PRE-EXISTENCE OF CHRIST OUR

LORD. (See Generation .) His existence before he was born of the Virgin Mary, and even before the creation of the world by him. The fact is stated thus by Bishop Bull in his “Defence of the Nicene Creed:”—All the catholic doctors of the first three centuries taught, that Jesus Christ , he who was afterwards so called, existed before he became man, or before he was born, according to the flesh, of the Ble ed Virgin, in another nature, far more excellent than the human nature; that he appeared to holy men, giving them an earnest, as it were, of his incarnation; that he always presided over, and provided for, the Church, which in time to come he would redeem with his own blood; and of consequence that, from the beginning, the whole order or thread of the Divine dispensation, as Tertullian speaks, ran through him: further yet, that he was with the Father before the foundations of the world, and that by him all things were made.