Again, the Catholic Church never taught that the human soul of Christ was ignorant. This may have been the opinion of those from whom Dr. Channing may have drawn the theory of the hypostatic union; but in stating a doctrine in which all Christendom concurs, Protestant as well as Catholic, we should have thought it more honest if Dr. Channing, not satisfied with his own teachers, would have taken the pains to ascertain what two hundred and fifty millions of Christians hold about it.
The first real objection of Dr. Channing is as follows:
"We maintain that this (to attribute to Christ two natures in one person) is to make Christ two beings."
The same looseness and want of accuracy of philosophical language. What does Dr. Channing mean by _being_? If by being is meant nature, of course we do all attribute to Christ two natures, the human and the divine.
If by being is meant person, we deny flatly that to attribute to Christ two natures is to make him two persons.
Let the reverend doctor prove the intrinsic impossibility of two distinct natures being united in one single subsistence and person, and then we shall grant him that Christ, being possessed of two natures, is two persons also. But such impossibility can never be demonstrated; for the fact of the union between soul and body in man, in the unity of one single personality, is a contradiction to all such pretended impossibility. We have, moreover, shown in the course of this article the intrinsic possibility of such supposition.
"To denominate him one person, one being, and yet to suppose him made up of two minds infinitely different from each other, is to abuse and confound language, and to throw darkness over all our conceptions of intelligent natures."
If our reverend opponent chooses to look with contempt and slight on all distinct and accurate notions of ideology, which he calls, in another place, vain philosophy; if he prefers to form crude and undigested ideas; if he will not sound to the very depth the nature, the faculties of intelligent beings, their acts, the genesis of their acts, their distinctions from other faculties and their acts; but loves rather to argue from ideas common to men who have never thought and thought deeply on these subjects, and distinguished them carefully, and classified them, is it any fault of ours if, when we propound the true philosophical doctrines about these subjects, Dr. Channing's ideas should become confused, and that darkness should spread over that which was never clear?