Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/71

Rh That is, He glorified the humanity; or, in other words, exalted it to a perfect union with the Divinity that was in Him from conception.

While in the flesh, our Lord had both a human and a divine nature, just as every man has an external and an internal, or what is sometimes called a lower and a higher nature. As to the external human which He derived from the mother. He was frail, finite, prone to evil, and therefore liable to temptation like any other man; but as to his internal, He was Jehovah God—infinite, perfect, divine, incapable of being tempted. By his own divine power, He gradually overcame the evil appertaining to his assumed humanity; completely eradicated all its selfish and evil proclivities; conquered all the hells; put off all that was frail and finite, and brought down into every region of that humanity his own Divine Love and Wisdom, and so brought it at-one with the essential and indwelling Divinity.

This is what is understood in the New Church by the Atonement, or At-one-ment (as the word was originally syllabled and pronounced)—a bringing at-one of the human and the Divine, or as the Apostle says, "making in Himself, of twain, one new man." And the purpose of this At-one-ment was, that the Lord might ever after be able to bring our external or natural at-one with our internal or spiritual man—goodness at-one with