Speculum theologiæ in Christo, or, A view of some divine truths which are either…

First it breaks out in his Incarnation. The word was made flesh, John 1.14. He, who was in the form of God, took upon him the form of a servant, Phil. 2.6, 7; that is, he, who had the Essence and Majesty of God, assumed so low a thing as an humane Nature: He did not lay down his Deity, but assumed an Humanity; two Natures, a Divine and Humane, were in one person. Never did God come so near the Creature as here. He was in the world by his Universal Presence; he was in the Temple in types and symbols; in the Saints he is by his Grace, in Heaven he is in immediate Glory: but in the Incarnation he is hypostatically in an humane Nature. The person of the Word, which was from Eternity an Hypostasis to his Divine Nature, became an Hypostasis to his humane Nature in time. O what wonders ⟨p. 101⟩of Power are here! Here God was made Man, the Creator became one with his Creature! Had the whole world been crowded into a single Atom, it would have been infinitely a less wonder than this; the putting a greater finite into a less, cannot be comparable to the taking of finite into infinite. Here are two Natures, a Divine and an Humane, in themselves infinitely distant, met in personal conjunction; finite is not absorbed by infinite, infinite is not changed by finite. Here Eternal dwells in the same person with Temporal, yet runs not into succession; immortal dwells with mortal, yet falls not into passion. Here an humane Nature is united to a person infinitely simple, and infinitely complete; yet he loses not his simplicity, nor yet doth he receive any additional perfection. Here's an humane Nature without any Personality of its own. Naturally the humane Nature of Christ would have had a Subsistence of its own; a Personality would have flown from it: but the resultance was miraculously prevented; the want of its own finite Subsistence was supplied by the Presence of an infinite one;¹ the Son of God communicated his Hypostasis to it, to sustain it. Here we have in some respect more of Divine Power manifested, than there was in the making of the World. When mere nothing was by an Almighty word elevated into Elements, Plants, Beasts, Men, Angels, still it was but into finite; but here a finite humane Nature was taken into infinite: and between the infinite God and the humane Nature, the disparity must be far greater than it is between a world and nothing.