's essence, nothing in God
will remain unrevealed. Every feature of His moral nature will be
delineated in the Son. If the Son is the exact likeness of God and has a
distinct mode of subsisting He is capable of all the modifications in
His form of subsisting which may be necessary, in order to make a
complete revelation of God intelligible to men. It is possible for Him
to become man Himself. He is capable of obedience, even of learning
obedience by suffering, and of acquiring power to succour by being
tempted. He can taste death. We might add, if we were studying one of
St. Paul's Epistles (which we are not at present doing), that this
distinction from God, involved in His very Sonship, made Him capable of
emptying Himself of the Divine form of subsisting and taking upon Him
instead of it the form of a servant. This power of meeting man's actual
condition confers upon the Son the prerogative of being the complete and
final revelation of God.

3. He upholds all things by the word of His power. This must be closely
connected with the previous statement. If the Son is the effulgence of
God's glory and the express image of His essence, He is not a creature,
but is the Creator. The Son is so from God that He is God. He so
emanates from Him that He is a perfect and complete representation of
His being. He is not in such a manner an effulgence as to be only a
manifestation of God, nor in such a manner an image as to be a creature
of God. But, in fellowship of nature, the essence of God is communicated
to the Son in the distinctness of His mode of subsisting. The Apostle's
words fully justify--perhaps they suggested--the expressions in the
Nicene and still earlier creeds, "God _of_ God, Light _of_ Light, very
God _of_ very God." If this is His relation to God, it determines His
relation to the universe, and the relation of the universe to God. Philo
had described the Word as an effulgence, and spoken also of Him as
distinct from God. But in Philo these two statements are inconsistent.
For the former means that the Word is an attribute of God, and the
latter means that He is a creature. The writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews says that the Word is not an attribute, but a perfect
representation of God's essence. He says also that He is not a creature,
but the Sustainer of all things. These statements are consistent. The
one, in fact, implies the other; and both together express the same
conception which we find in St. John's Go