This perfect union for ever of the two Natures in the one Person of Jesus Christ our Lord it is of the highest importance for us to receive, or we shall have unworthy notions of God, and what He has done for us. We shall, if we “divide the Substance,” making two Persons to be in Christ, be in danger of believing that a mere man died for us; or else, that the death of Christ was not, in a true sense, death at all; so that there would be either a propitiatory sacrifice made for the sins of the world by one less than God, or else no propitiatory sacrifice made at all. In either case, a denial of “the Lord that bought us.” {138} In the one, that He is the Lord; in the other, that He bought us. For, as we see at once, God, as God only, cannot die; and man, as man only, cannot make propitiation for sin. It is, of course, true that the Godhead, considered in itself, is incapable of suffering, and therefore, the Son of God, for this reason, (among many others, as we may well believe,) took upon Him man’s nature, which was capable of suffering and death. And not less true or less plain is it, that the Manhood, even in its best and most perfect state, could not make atonement to God for sin, or enable any man to “save his brother.” But when God became Flesh, when the Son of God became also the Son of Man, when the two natures in their Perfection were thus joined in the Person of Jesus Christ: then God being man could die, and man being God could not only live but give life. So Christ not only liveth ever, but He “giveth eternal life” {139a} to as many as are His. “Thus,”—to use the words of the well-known commentator on our Articles, the present Bishop of Ely,—“thus we understand the Scripture when it says that men ‘crucified the Lord of Glory,’ {139b} when it says that ‘God purchased the Church with His own Blood,’ {139c} because though God in His Divine Nature cannot be crucified, and has no blood to shed; yet the Son of God, the Lord of Glory, took into His Person the nature of man, in which nature He could suffer, could shed His blood, could be crucified, could die.” {139d} All this being done and suffered by that one Person—Christ Jesus, God and Man—it is no figure or fallacy but a simple truth, however wonderful, to say that God was born in Bethlehem and died upon the cross at Calvary. Thus, too, He the one ever-blessed Son of the Highest, “in Whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” could become unto us “wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption;” our Prophet, Priest and King, our Sacrifice, our Mediator, our Intercessor, our ever-merciful and ever-enduring Saviour, Who sitteth at the right hand of God, until He shall come again with power and great glory to be also our Judge.