Copts will probably be allowed for the future to carry out the much-needed reforms in their system in their own way. The Maronites of the Lebanon have remained apart from the Orthodox church of the East up to the present time, but the French political influence in the Lebanon since 1860 has caused a considerable number of them to join the church of Rome. The church of Abyssinia, though its Liturgy shows some beautiful traces of the purer ages of Christianity, has fallen into many superstitions and corruptions. Yet that church has had sufficient vitality to claim representation among the numerous churches and denominations which now gather at the cradle of Christianity, and not the least imposing religious edifice to be seen at Jerusalem is the Abyssinian church.
General Effect of the Controversies about the Person of Christ.—It may not be out of place, in conclusion, to endeavour to arrive at some estimate of the influence of these prolonged and bitter controversies upon the history of the Christian church. On the surface that influence appears unfavourable. Not only was the church of Christ broken up into antagonistic sections which mutually hated each other, but a divided Christendom fell an easy victim to the Mohammedan invader. Western theology, when deprived of the balance afforded by the more purely intellectual characteristics predominant in the East, crystallized into a Roman mould. Not even the revival of letters cured this evil, and we find that even post-Reformation theology has not altogether escaped from the long domination of purely Western forms of thought. But to stop short here would be one-sided and superficial. The effect of these prolonged controversies has undoubtedly been to clear up the confusion which long existed in the Christian mind about the relations of the three Persons (or distinctions) in the Trinity, and of the two natures in the one Christ. The two conflicting tendencies at work in the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies were (1) the disposition to divide the Redeemer into two separate beings, united to one another for God's purpose of salvation, and (2) the disposition either (a) to make the Redeemer a Being compounded out of two other beings, God and Man, being Himself neither one nor the other, or (b) to regard the Humanity of Christ as swallowed up by His Divinity. Of these two forms of Monophysite doctrine the former is ultimately unthinkable. An Infinite Being and a finite one cannot possibly coalesce into a third being, which is neither the one nor the other. The second view, though in itself by no means inconceivable, has been felt to contradict the definite statements of Scripture on the nature of the union between God the Word and the Man Christ Jesus, and is therefore inadmissible. The controversy, pursued with great virulence for about a century and a half, ended by the definite establishment of a mean between the two extremes, namely, that Christ consisted of two separate natures, the Godhead and the Manhood, conjoined into one Personality or Individuality, i.e. one ultimate source of thought and action. Not that there was only one mind, or one will, in the Personality underlying these two natures, but that the action of the lower will was confined within certain limits, and ultimately determined by the fiat of the Divine and Higher Will. If it was permitted to the theologian to speak of a communicatio idiomatum (transfer of attributes), this involved no confusion nor amalgamation of the two natures, no absorption of the one by (or into) the other. Each remains separate and complete. But some attributes of the one nature may be spoken of as transferred to the other, by reason of the inseparable conjunction of both in the One Person (ὑπόστασις or πρόσωπον). Thus if, as is sometimes the case, God is spoken of as suffering or dying, it is not to be supposed that the Godhead, as such, is capable of suffering or of death. The expression is only permissible in consequence of the inseparable conjunction of Christ's Godhead and Manhood in one Personality. The same caution must be borne in mind when the Blessed Virgin is spoken of as θεοτόκος. God cannot be brought forth into this world as man is brought forth. Yet the Divine Word and the Man Christ Jesus are inseparably one. Another point must not be lost sight of. In the Nestorian and Monophysite controversies the word Hypostasis is applied to the Personal Mind and Will which separates the Being thus indicated from any other existence. But when, as in the Arian controversy, the word Hypostasis is applied to the so-called Persons in the Godhead, it is not used to indicate separate sources of thought and action, but is employed to denote certain eternal distinctions declared in Holy Scripture to exist within the Godhead Itself, where there can be only one Mind and Will. We confess that the Father's sole prerogative is to originate, the Son's to reveal, the Spirit's to guide, direct, inspire. But all these prerogatives co-exist harmoniously in Him, Who is above all, and through all, and in us all. The decisions of the four great oecumenical councils are thus a standing witness to the fact that the church, from the beginning till now, has taught consistently that Jesus Christ was (1) ἀλήθως (truly), (2) τελέως (completely), (3) ἀδιαιρέτως (indivisibly), and (4) ἀσυγχύτως (without confusion [of nature]) the Word, or Son of the Eternal God, Who in the last times, "for us men and for our salvation," took upon Him our flesh, and manifested Himself to the world "in the form of a bond-slave," and that His two natures remained separate and uncombined. And so, being at once Perfect God and Perfect Man, He is able, not only to reconcile God and Man, and to destroy the empire of sin in the latter, but can in the end present us, reconciled and saved, as perfect and unblamable before the God and Father of us all.
Bibliography.—Our authorities are nearly the same as those given under NESTORIUS. We have no longer the help of Socrates, but Evagrius is vivid, and generally accurate, though often very credulous. He accepts implicitly the decisions of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and of the latter he gives a detailed and careful summary. The letters of Theodoret, and the collection of the letters of other men of mark in his day, found in
