n the flesh. When a cloud received Him out of their
sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still
in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with
God and with them. They used their current symbol for God--the Most High
enthroned above His world--and they pictured Jesus as seated at the
right hand of the throne of God. Or they took some vivid metaphor of
personal friendship--a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat
with them--and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience.
These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God's life and
ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize
heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our
literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New
Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith.

The second question was asked even during Jesus' lifetime--"Whence hath
this Man these things?" The New Testament writers deal with the question
of Jesus' origin in a variety of ways. The earliest of our present
gospels opens its narrative with the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as
He answers John's summons to baptism. It seems to explain His
uniqueness by the extraordinary spiritual endowment bestowed upon Him in
manhood. The first and third gospels contain besides this two other
traditions: they introduce Jesus as the descendant of a line of devout
progenitors, going back in the one case to David and Abraham, and in the
other still further through Adam to God. They bring forward His
spiritual heredity as one factor to account for Him. Side by side with
this they place a narrative which records His birth, not as the Son of
Joseph through whom His ancestry is traced, but of the Holy Spirit and a
virgin-mother. This gives prominence to the Divine and human parentage
which brought Him into the world. In Paul and John and the _Epistle to
the Hebrews_, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly
Being--the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with
God, the Son through whom He made the worlds. They present us with a
Divine Being made a man. This last conception is not combined by any New
Testament writer with a virgin-birth. When our New Testament books were
put together, the Church found all four statements in its Canon, and
combined them (although some of them are not easily combined) in its
account of Jesus' origin.

Historical