THE JACOBITES.
When Nestorius promulgated his doctrine of two persons in the Redeemer, he had not a more zealous antagonist than Eutyches, an archimandrite of a monastery of three hundred monks, near Constantinople. But while prosecuting his opposition to that erroneous dogma, Eutyches himself was carried away by a too common tendency of our nature to run into extremes, and became, in his own turn, the author and advocate of a new heresy. In contending for the oneness of the person of Christ, he began to teach that the two natures in that one person were so blended as to have become one nature; or, in other words, that the humanity of our Saviour had, by some mysterious process, been transmuted into, or identified with, his divine nature.
It will not consist with our brief limits to discuss the demerits of this particular opinion, nor to detail minutely the progress of the controversy occasioned by it. He who has received the plain teachings of the inspired volume regarding the person of our Lord, will learn a salutary lesson on the infirmity of the human mind, and its proneness to err in things spiritual, from the fact, that an idea at once so contrary to the letter of scripture, and the general economy of redemption, should have had an advocate, in other points of character, so respectable.
[Observe how emphatically the distinctness of the two natures is enunciated in such passages as Rom. i. 3; 1 Peter iii. 18; Heb. ix. 14; John i. 14; Phil. ii. 6, 7; Col. ii. 9, &c.
[It would follow from the Eutychian doctrine, that the Messiah not being really man with men, and physically incapable of death, could not have redeemed our nature
