Watts - BX5200 .W3 1813 v.6

APPENDIX. 659 world into which he brings his children." That personal fulness that is in God-man is reserved by God as a subject of that depth and glory to take up, together with his own perfections, the thoughts of men and angels for ever.; Rev. xxr. 23. That city had no need of the sun nor moon to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it and the Lamb is the light thereof. When those two great volumes, this of his word, and that ofhis world, which now in this life are put into our hands, to read the charac- ters of his glory in by faith, when both these shall be folded up and clean laid aside, then will the person of Christ, God-man, be set forth to us, to entertain us for ever with the sight of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Having drawn out this little abridgment of this excellent treatise, I take the freedom to make these few remarks on it : I. This learned and pious author plainly manifests that he could not expound several scriptures which speak of Christ both in the Old Testament and the New, without taking in his human nature to be the joint subject of such ascriptions, because there are so many things expressed in them below thedignity of god- head : And therefore he supposes the human nature of Christ to exist in the view or idea of the Father from everlasting, and to have all those glorious actions and characters ascribed to him as man united to God, or as God united to man. And it is to be ob- served, that he does this not in one sentence or two, or in one page or two, but it is the chief design of that wholediscourse of the " glories and royalties that belong toJesus Christ considered as God- man," which fills up more than a hundred pages in folio. II. He supposes the man Christ Jesus not only to-have an existence in the divine idea through all the various ancient trans- actions of creation, providence, &c. But he asserts that he ought actúally to have existed the first of all creatures, and to have been as it were an under -agent in the creation of the world ; but that this actual glory was suspended for four thousand years, merely because he' was to bear sin and the curse for the redemp- tion of men. III. He rises much higher in his ascriptions to the man Jesus Christ, than I have dared to do in any part of my dis- course, and invests him with much more sublime powers than any angelic spirit ; and yet he supposes his soul to be a human soul still, and calls him aman : Hegiveshimmost illustrious prero- gatives, on the account of hisvirtual union to his divine nature, all which he asserts to be his early due had he actually then existed. IV. 'l'he actual pre-existence of the man Jesus, or the hu- man soul of Christ, and his actual union to his divine nature eau never withhold or diminish any of those sublime characters, those illustrious honours or prerogatives which this author saith were his clue, had he then existed, and which he supposes to be attributed to him in scripture by the figure prolepsis, andby way of anticipation, and which were given him by God the

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