"According to this doctrine, (the doctrine of those who hold the hypostatic union,) Jesus Christ, instead of being one mind, one conscious intelligent principle, whom we can understand, consists of two souls, two minds: the one divine, the other human; the one weak, the other almighty; the one ignorant, the other omniscient. Now, we maintain that this is to make Christ two beings. 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. According to the common doctrine, each of those two minds in Christ has its own consciousness, its own will, its own perceptions. They have, in fact, no common properties. The divine mind feels none of the wants and sorrows of the human, and the human is infinitely removed from the perfections and happiness of the divine. Can you conceive of two beings in the universe more distinct? We have always thought that one person was constituted and distinguished by one consciousness. The doctrine that one and the same person should have two consciousnesses, two wills, two souls infinitely different from each other, this we think an enormous tax on human credulity."[33]
We are not, of course, aware from what source or teachers Dr. Channing learned the doctrine of the hypostatic union. Of one thing we are fully assured, that the Catholic Church never taught, first, that in Christ there are two souls. He is endowed with a human soul, belonging to the human nature of which he is possessed. The infinite and divine nature of the Word, of which Christ is also preserved, has never, in theological language, been called a soul, nor can we denominate it by that name except in loose and metaphorical language, unworthy of a philosopher and theologian who is stating points of doctrine.
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.
Dr. Channing continues: