Forbes on Article XV: Of Christ alone without Sin

Son of God made man, are the mirrors whereat he is to dress himself? Unprofitable servants ! what but unprofitable, in view of the truth that God needs not one of us, that He is in Himself complete in all things, and that the addition or subtraction of an universe adds nothing to, takes nothing from His perfection P And yet He never calls us to impossibilities, never withholds the grace to do what He desires ; every in dividual soul is dear to Him, in the mystery of re demption, His money, His sheep ; and therefore in the order of grace, we are dear and precious in His sight : ” And they shall be Mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when T make up My jewels ll.”

d Mai. iii. 17.

CHEISTUS in nostrce naturae ccritate per omnia similis factus cst nobix, exccpto pcccato, a quo prorsus crat imniunis, turn in came, turn in spiritu. Venit ut ag- nm, absquc macula, qui mundi peccata per immola- tioncm sit i semcl factam, totteret, et pcccatum (ut in- quit Johannes) in co non crat : ted nos rcliqui ctiam baptizati, ct in Christo regenerati, in mult in tamen offendimus omnes. Et si dixerimus, quod peccatum nou habemus, nos ip-WH scffaciiitits, ct reritas in. no- bis non cst.

11 Of Christ alone mtltout Sin.

” CIIJUST, in the truth of our nature, was made like unto us in all things, sin only except, from which He was clearly void, both in His flesh and in Ilis Spirit. He came to be the Lamb without spot, who, by sacri fice of Himself once made, should take away the sins of the world, and sin (as St. John saith) was not in Him. But all we the rest, although baptized, and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things ; and if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

AFTER laying down positively the blessed truth of a Ilomoiisia between our Lord and us, — in that He has

actually assumed our nature, with all its attributes, its sinless infirmities, its faculties, and powers, into His divine person, so that as He has become a sharer in hu man nature, we have become partakers of the divine, —the Article goes on to state the one abatement that must necessarily be made to the statement in its breadth which is involved in the exclusion of any tli ought of sin in connection with Him.

It is first stated negatively that Christ is without sin; we have therefore in the first place to consider the doctrine of the sanctity of our Lord in His in carnate nature. By sanctity, we mean that quality which is contrary to what is profane or polluted, — which is opposed to sin, — which is a state of the soul free from the contagion of deadly crime, — which is pure, incorrupt, and adorned with the splendour of divine grace. Now our Lord by Gabriel was empha tically called the holy thing that was to be born of Mary; and this took place in three ways: 1. by the gift of sinlessness, the absence of the power of falling; i2. by the perpetuity of that gift ; and 3. by the pleni tude of grace. If the first Adam was made upright, how much more the second Adam, who, as to body, was formed out of the most pure and perfect flesh and blood of the Yirgin Mary, and whose soul was formed on the likeness of the archetypal Word of God, which was taken by Him and proposed as the exam ple of holiness to all the saints ; for ” whom God did foreknow, them He did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn

among many brethren a.” Hence it is in His human nature, assumed into the unity of His Divine Person,, that our Lord is the head of the Church, and the au thor of holiness, which are necessary conditions of the due discharge of His offices of Mediator, Saviour, and High-Priest b ; and, duly to estimate the plenitude of thi& grace, we must bear in mind that this special gift was not accidental or communicated, but inherent in Him self. In Him was the fountain of grace, infinite and uncircumscript. And if we ask the awful question, What was the formal cause of this holiness ? we have to answer that the actual divinity of the Word by itself sanctifies the human nature assumed into consortship with the same Person ; that the human nature by union with the Word is deified and holy by an archetypal holiness : that the unction of the humanity of Christ has been effected by the Word sanctifying the flesh, by the Father working through the Word, and by the Holy Ghost causing the union of the Word and the Flesh. Hence we gather the truth of the impec- cancy of Christ c.

The testimony of the ancients to the truth that sin is not to be predicated of our Lord is very ample. Some assert that Christ alone is without any sin, without specifying original sin : others that, Christ alone ex- cepted, all men are defiled with that original sin.

1. St. Augustine, in the controversy on original sin with Julian, asks him whether he would venture to sav,

a Rom. viii. 29. b Heb. ii. 17, iii. 2.

c Petavius, de Incarnatione, xi. 10, I.

to St. Ambrose too, that because he excepted Christ alone from the bonds of a guilty generation, in that lie was born of a virgin, whereas all others descended from Adam were born in the bond of sin, he made the devil the creator of all born after the ordinary law of nature. ” Charge him/’ he says, “as a condemner of marriage, who said that the Virgin’s Son was alone born with out sin d.”

” Christ was the first and only man upon earth that did not commit sin, neither was guile found in His mouth6.”

2. ” Xo one of the saints, of whatever virtues he may be full, yet being gathered from that blackness of the world, can be equalled to Him of whom it is written, ’ The holy Thing which shall be born of Thee shall be called the Son of God.’ For we, although we are made saints, yet are not born saints, because we are con strained by the very condition of our corruptible na ture to say with the Prophet, ’ Behold, I was shapen in iniquity ; and in sin did my mother conceive me/ But He alone was truly born holy, who, that He might overcome the condition itself of corruptible nature, was not conceived in the ordinary way of nature f.”

The doctrine of the sinlessness of our Lord is very important, when regarded in its relation to other truths of the Gospel.

I. The conception of a perfectly sinless character was never attained to by the unassisted reason of man.

d Cont. Jul. ii. 2. e Cyril Alex., de Recta Fide ad Theodos.,

torn. v. p. 18. e. ii. f S. Greg, in Job, 1. xviii. c. 52, torn. i.p. 593.

II. Impeccancy has never been claimed by any teacher save by our Lord, but He rests His divine mission on it : ” Which of you convinceth Me of sin ?” if He is not sinless, on His own shewing, He has no claim on us.

III. It infuses an element of meritoriousness and sacrificial power into the fact of our Lord’s life and leath. He was made a curse for us. He bore our sins ‘n His own Body on the tree, whereas in the case of all us, the rest, ” the wages of sin is death.”

IV. The teaching office of our Lord is closely con nected with His sinlessness. In proportion as sin pre vails, it clouds the higher part of the intellect, and the moral taint will tell upon the belief. Not only does our Lord rest His teaching office, that is, His right to be listened to, on the fact that they could not convince Him of sin, but He claims to be the Truth itself.

Y. It makes the perfection of the Christian to be ever advancing ; for if no standard short of the pat tern of a sinless Christ be that to which mankind is invited to look as the Sjwcies exima pukhrituduiis, it follows that there is no room for boasting, however Highly any one may seem to have attained. Between the perfection even of the Blessed Virgin herself and the perfection of her Son, — who alone is, by His own nature, impeccable, because His Manhood is One Person with God the Word, and so holy with an uncreated holiness, — there is a great gulph fixed.

VI. The sinlessness of Christ has a most important bearing on ourselves. If our justification be the im-

parting to us of an actual righteousness, and that actual righteousness be the righteousness of a sinless Person, it will be seen what a standard is placed before us. Lastly : —

VII. It infuses into the soul a high sense of the destinies of that creation which now, and for a season, is made subject to vanity. Not only in body, but in soul and in spirit, are we destined to be changed into His likeness. The second Man, which is the Lord from heaven, who operates upon us here sacramentally, as the Food of our souls, is the sinless Christ, and it is into His image that we shall be changed from glory to glory.

The Article here rises from simple dogmatic state ment into something like religious fervour. It goes on from the assertion of the sinlessness of our Lord to de duce the conveniency of His being the eternal Victim for sin. Priest and Victim in one, in order to fulfil the necessary conditions of our propitiation, the require ment of sinless life enters into both natures. His priesthood must be pure, ” For such an High-Priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens ; who needed not daily, as those high-priests, to offer up sacri fice first for His own sins, and then for the people”.” A sinless Sacrifice is the antitype of a lamb without spot. It was a lamb, or a kid of the goats without blemish, that was to be taken for the sacrificial feast j and so Christ our Passover must needs be sinless. For B Heb. vii. 2G, 27.

we are redeemed from our corrupt conversation by the precious Blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without spot, ” who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth1’.”

The impeccable nature of our Lord supplies the special aptitude for His sacrificial function. The per- fectness of the victim under the old law presignified this condition in its antitype, and foreshadowed in no dark similitude that the victim that was to take away the sins of the world must have no sins of its own to atone for. Herein was the difference between priest and victim under the old law. There the priest was emphatically sinful, he had to offer both for his own sins and for the sins of the people ; but the victim must be perfect, the first-born, free from all defect, otherwise it was not worthy to be offered to God. Under the new dispensation both Priest and Victim are one, wherefore if the Victim be pure, the Priest is pure also ; in short, fulfilling the conditions laid down in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ” holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.”

And this sacrificial aspect of Christ’s mediation can not sufficiently be borne in mind ; for, from the obscu ration of Eucharistic truth which has prevailed since the Reformation, our Lord’s intercession has been looked upon much more as an act of prayer than of sacrifice. Hereby the whole typology of the Books of Moses — as representing the ceremonies of the great day of atone ment, whereby the atonement by slaying being made

• 1 Pot. ii. 22.

outside the veil, the blood was carried, still as atone ment, by the high-priest into the holy of holies once a-year — is entirely lost * ; a poverty of conception with regard to the present work of Christ — the continued pre sentation of those Sacred wounds, of that glorious Body which once hung upon the tree, and now, without words, pleads by its very presence within the Holy of Holies — at the Father’s right hand is engendered ; and the deep cry of the Church, involving its belief in the everlasting propitiation of the Son of God, loses its significance. “Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata raundi, miserere nobis.” The Article goes on to assert in broad terms the actual sinfulness of mankind. In spite of our high privileges in the Gospel ; of our being taken out of the state of nature and put in the state of grace j of our being by baptism buried and risen with Christ ; of our being born again of water and of the Holy Ghost ; it is certain that we shall not escape all sins. Though God gives us grace to fulfil His law, though He enables us to meet each temptation as it arises, though He bestows on us sufficient helps to serve Him ; as a matter of fact, we do not do so. To take an ana logy in the things of this life : just as with sufficient knowledge of arithmetic to sum up a set of figures rightly, we know that if we do so a great many times we shall certainly make a mistake; just as out of a certain number of letters, there are a certain number and average that will be misdirected, so in our own individual case, we may be sure that we shall fall into some sin. The Article does not speak of exceptional See Theological Defence for the Bishop of Brecliin.

cases. It says, ” all we the rest.” It does not commit itself to what may be the case with regard to saints whom God may by a special prerogative save from grave sin ; as was the case, under the old law, with Zacharias and Elisabeth, who (albeit they might not have been free from infirmities) walked in all the ordinances of the Lord blameless, or as must be the case with regard to His own Holy Mother, of whom, though we may ima gine imperfections as possible, yet, with whom, for the honour of her Son, we can associate 110 idea, of sink, To imagine that even for one moment the Blessed Yirgin, by a wilful sin, was hateful to her Son, or that by a deliberate evil wish she took the part of Satan against her Son, and conspired to dethrone Him (both which notions are bound up in the idea of sin), is a thought revolting to the pious instinct.

Closely connected with this is the important ques tion, whether, by that measure of grace which God metes out in this life, the saints can fulfil the law of God. The matter was discussed in St. Augustine’s time, and he expresses himself with great hesitation on the subject. When discussing with Pelagius where Abraham’s bosom was, he was unwilling to contend about the power of living without sin by the grace of Christ, although he thought that no one could be shewn who had done it \ Proceeding from the power to the act, he expressly affirms that he does not wish strenuously to dispute whether there are not some who arrive here at such a perfection of righteousness as to

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be without sin, although it seemed to him the true view that there are none ra ; and in the celebrated letter sent by four African bishops (of whom the Saint was one) to Pope Innocent, it is confessed that there are Catholics to whom it seems not contrary to truth that there are some persons who through grace are able to fulfil in this life the law of God without sin ; that, if they err, they err more tolerably than Pelagius ; but that for them it is enough that no one of the faithful is found in the Church of God, in however high a state of advance and excellency of righteousness, who can dare to say that the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, ” Forgive us,” &c., is not necessary for him, and that he has “no sin/’ although he now lives blamelessly ”.

That the Blessed Virgin is not included necessarily in this condemnation, may be inferred from the lan guage of some of the formularies. The Collect for Christmas dwells on our Lord’s birth from “a pure virgin/’ which, however, may refer solely to her un stained maidenhood. The Preface, ” that He was made very man of her substance, and that without spot of sin,” may also be limited to the immaculate nature of our Lord’s conception ; but the Homily on Repentance, in a short dogmatic statement, speaks of ” Jesus Christ, who being true and natural God, equal and of one sub stance with the Father, did at the time appointed take upon Him our frail nature, in the Blessed Virgin’s womb, and that of her undcfihd substance, so that He

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miirht be a mediator between God and us, and pacify His wrath.” In that on Wilful Rebellion0 it speaks of ” the obedience of this most Noble and most Virtuous Lady, which doth well teach us who in comparison to her are most base and vile.” Of course, between the perfection of God and the perfection of the noblest of His creatures, there is the gulph of infinity fixed. Be tween essential Sanctity, the Sanctity that is the same as Being, and the most exalted sanctity that is a gift, there can be no possible comparison. There can be no comparison between that which is the attribute of the Creator and the gift to the creature.

Indeed, as regards the Blessed Virgin, one’s first thought with regard to her is a jealousy for the honour of the Lord God of Hosts. Anything that approaches Him must be zealously fended off. We cannot endure that the idea of any created thing, however great and holy, shall be compared unto Him. He is supreme, and His honour we must not give unto another. There fore the soul shrinks with an infinite loathing from any of those expressions which seem to trench upon His incommunicable glory.

But on the other hand, viewed rightly and in the analogy of faith, the great honour bestowed on Mary, the recognition of her place in the order of grace, tends very directly to a proper estimate of the glory of God. As in Alpine scenes one can never estimate the vast distances and enormous magnitudes of the glorious ob jects by which we are surrounded, from the fact that

o Part II.

we have no measure or power of comparison till we see some tree or human form, the comparative insigni ficance of which forms that measure, so it is with the infinitude of God. We ascend towards it through the contemplation of the saints. Take the Virgin as the highest of them all, estimate her pure as Eve at the moment of her creation, add to that the miraculous fact of divine maternity, exhaust all thought and all positive language in the conception and expression of her august prerogatives, and yet, when you have reached the height, God is still infinitely greater. Thus she becomes a height of created nature, whence to rise to the Divine Humanity of her Son, and thence to the infinitude of God, and the higher ideal we have of her, the more complete is our all-imperfect estimate of Him.

Christ is the glorious sun of righteousness, shining in His strength, glorious and radiant, from whose heat nothing is hidden ; and He shines all the more gloriously and radiantly, l>y reason of and in com parison with those derived fires, the saints who shine in the firmament as the stars of heaven, and specially with her whom an imaginative and poetic Christianity, playing upon a fancied interpretation of her lovely name, has designated as the Star of the Sea.

But the question of her immaculate conception is beside the honour due to her. Unless we assume the theory of development as the only intellectual basis for our faith, it cannot be denied that this doctrine lias little support in antiquity. While the ancient

liturgies freely testify to her being undefiled, while Holy Scripture denies the possibility of bringing what is clean out of that which is unclean, and St. Augustine from the honour due to our Lord, refuses to connect the notion of sin with her mother,, the notion of a sus pension of the law of the fall in this individual case is a middle-age idea. The festival was opposed by St. Bernard as a novelty, and as involving the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but in so doing he sub mitted himself beforehand to any contrary judgment from Rome. The festival spread, however, with, the deepening devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and its sup porters resented opposition to it as a slight upon her. In this country, it was unhappily upheld by what are now known to have been forgeries, — the relation of a vision in which the Blessed Yirgin is herseF stated to have enjoined its observance, and a letter of St.Anselm enforcing it on the credit of that revelation. The Schoolmen on St. Augustine’s principles and tradi tion continued to oppose it, until Duns Scotus, mainly on abstract grounds, turned the tide, and gained the University of Paris in its favour. The Feast of her Conception began with the Greeks, and was brought by them to Sicily and to Italy. Its object was, to celebrate the first moment of her existence, who was to be the Mother of the Redeemer of the world. Ac cordingly the day was fixed on Dec. 8, just nine months before that upon which her nativity was cele brated. It was a natural expression of piety. The Council of Basle charged Turrecremata, the master

Notes

• De Nat. el Gratia, 59, 69, t. x. p. 157 d. u Ep. 95, num. 177, 16, 18.