33. And so—for not even the glory of
the Resurrection has opened the eyes of these lost men and kept them
within the manifest bounds of the faith—they have forged a weapon
for their blasphemy out of a pretended reverence, and even perverted
the revelation of a mystery into an insult to God. From the
words, I ascend unto My Father and your Father, to My God and your
God St. John xx. 17., they argue that since that Father is ours as
much as His, and that God also ours and His, His own confession that He
shares with us in that relation to the Father and to God excludes Him
from true Divinity, and subordinates Him to God the Creator Whose
creature and inferior He is, as we are, although He has received the
adoption of a Son. Nay more, we must not suppose that He
possesses any of the characters of the Divine nature, since the Apostle
says, But when He saith, all things are put in subjection, this is
except Him Who did subject all things unto Him, for when all things
shall have been subjected unto Him, then shall also He Himself be
subjected to Him that did subject all things unto Him, that God may be
all in all 1 Cor. xv. 27, 28.. For, so they
say, subjection is evidence of want of power in the subject and of its
possession by the sovereign. The eleventh book is employed in a
reverent discussion of this argument; it proves from these very words
of the Apostle not only that subjection is no evidence of want of power
in Christ but that it actually is a sign of His true Divinity as God
the Son; that the fact that His Father and God is also our Father and
God is an infinite advantage to us and no degradation to Him, since He
Who has been born as Man and suffered all the afflictions of our flesh
has gone up on high to our God and Father, to receive His glory as Man
our Representative.