The second section of this chapter is filled principally
with exceptions against my discourse about the personal excellencies of
Christ as mediator; if I may not rather say, with the reflections on the
glory of Christ himself. [As] for my own discourse upon it, I
acknowledge it to be weak, and not only inconceivably beneath the dignity
and merit of the subject, but also far short of what is taught and
delivered by many ancient writers of the church unto that purpose; and [as]
for his exceptions, they are such a composition of ignorance and spite as
is hardly to be paralleled. His entrance upon his work is (p. 200) as
followeth:— “Secondly, Let us inquire what they mean by the person of
Christ, to which believers must be united. And here they have outdone all
the metaphysical subtilties of Suarez, and have found out a person for Christ distinct
from his Godhead and manhood; for there can he no other sense made of what
Dr Owen tells us, — that by the ‘graces of
his person’ he doth not mean the ‘glorious excellencies of his Deity
considered in itself, abstracting from the office which for us, as God and
man, he undertook; nor the outward appearance of his human nature, when he
conversed here on earth, nor yet as now exalted in glory: but the graces of
the person of Christ, as he is vested with the office of mediation, — his
spiritual eminency, comeliness, beauty, as appointed and anointed by the
Father unto that great work of bringing home all his elect into his bosom.’
Now, unless the person of Christ as mediator be distinct from his person
as God-man, all this is idle talk; for what personal graces are there in
Christ as mediator which do not belong to him either as God or man? There
are some things, indeed, which our Saviour did and suffered, which he was
not obliged to, either as God or man, but as mediator; but surely he will
not call the peculiar duties and actions of an office personal graces.”