with the Father is not like the union of any mere creature with God, however exalted that creature may be. Christ's oneness with the Father is unique. No other teacher has taught as Christ taught. No other penetrated so deeply into the arcana of God's purpose, and manifested such familiarity with those purposes. It was no strange and mystic burden like that which oppressed the heart and compelled to utterance the lips of the old prophet, that Christ delivered. He alone, of all who have articulated to men the thought of God, spake in his own vernacular. He alone grasped the whole scope of divine revelation, and unfolded it as they were able to bear it to his hearers, as one to whom the thoughts that come out of the Infinite and the Eternal were familiar. He stands aloof from all other teachers, the one matchless being of whom alone it has been said, or could be said: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." One with the Father in his essential nature, he was yet, in his work of revealing God to the world and making atonement for human sin, subject in all the exercises of hand and heart and mind to that will which is at once man's highest law, and the source of man's greatest good.

II. CHRIST'S SUBJECTION TO THE FATHER WAS VOLUNTARY.

To appreciate justly the significance of this, we need continually to keep in mind the fact of Christ's essentially divine nature. His subjection was not the subjection of a mere creature. All creatures are, by their very nature, forever subject to God; even the evil and rebellious being is compelled, often unwittingly, to accomplish the divine purpose. In becoming incarnate the Son of God assumed the subject condition of the creature, yet he was always more than a creature. He became dependent upon God, yet his dependence was not the necessary dependence of a purely human being. In his person deity yielded to the humble and straightened conditions of the creature-life.

Though the Word was equal with God, and was GOD, yet he "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself." Christ's subjection was not necessary, then, as is man's; for, if we say that, by virtue of his becoming incarnate, he necessarily became subject, we must still remember that the incarnation itself was not intrinsically necessary. There was no inherent necessity upon the Word that he should be "made flesh." This is the crowning point of God's condescension, that he chose to assume the nature and lot of man in order that he might be man's Savior. Having become man, Christ's subjection to the Father was, as we have seen, complete. Conduct, feeling, thought, all the faculties and affections of his nature, were ever held in constant and sweet accord with the divine will.

Christ's subjection was voluntary, in the fact that:

I. It was not the result of compulsion. Christ was under no constraint imposed from without. He did not yield himself to God's will as to an iron fate from which there was no escape. His assumption of human nature was not a stepping out into a resistless current of forces which bore him along upon its surface, as a river bears onward a leaf that has fallen upon its tide. He was not subject to God as, sometimes, man is subject to a despot. His obedience was not wrought out under the stress of an Omnipotent will. True to his self-elected course as a planet is true to its orbit, he was not, like the planet, moved by the mighty propulsion of inevitable external force. The Father's will was no fiat-power, disobedience to which was intrinsically impossible. That Christ should disobey the Father is inconceivable. On the contrary, his obedience was absolutely perfect; yet it was so, not because he could not disobey, but because he would not. Upon him was no compulsion, within him was no resistance. His obedience to God's will followed any expression of that will as the echo follows the stroke.

2. Christ's subjection to the Father was not a merely nega tive subjection-that is, a passive acquiescence in his will. As Christ was put under no external constraint by the will of God, and experienced in his heart no impulse of opposition, neither, on the other hand, was he passively plastic, as is the clay in the hands of the potter. He never sank into a mere instrument upon which the power of God fell as the fingers of a Thalberg fall upon a piano, bringing thence such harmonies as he will. Nothing in the Gospels is more striking than Christ's marked, positive individuality, his calm self-possession, his judicial intellect, his perfect poise. He is never swept away by any ebullient enthusi asm. Every act and every word manifests the most perfect self-control and the freest self-direction. An authority reposed in his person and revealed itself in his manner and speech, that now drew men to forsake all and follow him; then to flee from his presence as from an avenging judge.

He

3. Christ's subjection was the result of a free choice. was not void of will, nor was his will under compulsion. Freely and perfectly it assimilated itself to the will of the Father. The mission on which his Father sent him into the world was also the mission of his own election. He did not abdicate his deity when he assumed humanity. As he freely chose to undertake the salvation of men, and for that purpose became incarnate, so, also, he freely chose the humble lot which he filled, and every act of his life, from the most trivial (if any act in such a life could be called trivial) to the most momentous, even the dying on the cross, was the result of an uncompelled and spontaneous volition. One of his sayings, as recorded by John, is significant on this point: "For this the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself." Yet, as if to show that in his choosing to die for men, he would not make even that choice of himself only, but in humble obedience to the will of the Father, he continues: "I have

authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it again. This commandment I received from my Father." The perfectness of Christ's subjection, then, consisted not in the abdication of his will, or the holding of his will in abeyance, but in the free, constant, and glad directing of his will to the same great end toward which was directed the will of the Father. Thus the voluntariness of Christ's subjection adds a grace and a glory to its completeness that make it forever the grand and luminous exposition and vindication of the absolute holiness and blessedness of the will of God. In this complete, voluntary subjection to the Father, Christ gives to the world a concrete realization of the ideal human life. It is the one only ideal. It has never been paralleled, nor even approached except to such degree as shows all the more clearly the absolute singularity in beauty and grace of that life which, for our comfort, appeared in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago. Thus Christ, and Christ alone, is the sole flawless exemplar of all highest ethics, and the eminent theme of all purest teaching. He is the supreme embodiment of God's idea of the perfect man.

ARTICLE III.

THOMAS AQUINAS.

BY THE LATE REV. RICHARD M. NOTT.

ARTICLE SECOND.

WE closed our account of the life and times of Thomas Aquinas, printed in the last number of the REVIEW, with the intimation that his "Summa Theologiæ" is the greatest of his productions, and that it illustrates most thoroughly his own method and that of the Scholastic Philosophy in general. To the consideration of this great work we now proceed. The Summa Theologiæ, or Complete Treatise upon Theology," contains more than twenty-five hundred pages. The work consists of three parts or great divisions. In the Prologue the author, first quoting the text, "As babes in Christ, I have fed you with milk and not with strong meat," states his purpose to write with simplicity, for the benefit of beginners. How exactly this is carried out let those who try to read determine. He animadverts gently on the practice in some theological writings of perplexing the simple by "the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments," and we conclude that he intends, certainly to avoid this. Let the students of his discussions concerning angels judge! One pledge to which he binds himself is undeniably fulfilled, that he will not be guilty of that want of system in the treatment of theology which had been the grievous fault. of many.

The first part of the work, Pars Prima, may be described in general language as containing Theology proper, or the doctrine of God; Pars Secunda, Anthropology; Pars Tertia, Christology, including Soteriology and whatever the author