Thus the Son becomes flesh, and that by true maternity on the Virgin’s part. But man is more than flesh; he is soul as well, and it is the soul which makes him man instead of matter. The soul, as we saw, is created by a special act of God at the beginning of the separate existence of each human being; and Christ, to be true man and not merely true flesh, created for Himself the human soul which was necessary for true humanity. He had borrowed from the Apollinarians, consciously no doubt, their interpretation of one of their favourite passages, ‘The Word became flesh’; here again we find an argument of heretics rendered harmless and adopted by orthodoxy. For the strange Apollinarian denial to Christ of a human soul, and therefore of perfect manhood, is not only expressly contradicted E.g. Trin. x. 22 in. The human soul is clearly intended. Schwane, ii. 268, justly praises Hilary for greater accuracy than his contemporaries in laying stress upon each of the constituent elements of Christ’s humanity, and especially upon the soul; in this respect following Tertullian and Origen., but repudiated on every page by the contrary assumption on which all Hilary’s arguments are based. Christ, then, is ‘perfect man In Trin. x. 21 f. is an argument analogous to that of the De Synodis concerning the Godhead. Christ is Man because He is perfectly like man, just as in the Homœusian argument He is God because He is perfectly like God., of a reasonable soul and Human flesh subsisting,’ for Whom the Virgin has performed the normal functions of maternity. But there is one wide and obvious difference between Hilary’s mode of handling the matter and that with which we are familiar. His view concerning the mother’s office forbids his laying stress upon our Lord’s inheritance from her. Occasionally, and without emphasis, he mentions our Lord as the Son of David, or otherwise introduces His human ancestry E.g. Comm. in Matt. i.; Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 19., but he never dwells upon the subject. He neither bases upon this ancestry the truth, nor deduces from it the character, of Christ’s humanity. Such is Hilary’s account of the facts of the Incarnation. In his teaching there is no doubt error as well as defect, but only in the mode of explanation, not in the doctrine explained. It will help us to do him justice if we may compare the theories that have been framed concerning another great doctrine, that of the Atonement, and remember that the strangely diverse speculations of Gregory the Great and of St. Anselm profess to account for the same facts, and that, so far as definitions of the Church are concerned, we are free to accept one or other, or neither, of the rival explanations.