_Sonnet 80._ The leading truth of the gospel, dear to my heart since I first began to preach it 56 years ago, is that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, by whom God made the worlds, and who came down from heaven and in human flesh was himself the sufferer on the cross for the sins of men. I use language as men of reason should use it. I dare not, on the peril of my soul, explain it away by saying, that the Son of God from heaven united himself to another spirit or intelligent being, which latter spirit or mind bore the suffering, ascribed to the Son from heaven. That Christ had two spirits is the teaching of human theory but not of divine scripture. Every man is conscious, that he is one,――one existence, one intelligent being, one human being, or an intellect or mind now dwelling in a human body; and he acknowledges every other man to be a similar being. He also regards every angel, that comes to his knowledge by revelation, as one being. God, the Creator of the universe, we view necessarily as one being. The idea of a duplicate intellectual being is beyond our thought; it is inconceivable, an absurdity, a contradiction. Jesus Christ then was either man or the one Son of God in the form of a man. That there is "one God and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" is Paul's teaching. The reason of calling Christ _man_ is, that "God sent his son in the _likeness_ of sinful flesh," Rom. 8:3. The Son's intelligent spirit was enough to be the tenant of one human body without a co-tenancy with a human spirit, and enough to suffer for the sins of the world. When Paul speaks of Christ as being once "in the form of God," he did not mean, that he was God himself, in whose form or likeness he was, Phil. 2:6. Then in the next verses, by his being "in the form of a servant," "in the likeness of men," "in fashion as a man," he could not mean, that Christ was a real, perfect man. But did he first live in heaven, and thence come to the earth to tabernacle in human flesh and to offer himself as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the race of men? In the first chapter of John's gospel we are taught, that Christ or the Son of God, called the Word, existed in the beginning with God and that all things were made by him. At the very commencement of all created existences in the universe, he existed with God, and by him all created things in the universe were created. Here then was a high and glorious dignity in heaven, the Son of God, before he dwelt in human flesh.