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Rh a perfect man. Theodore developed his ideas of the moral perfection of Jesus as a man, resting this partly on the Virgin birth and the baptism, and partly on His union with the Divine Word. He held that there was an indwelling of God in Christ, generically the same as in the saints, but specifically different. "I am not so mad," he says, "as to affirm that the indwelling of God in Christ is after the same manner as in the saints. He dwelt in Christ as in a son." It will be seen that such language finds the actual personality of Christ in His human nature, however closely and in however unique a way the Divine may be united to it. Thus the tendency of thought will be towards a separation into two persons—the Divine Person of the Logos and the human Person Jesus. That will not be so far from 's idea of the God-influenced man, except that as regards the Divine, the Logos, the Trinitarian conception is preserved.

Theodore's views were introduced to Constantinople by Nestorius, who was appointed patriarch in the year 428, like Chrysostom after having been a presbyter at Antioch. He was blameless in personal character, and he had gained some reputation by his fluent, sonorous eloquence. And yet he commenced with a false step, for in his first sermon, addressing the emperor, he exclaimed, "Give me the earth cleared of heretics, and I will give you the kingdom of heaven in exchange; aid me in subduing the heretics, and I will aid you in vanquishing the Persians." Such an untimely boast of bigotry disgusted sober minds, and Nestorius came to be branded as an "incendiary" in consequence. Not long after this the heresy-hunter was denounced as a heretic—a just retribution of which history furnishes many instances. The trouble began with the sermon of a presbyter Anastasius, who had accompanied Nestorius from Antioch and shared with his bishop the ideas of Theodore, in which the preacher attacked the