Cornelius a Lapide

But when the fulness of the time was come. When the time fixed beforehand for the end of the law and the beginning of the Gospel was fully come, we were transferred from the servitude of the law to the freedom of sonship. S. Bernard (Serm. 1 de Adventu) explains the passage somewhat differently : “ The fulness and abundance of temporal things had brought about forgetfulness and famine of eternal things . It was at the moment when temporal things 288 THE EPISTLE TO THE held sway that eternal things opportunely arrived ” But this is a symbolical rather than literal explanation. Literally, the fulness of time is not the abundance of temporal things, but the full completion of the pre-determined time. God sent forth His Son , as His legate or Apostle, with full instructions to act on His behalf. He sent His Son, not by change of place, as though He left heaven and arrived at earth ; but the Son, remaining where He was, in heaven and on earth, took a new role, viz., that of a Human Ambassador from God to man. Made of a woman . Woman here denotes, not corruption, but the female sex, and applies as well to a virgin as to another woman. Made of a woman denotes conception without a male, from the sole substance of the mother. From this it clearly follows that Christ did not assume a heavenly body, which He brought to earth by passing through the Blessed Virgin as through a pipe, as the Valentinians formerly, and the Anabaptists now teach, but that His body was formed from the Virgin. Made under the law . Though Christ, even as man, was not subject to the law, because He was still the Son of God, the giver of the law, yet of His own free-will He observed it, and of His own free-will submitted Himself to circumcision, and to its other ceremonial enactments. Made , therefore, denotes, not obligation, but practice ; not right, but fact. To redeem them that were under the law . By paying the price, might bestow on them Christian liberty. The reference is to the bondage of the law, not of sin. That we might receive the adoption of sons, (i.) The Son of God was made of a woman Son of man, that He might make the sons of men sons of God. " God was made man ,” says S. Bernard, “ that man might be made God . 19 (2.) This adoption is by grace, by which we obtain not only a right to be heirs of God the Father, but also participation in the Divine Nature, the Holy Spirit Himself, and sonship with God. (3.) Although all the righteous, even before Christ, were sons of God by adoption, yet the Apostle calls them all slaves — (a) because, although the righteous were truly sons of SONS, NOT SLAVES 289 God, yet they had not the status of sons, but only of slaves, being under the law, and consequently under the spirit of servile fear, (b) Because they had not the right of sonship through the law, but through their faith in Christ yet to come ; and they belonged, therefore, more to the New Law than to the Old, as Augustine proves happily and exhaustively (contra Duos Epp . Pelag. cap . 4). (c) Because they lacked the fruit of adoption, in being unable to discern their heavenly inheritance before Christ revealed it (d) Because Christ,, in setting us free from the yoke of the law, substituted for it in the New Law the one spirit of adoption and of love