took upon Him the nature of man, of which the body is a part; so we acknowledge that He took a true and real body, so as to become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. This body of CHRIST, really and truly human, was also frail and mortal, as being accompanied with all those natural properties, which necessarily flow from the condition of a frail and mortal body: and though now the same body, exalted above the highest heavens, by virtue of its glorification be put beyond all possibility of passion; yet in the time of His humiliation it was clothed with no such glorious perfection; but as it was subject unto, so it felt weariness, hunger and thirst..... Thus did the body

of the Son of Man truly suffer the bitterness of corporal pains and torments inflicted by violent external impressions.

And as our Saviour took upon Him both parts of the nature of man, so He suffered in them both, that He might be a Saviour of the whole. In what sense the soul is capable of suffering, in that He was subject to animal passion....

We ought not therefore to question whether He suffered in His soul or no ; but rather to endeavour to reach, if it were possible, the knowledge how far and in what degree He suffered; how bitter that grief, how great that sorrow and that anguish was.

That our Saviour did thus suffer, is most necessary to believe. First, that thereby we may be assured of the verity of His human nature. For if He were not man, then could not man be redeemed by Him; and if that nature in which He appeared were not truly human, then could He not be truly man. But we may be well assured that He took on Him our

nature, when we see Him subject unto our infirmities...

That as He is a perfect Redeemer of the whole man, so He was a complete sufferer in the whole; in His body by such dolorous infirmities as arise internally from human frailties, and by such pains as are inflicted by external injuries; in His soul, by fearful apprehensions, by unknown sorrows, by anguish inexpressible. And in this latitude and propriety I believe our Saviour suffered.

.Secondly, to prove that our JESUS, Whom we believe to be the true Messias, did not only suffer torments intolerable and inexpressible in this life, but upon and by the same did finish this life by a true and proper death... Dead then our

blessed Saviour was upon the cross; and that not by a feigned or metaphorical, but by a true and proper death. As He was truly and properly man, in the same mortal nature which we the sons of Adam have; so did He undergo a true and proper death, in the same manner as we die.... The torments

which He endured on the cross did bring Him to that state, in which life could not longer be naturally conserved, and death, without intervention of supernatural power, must necessarily follow.

For CHRIST, Who took upon Him all our infirmities, sin only excepted, had in His nature not only a possibility and aptitude, but also a necessity of dying; and as to any extrinsical violence, able, according to the common course of nature, to destroy and extinguish in the body such an aptitude as is indispensably required

to continue an union with the soul, He had no natural preservative; nor was it in the power of His soul to continue its vital conjunction unto His body bereft of a vital disposition.

It is true that CHRIST did voluntarily die, as He said of Himself, No man taketh away My life from Me, but I lay it down of Myself: I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. For it was in His power whether He would come into the power of His enemies : it was in His power to suffer or not to suffer the sentence of Pilate, and the nailing to the cross; it was in His power to have come down from the cross, when He was nailed to it: but when by an act of His Will He had submitted to that death, when He had accepted and embraced those torments to the last, it was not in the power of His soul to continue any longer vitality to the body, whose vigour was totally exhausted. So not by a necessary compulsion, but voluntary election, He took upon Him a necessity of dying.

The miracle was not in Ilis death, but in the voice: the strangeness was not that He should die, but that at the point of death He should cry out so loud: He died not by, but with a miracle. (Mark xv: 37, 39, 44.)

Wherefore being CHRIST took upon Himself our mortality in the highest sense, as it includeth a necessity of dying; being He voluntarily submitted Himself to that bloody agony in the garden, to the hands of the plowers who made long their furrows, and to the nails which fastened Him to the cross; being these torments thus inflicted and continued did cause His death, and in this condition 'He gave up the ghost;' it followeth that the only begotten SON of GOD,

the true Messias promised of old, did die a true

and proper death. . . . .

Thus CHRIST did really and

truly die, according to the condition of death to which the nature of man is subject . . .

.... The necessity of this part of the Article is evident, in that the death of CHRIST is the most intimate and essential part of the mediatorship, and that which most intrinsically concerns every office and function of the Mediator, as He was Prophet, Priest and King."

Bp. Pearson on Art. 4th.

The testimony of Bp. Burnet, though not so strong as that of Bp. Pearson, is nevertheless sufficiently explicit. The following extracts are taken from his Exposition of the thirty-nine

Articles.

"The second branch of this article is, that He 'took man's nature upon Him in the womb of the blessed Virgin, and of her substance.' This will not need any long or laboured proof, since the texts of Scripture are so express, that nothing but wild extravagance can withstand them. CHRIST was in all things like unto us, except His miraculous conception by the Virgin: He was the Son of Abraham and of David. But among the frantic humours that appeared at the Reformation, some, in opposition to the superstition of the church of Rome, studied to derogate as much from the blessed Virgin on the one hand, as she had been over-exalted on the other; so they said, that CHRIST had only gone through her. But this impiety sunk so soon, that it is needless to say any thing more to refute

it."

Art. 2.

"....Now since, in the composition of man, there is a body and a spirit, and since it is plain that the raising of CHRIST on the third day was before that His body in the course of nature was corrupted, the other branch seems to relate to His soul; though it is not to be denied, but that in the Old Testament soul in some places stands for a dead dody. (Acts ii: 27.)" Art. 3.

"As for His stay on earth forty days, we cannot pretend to give an account of it; whether His body was passing through a slow and physical purification, to be meet for ascending; or whether He intended to keep a proportion between His Gospel and the law of Moses."

Art. 4.

"That CHRIST was 'holy, without spot and blemish, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners;' (Heb vii: 26;) that there was 'no guile in His mouth; that He never did amiss, but went about always doing good,' and was a 'Lamb without spot,'(1 Pet. i: 19,) is sooft affirmed in the New Testament, that it can admit of no debate. This was not only true in His rational powers, the superior part called the spirit, in opposition to the lower part, but also in those appetites and affections that arise from our bodies, and from the union of our souls to them, called the flesh. For though in these CHRIST, having the human nature truly in Him, had the appetites of hunger in Him, yet the devil could not tempt Him by that to distrust GOD, or to desire a miraculous supply sooner than was fitting: He overcame even that necessary appetite, whensoever there was an occasion given Him to do the Will of His heavenly FATHER: (John iv: 34.) He had also in Him the aversions to pain and suffering, and the horror at a violent and