Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. This is the confidence that we have in Him''? AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH ? John L 14. T N the previous chapters, the endeavour was made, as fully as our limits would admit, to adduce scriptural proof in support of that foundation-article of our most holy faith, the supreme divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ: The Word was God. Let us, with a similar devout and reverential spirit, now turn our thoughts to another great cleft in the Rock of Ages, the correlative doctrine of the Saviour's Humanity; when (adopting the translation or paraphrase of the apostle's words, made by an exegetical writer of the fifth century), hiding His own dignity, He took the condition of extreme humiiiation, and clothed Himself in the human form. The Word was made Flesh What a transition What a stoop for that Infinite Being whom we found proclaiming Himself the Alpha and the Omega, writing His name on the Talace-walls of Eternity, I AM THAT I AM for The Ancient of days to assume the nature and take the form of a cradled infant, sleeping on a virgin mother's breast ?the Plant of heavenly renown to become a root out of a dry ground, without beauty or comeliness We have no plumb-line to sound the depths of that humiliation?no arithmetic by which it can be submitted to any process of calculation. To use an illustration, which has been appositely employed; if we can entertain for a moment the startling supposition of the loftiest created spirit in heaven abjuring his angel-nature, and (suddenly metamorphosed, ) becoming an insector a worm, we can, in some feeble degree, estimate the descent involved in the transformation; because, however great the disparity, they are both creatures of God, though at the antipodes of being. But, for .the Illimitable, Everlasting Jeh...