Suspicion of the reality of Christ's human nature as a whole is characteristic of all monophysite thought. This suspicion, not always formulated or expressed, is everywhere present. If the monophysites admitted the fact of His true manhood, they denied or neglected the religious value of that fact. Their spurious spirituality rebelled against a dogma which seemed to tie the infinite down to a point in history. The fact that the Son of God lived a perfect human life contained no inspiration for them. They idealised the incarnation. It was not for them a historical event. This is a corollary to the proposition, maintained by their great champion, Philoxenus, that "no addition to His person took place." It is tantamount to saying that the union of divine and human in Christ is purely conceptual. When the monophysite faced the question, "What change in Christ did the incarnation effect?" his formula constrained him to reply, "It made no change." The deity of the person was not denied. The pre-existent Logos and the Christ who walked in Galilee were admittedly one and the same. The second person of the trinity and Jesus of Nazareth were one personality. If Bethlehem made no change in that personality, it was purposeless, and the import of the incarnation disappears. THE MONOPHYSITE THEORY OF A COMPOSITION OF NATURES For the consistent monophysites, then, the human nature, as a psychic entity with peculiar properties, did not survive the incarnation. They did, however, allow it a verbal reality. They admitted a composition of natures, and this composition provided for them whatever degree of reality the incarnation possessed. On this point their Christology passed through several stages of development, the later stages showing progressive improvement on the earlier. They distinguished three senses of the word "composition." First, they said, it might mean "absorption," as when a drop of water is absorbed in a jar of wine. Second, it might imply the transmutation of constituent particles, as when a third unlike thing is formed from two. Thirdly, there is composition when, from the association of two whole and entire things, a third whole and entire compound thing is formed without loss to the components. They illustrated the third mode of composition by the union in man of soul and body. The pre-Eutychian monophysites regarded the hypostatic union as a composition in the first sense of the word. They spoke of Christ's human nature as absorbed in the divine, as is "a drop of vinegar in the ocean." Eutyches adopted the term in its second sense. He taught that the Word became flesh[3] "as the atmosphere assumes bodily form and becomes rain or snow under the influence of the wind, and as water becomes ice by reason of the cold air." Philoxenus in a later generation saw that both these positions were wrong and the similes misleading. He taught a hypostatic union totally devoid of