confusion or loss or commutation of the elements of the two natures. To illustrate his meaning he used the simile supplied by the "Athanasian" creed, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and Man is one Christ." This position is a vast improvement on that of the original monophysites. It was ground gained to secure the admission that in any sense Christ was very man. But the monophysites never learned the true manner of the union, namely, that Christ was "one; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God; one altogether; not by confusion of Substance but by unity of Person." Read in this connection the assertion that God and man is one Christ, "as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man," is orthodox; read apart from this context, it is ambiguous. If the simile be kept as a simile, as a mere suggestion or hint as to how, in general, two may compose one and yet remain two, then no exception can be taken to it. If, however, the clause be interpreted as a proportion sum, assigning corresponding values to the different terms, then it savours strongly of Apollinarianism. Most monophysites, like many moderns, probably understood it in the mathematical sense. Christ, they argued, was God and man, just as man is rational soul and body; the terms are in proportion; therefore the divine nature was the rational soul, and the human nature was the body. They forgot that the free act of the whole divine person in assuming man underlies the union and makes it efficacious; they gave _sarx_; the narrow meaning of _soma_, they set before themselves the picture, not of the infinite robing in the finite, but of the union of mind and matter. Consequently they habitually spoke of the Logos, as assuming, not man or a human nature, but a body. Such in its varying phases was the monophysite doctrine of composition. At its worst, it contained a direct denial of the real humanity of Christ. At its best, it falls far short of the catholic doctrine of His real, perfect and complete humanity. The permanent assumption of human nature into the transcendent personality had no meaning for the heretic party. If it had taken place, it was, they thought, merely momentary, with no after-effects, the passing of a summer cloud across the face of the sun.