themselves aloof. Those who are called their wives, such as Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Zipporah, were in name women, but in fact virtues. Such virtues can conceive seed 'only from God,' though-as God needs nothing for Himself-they conceive seed to the men who are their lovers. It is for this reason that Holy Scripture uses such modes of speech as indicate that these women, i. e. virtues, conceive for their husbands indeed but from God. Thus (Gen. xxi. 1) Sarah is introduced as pregnant when God visits her alone. Of Leah it is said (xxix. 31) that God 'opened her womb,' which is the work of the man. Rebecca (xxv. 21) conceived divinely in answer to Isaac's prayer. Again 'apart from supplication and prayer Moses having taken to wife the winged and lofty virtue Zipporah found her with child of no mortal1. The meaning of this mystical language of his Philo subsequently guards. Men, he says, make virgins into wives. God, by spiritual relationship with souls, makes wives into virgins. "The scripture (Jer. iii. 4. lxx) is careful to describe God as the husband not of a virgin but of virginity.' Now all this argument, which is quite in the mystical gnosticizing manner of Philo, is wholly alien to the spirit both of the Old Testament and of the New. We notice, for example, that when St. Paul is speaking in the case of Isaac of a 'birth after the spirit 2,' he shows no tendency to pass like Philo to the idea of 'virginity,' or to shrink from associating divine action with the language descriptive of the ordinary physical process of generation. Further

1 This seems built on no words in the biblical account.

2 Gal. iv. 22, 29.

there is no evidence justifying the belief that such a mode of thought as is found in Philo existed in the Palestinian Judaism out of which the narratives of the nativity have their origin.

(2) Setting aside the question whether Philo did or did not influence the fourth Gospel, it may be taken for certain he did not influence the language of the authorities upon which St. Matthew and St. Luke depend1. On the whole we may say that there is no connexion at all probable between the thoughts and language of the narratives of the nativity and the speculations of Philo about spiritual virginity.

The connexion of doctrine and fact.

What has been hitherto attempted is both to vindicate the historical character of the records of our Lord's miraculous birth at Bethlehem and also to show that in the earliest tradition of the Christian churches, as far as we can trace it, the belief in the Virgin Birth is found as a constant accompaniment of the confession of His Incarnation. What we have finally to do is to show cause why we should regard the belief in the Virgin Birth as, in fact, inseparable from belief in the

1 The author of The Kernel and the Husk assumes that the idea of the virginity of Mary was of Gentile origin, which is contrary to the evidence. The documents of the nativity are intensely Jewish.

Incarnation and, even more from belief in the sinless Second Adam.

For beyond a question, our opinion as to the inseparability of the supposed fact from the Christian idea will affect our estimate of the evidence. The historical evidence for our Lord's birth of a virgin is in itself strong and cogent. But it is not such as to compel belief. There are ways to dissolve its force. To produce belief there is needed-in this as in almost all other questions of historical fact-besides cogent evidence, also a perception of the meaning and naturalness, under the circumstances, of the event to which evidence is borne. To clinch the historical evidence for our Lord's virgin birth there is needed the sense, that being what He was, His human birth could hardly have been otherwise than is implied in the virginity of His mother. The logic of the matter may be represented on the ground of the Incarnation. Granted that the eternal Son of God did at a certain moment of time take flesh by a real incarnation in the womb of Mary,-granted that He was born as man, without change of personality or addition of another personality, but simply by the assumption of a new nature and by an entrance into new conditions of life and experience-granted in this sense the incarnation of the Son of God in the womb of Mary, can we conceive it to have taken place by the ordinary process of generation? Do not we inevitably associate with the ordinary process of generation the production of a new personality? Must not the denial of the Virgin Birth involve the position that Jesus was simply a new human person in whatever specially

intimate relations with God? This seems to the present writer to be very probably the case, but at the same time to be a question very difficult to argue. But the argument becomes almost irresistible when the question is removed from the idea of incarnation strictly considered, to the associated idea of the sinless humanity, the humanity of a Second Adam.'

Jesus Christ was a new departure in human life. Philosophers of different ages, from Plato to Carlyle, have been found scoffing at contemporary reformers, on the ground that their proposed reforms did not, could not, go deep enough to get at the root of the evils of human society. What is wanted to remedy these evils is a fresh departure-in some sense, a new birth, or regeneration of humanity1. So moral philosophers have reasoned: but it has been a matter of words. Jesus Christ alone has, in any adequate sense, translated this logical demand into actual reality. In Him we really find a 'Second Adam,' a new manhood. He appears among men in all the fulness of human faculties, sympathies, capacities of action and suffering; He was in all points such as we are except sin. But what an exception! As Jesus moves among the men of His day, as His historical presentation renews His image for each generation, by how great a gulf is He separated in His sinlessness, His perfection, from other men. He is very man, but new man. And with this quality of His person coincides His method. He will not take other men as He finds them and make the best

1 See Carlyle, Past and Present, bk. i. ch. 4 ‘Morrison's pill'; Plato, Republic-the argument of the whole work, especially bk. iv. pp. 425–6.

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of them. He demands of them the acceptance of a new birth; the fundamental reconstruction of their moral being on a new basis, and that basis Himself. 'Except a man be born anew he cannot see the kingdom of God.' 'Except ye turn'-with a radical conversion of the moral tendency of your being—'except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven1.' Christ demands, then, a fundamental moral reconstruction of humanity, and He makes it possible because He offers to men a new life. He offers to reproduce in each man who will believe in Him and yield himself to Him, the quality of His own life by the bestowal of His own Spirit. Himself the New Man, He can make all men new. But granted that in this fundamental sense Christ Jesus is a new moral creation, is it possible that this new moral creation can have involved anything short of a new physical creative act? Does not all we know of physical heredity, all we know of the relation of spirit and body, lead us to believe that the miracle of a new moral creation must mean the miracle of a new physical creation? If the moral character was new, must not the stuff of the humanity have been new too? Must not the physical generation of the Second Adam have been such as to involve at once His community with our nature and His exemption from it? I am not laying all the stress on this sort of logic. I would, here and elsewhere, keep a priori arguments in their place. But this logic seems to me at least strong enough to clinch the historical argument or even to condition the 1 St. John iii. 3; St. Matt. xviii. 3.