7. For our sake, therefore, Jesus Christ, retaining all these attributes, and being born man in our body, spoke after the fashion of our nature without concealing that divinity belonged to His own nature. In His birth, His passion, and His death, He passed through all the circumstances of our nature, but He bore them all by the power of His own. He was Himself the cause of His birth, He willed to suffer what He could not suffer, He died though He lives for ever. Yet God did all this not merely through man, for He was born of Himself, He suffered of His own free will, and died of Himself. He did it also as man, for He was really born, suffered and died. These were the mysteries of the secret counsels of heaven, determined before the world was made. The Only-begotten God was to become man of His own will, and man was to abide eternally in God. God was to suffer of His own will, that the malice of the devil, working in the weakness of human infirmity, might not confirm the law of sin in us, since God had assumed our weakness. God was to die of His own will, that no power, after that the immortal God had constrained Himself within the law of death, might raise up its head against Him, or put forth the natural strength which He had created in it. Thus God was born to take us into Himself, suffered to justify us, and died to avenge us; for our manhood abides for ever in Him, the weakness of our infirmity is united with His strength, and the spiritual powers of iniquity and wickedness are subdued in the triumph of our flesh, since God died through the flesh.

7. Christus qui hominem, qui Deum se egerit. Cur nasci voluerit, cur pati, cur mori.---Nostri igitur causa 0286A haec omnia Jesus Christus manens, et corporis nostri homo natus, secundum consuetudinem naturae nostrae locutus est: non tamen omittens naturae suae esse quod Deus est. Nam tametsi in partu et passione et morte naturae nostrae res peregerit; res tamen ipsas omnes virtute naturae suae gessit, dum sibi 263 ipse origo nascendi est, dum pati vult quod eum pati non licet, dum moritur qui vivit. Et tamen cum haec Deus per hominem agit, ex se natus, per se passus, et ex se mortuus; non et hominem se non egit, dum et natus, et passus, et mortuus est. Haec autem jam ante conditionem mundi sacramenta sunt coelestium mysteriorum constituta, ut unigenitus Deus homo nasci vellet, mansuro in aeternum in Deo homine: ut Deus pati vellet, ne passionibus 0286B humanae infirmitatis diabolus desaeviens, legem in nobis peccati Deo infirmitatem nostram assumente retineret: ut Deus mori vellet, ne qua insolens potestas adversus Deum esset, neque creatae in se virtutis posset usurpare naturam, cum se immortalis Deus intra legem mortis habuisset. Nascitur itaque Deus assumptioni nostrae, patitur vero innocentiae, postremo moritur ultioni: dum et homo noster in Deo permanet, et infirmitatum nostrarum 0287A passiones Deo sociae sunt, et spiritales nequitiae ac malitiae potestates triumpho carnis, Deo per carnem moriente, subduntur.