Eight Sermons on the Priesthood, Altar, and SacrificeMayow, Mayow Wynell
Religion
Eight Sermons on the Priesthood, Altar, and Sacrifice
Mayow, Mayow Wynell
Catholic Church -- Doctrines
But though obscured, the treasures were there nevertheless. It were
impious to doubt or deny it. When, then, we hear it asked, as sometimes
in these latter days of almost unlimited free enquiry it is, Are we to
imagine that in that little infant was centred the knowledge of all
history, all learning, all the secrets of nature as we term them, all the
devices of art, all the developments of science? I think we cannot doubt
that the answer is, There was. For what is there in any kind or
department of knowledge or science, or of things past, present, or to
come, which we can suppose the Almighty not to know? This would be to
deny His attribute of Omniscience; and, therefore, to deny it of Christ,
God and Man, would be to deny His Godhead. People think to escape this
consequence by saying that it is merely His human nature which was
ignorant,—that whilst as God He knew, yet as Man He did not know,—not
seeing that thus immediately they must fall into that other error before
mentioned. For if they do not deny the Godhead, they must divide the
Substance of the Son. Perhaps in their defence they will urge such
passages of Holy Scripture as that in which it is written, “Jesus
increased in wisdom and stature;” {142a} or where He Himself said,
concerning the Judgment, “Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no,
not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father,”
{142b} of which it may be sufficient to remark to-day, that the first
passage seems to imply no more than that His wisdom, as He grew in years,
and of course appeared to acquire human knowledge, increased, in the
sense of its being more manifested in the eyes of men, just as His bodily
stature increased in visible presence before them: whilst of the other,
(without going into all which may be said on a passage confessedly
difficult,) it may be enough to point out that He does not say even of
the Day of Judgment, that He, the God-Man, Christ Jesus, ever undivided
in His divinity and humanity, did not know it: but that the Son (Who must
be taken of course here to be the Son of Man), knoweth it not. And if it
be thought that this admission grants all that the objector asked, and is
in fact but the enunciation of his own view, I should maintain that it is
not so, and for this reason, that it is a very different thing to say of
the One Person, Jesus Christ, that He, thus one and undivided, was
ignorant of anything, and to _contemplate apart_ His Godhead and His
Manhood, and so, in some sort, their attributes apart. And I conceive
that here our Blessed Lord using the term “the Son” (not ‘_I_ know not,’
but _the Son_ knoweth not,) contemplates Himself as the Son of Man, and
speaks of Himself as viewed in that relation. What modern unbelief seems
to delight to assert, is, that our Blessed Lord, as He stood and talked
and reasoned with the people, was ignorant or mistaken. What we affirm
to be the really just and consistent sense of the passages adduced, is,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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