15. If the Man Jesus Christ began His bodily life
with the same beginning as our body and soul, if He were not, as God,
the immediate Author of His own body and soul alike, when He was
fashioned in the likeness and form of man, and born as man, then we may
suppose that He felt the pain of our body; since by His beginning, a
conception like ours, He had a body animated with a soul like our
own. But if through His own act He took to Himself flesh from the
Virgin, and likewise by His own act joined a soul to the body thus
conceived, then the nature of His suffering must have corresponded with
the nature of His body and soul. For when He emptied Himself of
the form of God and received the form of a servant when the Son of God
was born also Son of Man, without losing His own self and power, God
the Word formed the perfect living Man. For how was the Son of
God born Son of Man, how did He receive the form of a servant, still
remaining in the form of God, unless (God the Word being able of Himself to take flesh from the
Virgin and to give that flesh a soul, for the redemption of our soul
and body), the Man Christ Jesus was born perfect, and made in the form
of a servant by the assumption of the body, which the Virgin
conceived? For the Virgin conceived, what she conceived, from the
Holy Ghost alone Omitting
‘suo:” or retaining it ‘His (i.e. the
Word’s) Holy Spirit.’, and though for
His birth in the flesh she supplied from herself that element, which
women always contribute to the seed planted in them, still Jesus Christ
was not formed by an ordinary human conception. In His birth, the
cause of which was transmitted solely by the Holy Ghost, His mother
performed the same part as in all human conceptions: but by
virtue of His origin He never ceased to be God.