The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-12-30

Points of Consideration.
 There still remain some few points to be considered in connection with the doctrine of the incarnation. We have seen that the incarnate Son of God is true man, although He had no man for
 Ills father The function that ordinarily lalls to the father was in this one case performed by the direct action of God, who can always produce by His own power whatever efforts are the result of secondary causes. As man, however, Christ was the son or Mary, and His body was nourished within her in exactly the same manner as in the ordinary process of gestation. The human soul of christ was created and infused into that body at the first instant of it's existence, and in the same instant the Divine Word assumed His human nature. It is of the utmost importance that we should re- alize the truth that from the first mo- ment of His conception, the Holy Thing which was conceived with the Son of God. (St. Luke 35) It follows from this that the dignity to which human nature was raised, through It's assumption by God, involved the consequence that Christ was sanctified by grace, had the use of free will, was capable of merit, and enjoyed the clear vision of God. His -body grew as the bodies of other infants grow; but His soul was not hampered In it's operations by the imperfections of the body which it informed.
 Christs human nature was in no sense subject to original sin. for this, by the divine decree, is transmitted to those only who have for the father a child of Adam; and Christ had no human father. higher reason for the sinlessness of Christ is found in the substantial union of the humanity with xne All-holy God Since the will is the principle from which the actions of a rational creature spring, it follows by the presence of two wills human and divine in Christ that His actions fall into three classes. First, His union with human nature did not prevent the second person of the blessed trinity from exercising all the powers of the divine nature, including the divine will The divine will In Christ was the will which created the world and which unceasingly maintains creatures in exist ence and in the exercise of their powers (Col. 16-1O.
 Another class of the actions of Christ proceeds wholly from the human will and proves that He was truly man. To weep is to be purely human The third class consists of those acts in which both wills had part. We have examples of the last class of actions wherever our Lord was pleased to work His miracles by the use of some material instrument, as when He spread clay on the eyes of the man born blind and bade him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam (St. John iX). The clay and the washing could have had no efficiency apart from that which the divine will gave Him; at the same time, it was in obedience to the human will that the limbs moved to take the clay and apply it; here, then, we have an illustration of what may be termed the andric action. The healing of the Centu- rion's servant, on the other hand, would come under the first class, when the human will had no part directly physical in the working of the miracle John Damascene defines the theandric opera ton thus: When God became man, both His human operation was divine, to- wit defied, and it participated in His di- vine operation; and His divine operation participated in His human operation but either Is contemplated in connection with the other. And this manner is styled "periphrasis," when a person embraces any two things by one expression. For as we call the divided cauterizing and the inflamed incsion of the heated knife the same thing, and yet style the incision one operation and the cauterizing another and call them operations of different na- lures, the cauterizing of fire and the in- cision of iron, so also, speaking of one theandric operation of Christ we under stand the operations of the two natures to be two, the divine that of His divinity and the human nature that of His human- ity.