Christ, then, Who had been perfect God from eternity, became perfect Man by His self-wrought act of creation. Thus there was an approximation between God and man; man was raised by God, Who humbled Himself to meet Him. On the one hand the Virgin was sanctified in preparation for her sacred motherhood Trin. ii. 26.; on the other hand there was a condescension of the Son to our low estate. The key to this is found by Hilary in the language of St. Paul. Christ emptied Himself of the form of God and took the form of a servant; this is a revelation as decisive as the same Apostle’s words concerning the first and the second Adam. The form of God, wherein the Son is to the Father as the exact image reflected in a mirror, the exact impression taken from a seal, belongs to Christ’s very being. He could not detach it from Himself, if He would, for it is the property of God to be eternally what He is; and, as Hilary constantly reminds us, the continuous existence of creation is evidence that there had been no break in the Son’s divine activity in maintaining the universe which He had made. While He was in the cradle He upheld the worlds Ib. viii. 45, 47, ix. 14, &c.. Yet, in some real sense, Christ emptied Himself of this form of God This ‘evacuation’ or ‘exinanition’ is represented in Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 4 by the more precise metaphor of a vessel drained of its liquid contents.. It was necessary that He should do so if manhood, even the sinless manhood created by Himself for His own Incarnation, was to co-exist with Godhead in His one Person Hilary has devoted his Homily on Psalm lxviii. to this subject. In § 25 he asks, ‘How could He exist in the form of man while remaining in the form of God?’ There are many equally emphatic statements throughout his writings.. This is stated as distinctly as is the correlative fact that He retained and exercised the powers and the majesty of His nature. Thus it is clear that, outside the sphere of His work for men, the form and the nature of God remained unchanged in the Son; while within that sphere the form, though not the nature, was so affected that it could truly be said to be laid aside. But when we come to Hilary’s explanation of this process, we can only acquit him of inconsistency in thought by admitting the ambiguity of his language. In one group of passages he recognises the self-emptying, but minimises its importance; in another he denies that our Lord could or did empty Himself of the form of God. And again, his definitions of the word ‘form’ are so various as to be actually contradictory. Yet a consistent sense, and one exceedingly characteristic of Hilary, can be derived from a comparison of his statements Baltzer and Schwane have been followed in this matter, in opposition to Dorner.; and in judging him we must remember that we have no systematic exposition of his views, but must gather them not only from his deliberate reasonings, but sometimes from homiletical amplifications of Scripture language, composed for edification and without the thought of theological balance, and sometimes from incidental sayings, thrown out in the course of other lines of argument. To the minimising statements belongs his description of the evacuation as a ‘change of apparel Trin. ix. 38, habitus demutatio, and similarly ib. 14.,’ and his definition of the word ‘form’ as meaning no more than ‘face’ or ‘appearance Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 25.,’as also his insistence from time to time upon the permanence of this form in Christ, not merely in His supramundane relations, but as the Son of Man E.g. Trin. viii. 45.. On the other hand Hilary expressly declares that the ‘concurrence of the two forms Trin. ix. 14, concursus utriusque formæ.’ is impossible, they being mutually exclusive. This represents the higher form, that of God, as something more than a dress or appearance which could be changed or masked; and stronger still is the language used in the Homily on Psalm xviii. There (§ 4) he speaks of Christ being exhausted of His heavenly nature, this being used as a synonym for the form of God, and even of His being emptied of His substance. But it is probable that the Homily has descended to us, without revision by its author, in the very words which the shorthand writer took down. This mention of ‘substance’ is unlike Hilary’s usual language, and the antithesis between the substance which the Son had not, because He had emptied Himself of it, and the substance which He had, because He had assumed it, is somewhat infelicitously expressed. The term must certainly not be taken as the deliberate statement of Hilary’s final opinion, still less as the decisive passage to which his other assertions must be accommodated; but it is at least clear evidence that Hilary, in the maturity of his thought, was not afraid to state in the strongest possible language the reality and completeness of the evacuation. The reconciliation of these apparently contradictory views concerning Christ’s relation to the form of God can only be found in Hilary’s idea of the Incarnation as a ‘dispensation,’ or series of dispensations. The word and the thought are borrowed through Tertullian It is very characteristic that it lies outside Cyprian’s vocabulary and range of ideas. from the Greek ‘economy’; but in Hilary’s mind the notion of Divine reserve has grown till it has become, we might almost say, the dominant element of the conception. This self-emptying is a dispensation Trin. ix. 38 in., and especially ib. 39. The unity of glory departed through His obedience in the Dispensation., whereby the incarnate Son of God appears to be, what He is not, destitute of the form of God. For this form is the glory of God, concealed by our Lord for the purposes of His human life, yet held by Hilary, to a greater extent, perhaps, than by any other theologian, to have been present with Him on earth. In words which have a wider application, and must be considered hereafter, Hilary speaks of Christ as ‘emptying Himself and hiding Himself within Himself Trin. xi. 48; cf. the end of this section and xii. 6..’ Concealment has a great part to play in Hilary’s theories, and is in this instance the only explanation consistent with his doctrinal position Cf. Baltzer, Christologie, p. 10 f., Schwane, p. 272 f. Other explanations which have been suggested are quite inadmissible. Dorner, p. 407, takes the passage cited above about ‘substance’ too seriously, and wavers between the equally impossible interpretations of ‘countenance’ and ‘personality.’ Förster (l.c. p. 659) understands the word to mean ‘mode of existence.’ Wirthmüller, cited by Schwane, p. 273, has the courage to regard ‘form of God’ and ‘form of a servant’ as equivalent to Divinity and humanity..