This is, indeed, worthy of all admiration.
On the moral side of Christianity we see him insisting upon the
voluntary character of Christ’s work; upon His acts of will,
which are a satisfaction to God and an appeal to us Schwane, ii.
271, says, ‘Though we reject that part of it which attributes a
natural impassibility to the body of Christ, yet Hilary’s
exposition presents one truth more clearly than the earlier Fathers had
stated it, by giving to the doctrine of the representative satisfaction
of Christ its reasonable explanation as a free service of
satisfaction. He conceives rightly of the Lord’s whole life
on earth, with all its troubles and infirmities, as a sacrifice of free
love on the part of the God-Man; it is only his closer definition of
this sacrifice that is inaccurate.…Hilary lays especial stress
upon the freedom of the Lord s acceptance of death.’ He
quotes Trin. x. 11.. On the intellectual side we find
the Unity in Trinity so luminously declared that Bishop French of
Lahore, one of the greatest of missionaries, had the works of Hilary
constantly in his hands, and contemplated a translation of the De
Trinitate into Arabic for the benefit of Mohammedans He had evidently
been long familiar with it (Life, i. 155), but the first mention
of its use for missionary purposes is in 1862 (ib. i.
137). He began the translation into Arabic at Tunis in 1890,
after his resignation of the bishopric of Lahore (ii. 333), but it
seems doubtful whether he was able to make any progress with it at
Muscat. His biographer says nothing of the amount actually
accomplished.. This was not because Hilary’s
explanation of our Lord’s sufferings might seem to commend the
Gospel to their prejudices; such a concession would have been repugnant
to French’s whole mode of thought. It was because in the
central argument on behalf of the Godhead of Christ, where he had least
scope for originality of thought, Hilary has never suffered himself to
become a mere mechanical compiler. The light which he has cast
upon his subject,
though clear, is never hard; and the doctrine which, because it was
attractive to himself, he has made attractive to his readers, is that
of the unity of God, the very doctrine which is of supreme importance
in Mohammedan eyes For Bishop
French’s view of the importance of this doctrine, see his
Life, i. 84..