Talis decet partus Deum'--a birth of that kind is befitting to
one who is God. We do not--no one ever did--believe Christ to be
God because He was born of a Virgin; that is not the order of
thought [and we have seen that it was certainly not the order of
Apostolic preaching]; but we can recognize that if He was God, it
was not unnatural for Him to be so born. No sound genuine
historical criticism can deny that the Virgin-Birth was part of
the Creed of Primitive Christianity, and that nothing that can be
truly called science can object to that belief, unless it starts
with the assumption, which, of course, it cannot even attempt to
prove, that Christ was never more than man."*

Similarly Professor Stanton: "The chief ground on which thoughtful
Christian believers are ready to accept it [the miraculous Conception]
is that, believing in the personal indissoluble union between God and
man in Jesus Christ, the miraculous Birth of Jesus Christ is the only
fitting accompaniment for this unions and, so to speak, the natural
expression of it in the order of outward effects."+

--
* Guardian, November 19, 1902.
+ Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah p. 376.
--

IV

OUR LORD AS THE SECOND ADAM

But we may surely go further than this, and say that, in regard to
St. Paul, his language as to the Second Adam seems to necessitate
the Virgin-Birth. In St. Paul's view there are, so to speak, only
two men: "The first man is of the earth earthy; the second man is
the Lord from heaven" (1 Cor. xx. 47.)--a new starting-point for
humanity. This doctrine of the Second Adam, of this fresh start
given to the human race by Jesus Christ, would seem to require His
Birth of a Virgin, for the Virgin-Birth is bound up with any really
Catholic notion of the Incarnation. For what is the Catholic
doctrine of Incarnation? Do we mean by Incarnation that on an
already existing human being there descended in an extraordinary
measure the Divine Spirit, so that He was by moral association so
closely allied to God that He might be called God? Do we mean that
some preminent saint, called Jesus, responded with such "signal
readiness" to the Divine Voice, "and realized more worthily than
any other man 'the Divine idea' of human excellence, so that to Him,
by a laxity of phrase not free from profaneness, men might thus
ascribe a so-called 'moral Divinity'"? Then, I say quite freely,
if that is what we mean, that the Virgin-Birth is, so far as we can
se