a Divine and a human nature, joined in personal union for ever. This I hold to have been the orthodox faith of the Christian church in all ages: it is the doctrine of the Scottish Church, expressed in these words of the Twenty-first Article: " As the eternal Godhead hath given to the flesh of Christ Jesus, which of its own nature was mortal and corrptible, life and immortality," &c. And, moreover, I assert, that the opposite of this doctrine, which affirmeth Christ's flesh to have been in itself immortal and incorruptible, or in any way diverse from this flesh of mine, without respect had to the Holy Ghost, is a pestilent heresy, which coming in will root out atonement, redemption, regeneration, the work of the Spirit, and the human nature of Christ altogether. Now, I glory that God hath accounted me worthy to appear in the field of this ancient controversy, which I hold to be the foundation-stone of the edifice of orthodox truth. With all this I hold the human will of Christ to have been perfectly holy, and to have acted, spoken, or wished nothing but in perfect harmony with the will of the Godhead; which, to distinguish it from the creature will, he calleth the will of the Father: for that there were two wills in Christ, the one the absolute will of the Godhead, the other the limited will of the manhood, the church hath ever maintained as resolutely as that there were two natures. These two wills, I maintain, were always concentric or harmonious with each other, and the work achieved by the Godhead through the Incarnation of Christ was neither less nor more than this, to bring the will of the creature, which had erred from the Divine will, back again to be harmonious

11

4

with the Divine will, and there to fix it for ever. This is the redemption, this is the at-one-ment, which was wrought in Christ, to redeem the will of a creature from the oppression of sin, and bring it to be at one with the will of the Creator. All divinity, all Divine operation, all God's pur!pose, from the beginning to the ending of time, and throughout eternal ages, resteth upon this one truth, that every acting of the human nature of Christ, was responsive to, and harmonious with, the actings of the Divine will of the Godhead. What a calumny it is then, what a hideous lie, to represent us as making Christ unholy and sinful, because we maintain that he took his humanity completely and wholly from the substance, from the sinful substance, of the fallen creatures which he came to redeem! He was passive to every sinful suggestion which the world through > the flesh can hand up unto the will; he was liable 1 to every sinful suggestion which Satan through the mind can hand up to the will; and with all such suggestions and temptations. I believe him beyond all others to have been assailed, but further went they not. He gave them no inlet, he went not to seek them, he gave them no quarter, but with power Divine rejected and repulsed them all; and so, from his conception unto his resur-rection, his whole life was a series of active triumphings over sin in the flesh, Satan in the world, and spiritual wickednesses in high places. If now, after this honest and true statement of the issue, any one will advance to the perusal of this treatise on the Incarnation with a prejudice against the orthodox truth, or against me its expounder, be anthe guilt of the breach, of charity on his own

head; and may God deal with him better than he deserves.

With respect to the second part of this book, which, from the text of the Parable of the Sower, doth open the various forms of prejudice and opposition which the truth as it is in Jesus hath to encounter from the world, together with the nature of that soil which God prepareth for it in those parts where he purposeth it should take root, I have, in the way of preface, to observe, that I have spoken with all boldness concerning the obstacles and resistances which the natural man preferreth to the preaching of the grace and truth as it is in Jesus Christ;-the forms, to wit, of infidelity, the forms of instability, the forms of worldly prepossession. And I have specially enlarged upon that soil of an honest heart in which alone the seed of the word taketh root. In all which compass of discourse I will be found, I fear, to have wounded the self-esteem of every sect and party in the church; but not, as I judge, to have wounded the unity of the Holy Spirit, or sinned against the holy catholic church, and the communion of the saints. My great preservative against the sectarian and schismatic spirit, I have found to be the right discernment of the unity of the church, and the right discernment of the forms of Apostasy in the church.-It hath pleased God to set forth all truth by the positive and the negative method. Sin is the negative of righteousness, and all forms of righteousness have their opposite forms of sin. Again, the devil, as a person, is the negative, or opposite, of Christ as a person; who came to destroy the devil and his works. And again, the Apostasy is the negative

of the true church; or, as our fathers called it, Satan's synagogue is the negative of Christ's church. As believers, we receive the truth as it is in Jesus, and we reject the evil as it is in the world, and in the wicked one. Again, as baptized men, we join ourselves to the true church, and lift up a protestation against the Apostasy in the church. We join with the right hand of fellowship the church of Christ, while with the left hand we cut asunder all fellowship with the Apostasy. If, therefore, any one can discern the Apostasy, which is the negative, he doth in the same act discern the Church, which is the positive; just as a man cannot discern sin, without at the same time discerning righteousness. Now, I have exercised myself much to discern the Apostasy, and to hold with it no communion or fellowship of any kind. This apostasy I perceive to be twofold; that of the sense, and that of the mind,-the former constituted into form by the Papacy, the latter constituting itself into form by the Socinianism and Neology of the Protestant churches. These two bodies, the Papacy and the Infidelity among Protestants, being the two forms of apostasy the Church doth stand separated from, calling unto every one in these two cities to flee out of them for their life. These are virtually excommunicated from the church, and are to be treated as excommunicated persons, whom we would fain restore to the body of Christ, but may not until they have repented of their errors; and when they do so repent, and satisfy the rulers of the church, we receive them without any public recantation, which I regard as rather a super-addition upon the ancient and true discipline in this respect. So!

much of severity is due unto the preservation of the unity of the body of Christ; and this being done in the true spirit of love and faithfulness, we will come by natural course, as it were, to recognize all others as brethren indeed, without respect to the varieties of their several modes of government and worship. For example, the Church of Scotland and the Church of England may not excommunicate each other, or hold each other excommunicated, unless the one is prepared to prove the other to be a limb of the Apostasy. No matter how we may differ and disagree in many respects, we may not stand out of communion with each other on lower ground than that of Apostasy; for excommunication is the only ordinance by which you can mark off an apostate, and for no lesser end ought it to be used. Therefore I regard the present standing of these two Churches to one another, to be one of the sorest wounds to Christian charity, to the unity of Christ's body, and one of the most heinous offences to the great Head of the Church, which it is possible to commit, and I do devoutly pray it might be removed. In like manner when the Dissenters in England, and the Seceders in Scotland, came so far as to interdict the receiving of the sacraments in the several churches from which they have seceded for the testimony of a pure discipline, they were betrayed into a sin far greater than the good which they aimed at, and did in fact excommunicate these churches, which may not be done save unto the Apostasy. There is no let or hindrance against particular bodies, or rather members, forming themselves in the one body of the church for a more high, holy, and