When now we turn again to the Prayer, and say "Our Father," of whom are we to think? whom are we to address? Plainly, the Lord Jesus Christ and no other. For he is both the Father and the Son; he is the Father, or the Essential Divinity, clothed with Humanity, and thus made comprehensible to man, and visible to his thought. And we are sure, that in looking at him, and beholding in thought his glorious Person, and addressing our prayer to that, we are addressing "our Father;" for he himself declared to the disciples, "He that seeth me, seeth the Father," and rebuked Philip for desiring to be shown the Father, otherwise than as he is seen in him:—" Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father."[1]
But a little further reflection will make it still more plain, that the Lord Jesus Christ is our Father, both in a spiritual and in a natural sense. Eighteen hundred years ago, God assumed humanity, and appeared in the world in the form of Jesus Christ. He then glorified that humanity, as before explained, and ascended with it to his own eternal place, "far above all heavens." Ever since that time, then, plainly, there has been no other God than he that is called Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ being the name of the Divinity clothed with Humanity. There is no such Being now as a Divinity not clothed with Humanity (by which I mean a Divine Natural Humanity): once there was, but there is not now, and there has not been these
