Hence the body of Christ has a character peculiar to itself. It is a heavenly body Corpus cœleste, x. 18., because of its origin and because of its Owner, the Son of Man Who came down from heaven, and though on earth was in heaven still Tr. in Ps. ii. 11, from St. John iii. 13.. It performs the functions and experiences, the limitations of a human body, and this is evidence that it is in every sense a true, not an alien or fictitious body. Though it is free from the sins of humanity, it has our weaknesses. But here the distinction must be made, which will presently be discussed, between the two kinds of suffering, that which feels and that which only endures. Christ was not conscious of suffering from these weaknesses, which could inflict no sense of want of weariness or pain upon His body, a body not the less real because it was perfect. He took our infirmities as truly as He bore our sins. But He was no more under the dominion of the one than of the other Trin. x. 47 f.; Tr. in Ps. cxxxviii. 3.. His body was in the likeness of ours, but its reality did not consist in the likeness Trin. x. 25., but in the fact that He had created it a true body. Christ, by virtue of His creative power, might have made for Himself a true body, by means of which to fulfil God’s purposes, that should have been free from these infirmities. It was for our sake that He did not. There would have been a true body, but it would have been difficult for us to believe it. Hence He assumed one which had for habits what are necessities to us, in order to demonstrate to us its reality Trin. x. 24. The purpose of the Old Testament Theophanies, it will be remembered, was the same. God appeared as man, in order to make men familiar with the future reality and so more ready to believe. See Trin. v. 17.. It was foreordained that He should be incarnate; the mode of the Incarnation was determined by considerations of our advantage. The arguments by which this thesis is supported will be stated presently, in connection with Hilary’s account of the Passion. It would be difficult to decide whether he has constructed his theory concerning the human activities of our Lord upon the basis of this preponderance of the Divine nature in His incarnate personality, or whether he has argued back from what he deems the true account of Christ’s mode of life on earth, and invented the hypothesis in explanation of it. In any case he has had the courage exactly to reverse the general belief of Christendom regarding the powers normally used by Christ. We are accustomed to think that with rare exceptions, such as the Transfiguration, He lived a life limited by the ordinary conditions of humanity, to draw lessons for ourselves from His bearing in circumstances like our own, to estimate His condescension and suffering, in kind if not in degree, by our own consciousness. Hilary regards the normal state of the incarnate Christ as that of exaltation, from which He stooped on rare occasions, by a special act of will, to self-humiliation. Thus the Incarnation, though itself a declension from the pristine glory, does not account for the facts of Christ’s life; they must be explained by further isolated and temporary declensions. And since the Incarnation is the one great event, knowledge and faith concerning which are essential, the events which accompany or result from it tend, in Hilary’s thought, to shrink in importance. They can and must be minimised, explained away, regarded as ‘dispensations,’ if they seem to derogate from the Majesty of Him Who was incarnate.