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The controversies of the third and fourth centuries threw into bold relief the unity of the person and the perfection of the divinity and of the humanity. The manner of the hypostatic union then became an urgent problem. The Church of the fifth century was called upon to attempt a solution.

For in such a supposition no one could be happy. The lowest would envy the happiness of those who are a little higher, and these would envy the happiness of the highest, and these, again, would envy the happiness of the Blessed Virgin; and she, too, would be unhappy, because she does not possess the glory of the Hypostatic Union, which is the privilege of Jesus Christ alone.

Harnack goes so far as to say that "the whole position of the later monophysites, thought out to all its conceivable conclusions, is already to be found in Apollinaris." Apollinarianism was condemned at the second general council, and there the Church made her first declaration, a negative one, on the subject of the hypostatic union.

In this case, I find it impossible to represent this necessity in or by any conception, and it exists merely in my own mind, as the formal condition of thought, but not as a material and hypostatic condition of existence. SECTION VI. Of the Impossibility of a Physico-Theological Proof.

The hypostatic union of natures in Christ is a phenomenon not psychologically improbable, and one which can be paralleled from human experience. There is in man what is tantamount to a conjunction of the two natures. Man is rather diphysite than monophysite. We pointed out above the extensive modifications that can be produced in a man's nature by environment.

Not appreciating the hypostatic union of divine with human, they misunderstand the sacramental union of the same elements. Blind to the significance of Christ's humanity in the economy of redemption, they fail to see how matter can be the channel of sacramental grace. Yet the discipline of faith is the same in both cases.

Now if it could supply answers to the objections which are opposed to the dogma of the Trinity and that of hypostatic union, it would attain to those two Mysteries, it would have them in subjection and submit them to the strictest examination by comparison with its first principles, or with the aphorisms that spring from common notions, and proceed until finally it had drawn the conclusion that they are in accordance with natural light.

Query XX. p. 302. Why not as is felt to be for the interest of science in all the physical sciences retain the same term in all languages? Why not 'usia' and homoüsial, as well as 'hypostasis', hypostatic, homogeneous, heterogeneous, and the like; or as Baptism, Eucharist, Liturgy, Epiphany and the rest? Query XXI. p. 303.

For which cause God hath also exalted Him, and hath given Him a name which is above all names, that in the name of Jesus, every knee should bow of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth."* Surely this is far from saying that Jesus enjoys the highest glory of heaven, exclusively on account of the Hypostatic Union.

The scholastic philosophy of the fourteenth century, the disputes between the Nominalists and the Realists, in which he took the part of the former, the principle that "entities are not to be multiplied except by necessity," or the "hypostatic existence of abstractions," have ceased to create any very keen interest in the minds of readers.