Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/42

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The Doctrines of the New Church.

state and needs; and this among Christians is the Divine Humanity (the Son).

Moreover, it presents God to us as a divinely human Being or Person—as a Divine Man. It affirms that the attributes of love, wisdom, mercy, holiness and the like, imply personality, and cannot be predicated of anything but a person. We cannot even imagine love or wisdom to exist apart from the person who loves, thinks and is wise. Nor should we think of applying the adjectives, righteous, holy and just, to gravitation, heat or electricity—to anything, in short, but a self-conscious and rational being or person.

The personality, then, but not the tripersonality of God—his absolute oneness in essence and in person, in Whom, nevertheless, are three inseparable essentials—this, coupled with the assumption and glorification of the human by the Divine, is the central doctrine of the true Christian religion, according to the teachings of the New Church.

The Incarnation of the Divine.

This Church further believes and teaches that the Divine Being did, in the fulness of time, come and reveal himself personally unto men. From love toward his human offspring, He came down into our natural human conditions and relations according to the laws of his own divine order—just as every babe is born. He assumed our finite