The principle of unity, then, is no other than "the Word made flesh:" that divine Person who has for ever joined together the Godhead and the Manhood. Thus, S. Paul speaks to us of God "having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Himself, in the dispensation of the fulness of times, _to gather together under one head all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth_:" at whose resurrection, "He set all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all to the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him who filleth all in all." And again, "the head of every man is Christ;--and the head of Christ is God." "And we being many are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another:"[2] as, again, he sets forth at length in the 12th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, calling that one body by the very name of Christ. With one voice the ancient Fathers[3] exult in this as the great purpose of His Incarnation. "The work," says S. Hippolytus,[4] "of His taking a body, is the gathering up into one head of all things unto Him." "The Word Man," says S. Irenaeus,[5] "gathering all things up into Himself, that as in super-celestial, and spiritual, and invisible things, the Word of God is the chief, so also in visible and corporeal things He may hold the chiefship, assuming the Primacy to Himself, and joining Himself as Head to the Church, may draw all things to Himself, at the fitting time." And again, "The Son of God was made Man among men, to join the end to the beginning, that is, man to God;" or, as Tertullian says,[6] "that God might shew that in Himself was the evolution of the beginning to the end, and the return of the end to the beginning." And Oecumenius, "Angels and men were rent asunder; God then joined them, and made them one through Christ." S. Gregory Thaumaturgus breaks out, "Thou art He that didst bridge over heaven and earth by Thy sacred body." And Augustine,[7] "Far off He was from us, and very far. What, so far off as the creature and the Creator? What, so far off as God and man? What, so far off as justice and iniquity? What, so far off as eternity and mortality? See how far off was 'the Word in the beginning, God with God, by whom all things were made.' How, then, was He made nigh, that He might be as we, and we in Him? 'The Word was made flesh.'" "Man, being assumed, was taken into the nature of the Godhead," says S. Hilary:[8] and S. Chrysostome,[9] "He puts on flesh, that He who cannot be held may be holden:" "dwelling with us," says Gregory[10] of Nazianzum, "by interposing His flesh as a veil, that the incomprehensible may be comprehended." "For since," adds S. Cyril,[11] "man's nature was not capable of approaching the pure and unmixed glory of the Godhead, because of its inherent weakness, for our use the only-begotten one put on our likeness." "In the assumption of our nature," says S. Leo,[12] "He became to us