ers and refrain
from stating it plainly are doing their duty to their congregations.
No Old Testament passage whatever is directly or indirectly a prophecy
of the virgin birth of Jesus. To insist upon this may seem to many
like beating a man of straw, but if so the man of straw still retains a
good deal of vitality.

+The virgin birth in the gospels.+--The only two gospels in which the
virgin birth is alluded to are Matthew and Luke, and the nativity
stories contained in these are very beautiful, especially those
peculiar to Luke. But the two gospels are mutually contradictory in
their account of the circumstances attending the miraculous birth.
Each contains a genealogy which professes to be that of Joseph, not of
Mary, and these are inconsistent with each other. What has the
genealogy of Joseph got to do with the birth of Jesus if Jesus were not
his own son? The conclusion seems probable that in the earlier
versions of these gospels the miraculous conception did not find a
place, or else that two inconsistent sources have been drawn upon
without sufficient care being taken to reconcile them. But this is not
the only discrepancy. Matthew gives Bethlehem as the native place of
Joseph and Mary, Luke says Nazareth. Matthew says not a word about the
census of Cyrenius as the motive for the journey to Bethlehem, but
leads us to suppose that the holy family were already in residence
there. Then again he tells us of the coming of the wise men from the
East, their public inquiry as to the whereabouts of the holy child, the
jealousy of Herod, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into
Egypt. Luke says nothing about these things, but gives us an entirely
different set of wonders, including the attendance of an angelic host
and the annunciation to the shepherds. So far from recording any
massacre, or any hasty flight, he tells us that some time after His
birth the babe was taken to the Temple at Jerusalem to be presented to
the Lord, and that afterwards He and His parents "returned into Galilee
to their own city Nazareth." According to Matthew Nazareth was an
afterthought and only became the residence of the holy family after the
return from Egypt. These accounts do not tally, and no ingenuity can
reconcile them. The nativity stories belong to the poetry of religion,
not to history. To regard them as narrations of actual fact is to
misunderstand them. They are better than that; they take us into the
region