was baptized, we must follow His example. It was a new birth to Him, and therefore to us. He had been the Son; He became through Baptism the perfect Son by this fresh birth [323] . It is difficult to see what Hilary's thought was; perhaps he had not defined it to himself. But, with this reading in his copy of the Gospel, it was necessary that he should be ready with an explanation; and though there remained a higher perfection to be reached, this birth in Baptism might well be regarded as a stage in the return of Christ to His glory, an elevation of His humanity to a more perfect congruity with His Godhead. This birth is followed by another, the effect and importance of which is more obvious, that of the Resurrection, the birthday of His humanity to glory [324] .' By the Incarnation He had lost unity with the Father; but the created nature, by the assumption of which He had disturbed the unity both within Himself and in relation to the Father, is now raised to the level on which that unity is again possible. In the Resurrection, therefore, it is restored; and this stage of Christ's achievement is regarded as a New birth [325] , by which His glory becomes, as it had been before, the same as that of the Father. But now the glory is shared by His humanity; the servant's form is promoted to the glory of God [326] and the discordance comes to an end. Christ, God and Man, stands where the Word before the Incarnation stood. In this Resurrection, the only step in this Divine work which is caused by sin, His full humanity partakes. In order to satisfy all the conditions of actual human life, He died and visited the lower world [327] ; and also, as man shall do, He rose again with the same body in which He had died [328] . Then comes that final state, of which something has already been said, when God shall be all in all. No further change will be possible within the Person of Christ, for his humanity, already in harmony with the Godhead, will now be transmuted. The whole Christ, Man as well as God, will become wholly God. Yet the humanity will still exist, for it is inseparable from the Divinity, and will consist, as before, of body and soul. But there will be nothing earthly or fleshly left in the body; its nature will be purely spiritual [329] . The only form in which Hilary can express this result is the seeming paradox that Christ will, by virtue of the final subjection, be and continue what He is not [330] .' By this return of the whole Christ into perfect union with God, humanity attains the purpose of its creation. He was the archetype after Whose likeness man was fashioned, and in His Person all the possibilities of mankind are attained. And this great consummation not only fulfils the destinies of humanity; it brings also an augmentation of the glory of Him Who is glorified in Christ [331] .
In the fact that humanity is thus elevated in Christ consists the hope of individual men. Man in Him has, in a true sense, become God [332] ; and though Hilary as a rule avoids the phrase, familiar to him in the writings of his Alexandrian teachers and freely used by Athanasius and other of his contemporaries, that men become gods because God became Man, still the thought which it coveys is constantly present to his mind. As we have seen, men are created with such elevation as their final cause; they have the innate certainty that their soul is of Divine origin and a natural longing for the knowledge and hope of things eternal [333] . But they can only rise by a process, corresponding to that by which the humanity in Christ was raised to the level of the Divinity. This process begins with the new birth in the one Baptism, and attains its completion when we fully receive the nature and the knowledge of God. We are to be members of Christ's body and partakers in Him, saved into the name and the nature of God [334] . And the means to this is knowledge of Him, received into a pure mind [335] . Such knowledge makes the soul of man a dwelling rational, pure and eternal, wherein the Divine nature, whose properties these are, may eternally abide [336] . Only that which has reason can be in union with Him Who is reason. Faith must be accurately informed as well as sincere. Christ became Man in order that we might believe Him; that He might be a witness to us from among ourselves touching the things of God [337] .
We have now followed Hilary through his great theory, in which we may safely say that no other theologian entirely agrees, and which, where it is most original, diverges most widely from the usual lines of Christian thought. Yet it nowhere contradicts the accepted standards of belief; and if it errs it does so in explanation, not in the statement of the truths which it undertakes to explain. Hilary has the distinction of being the only one of his contemporaries with the speculative genius to imagine this development ending in the abolition of incongruity and in the restoration of the full majesty of the Son and of man with Him [338] . He saw that there must be such a development, and if he was wrong in tracing its course, there is a reverence and loyalty, a solidity of reasoning and steady grasp of the problems under discussion, which save him from falling into mere ingenuity or ostentation. Sometimes he may seem to be on the verge of heresy; but in each case it will be found that, whether his system be right or no, the place in it which he has found for an argument used elsewhere in the interests of error is one where the argument is powerless for evil. Sometimes--and this is the most serious reproach that can be brought against him--it must seem that his theology is abstract, moving in a region apart from the facts of human life. It must be admitted that this is the case; that though, as we shall presently see, Hilary had a clear sense of the realities of temptation and sin and of the need of redemption, and has expressed himself in these regards with the fervour and practical wisdom of an earnest and experienced pastor, still these subjects lie within the sphere of his feelings rather than of his thought. It was not his fault that he lived in the days before St. Augustine, and in the heat of an earlier controversy; and it is his conspicuous merit that in his zeal for the Divinity of Christ he traced the Incarnation back beyond the beginning of sin and found its motive in God's eternal purpose of uniting man to Himself. He does not estimate the condescension of Christ by the distance which separates the Sinless from the sinful. To his wider thought sin is not the cause of that great sequence of Divine acts of grace, but a disturbing factor which has modified its course. The measure of the love of God in Christ is the infinity He overpassed in uniting the Creator with the creature.