gion
for a feminine goddess, and these abandoned the worship of Isis, Demeter,
and Diana for that of the Virgin Mary. Thus began an evolution which is
still going on, and we see now that it was impossible that the world
should understand at once the spiritual meaning of life as Christ taught
it--that material facts merely symbolize the divine. For instance, the
Gospel of John has been called the philosophical or spiritual gospel.
And in spite of the fact that it has been assailed and historically
discredited by modern critics, for me it serves to illuminate certain
truths of Christ's message and teaching that the other Gospels do not.
Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not refer to the miraculous birth. At
the commencements of Matthew and Luke you will read of it, and it is to
be noted that the rest of these narratives curiously and naively
contradict it. Now why do we find the miraculous birth in these Gospels
if it had not been inserted in order to prove, in a manner acceptable to
simple and unlettered minds, the Theory of the Incarnation, Christ's
preexistence? I do not say the insertion was deliberate. And it is
difficult for us moderns to realize the polemic spirit in which the
Gospels were written. They were clearly not written as history. The
concern of the authors, I think, was to convert their readers to Christ.

"When we turn to John, what do we find? In the opening verses of this
Gospel the Incarnation is explained, not by a virgin birth, but in a
manner acceptable to the educated and spiritually-minded, in terms of the
philosophy of the day. And yet how simply! 'In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' I prefer John's
explanation.

"It is historically true that, in the earlier days when the Apostles'
Creed was put forth, the phrase 'born of they Virgin Mary' was inserted
for the distinct purpose of laying stress on the humanity of Christ, and
to controvert the assertion of the Gnostic sect that he was not born at
all, but appeared in the world in some miraculous way.

"Thus to-day, by the aid of historical research, we are enabled to regard
the Creeds in the light of their usefulness to life. The myth of the
virgin birth probably arose through the zeal of some of the writers of
the Gospels to prove that the prophecy of Isaiah predicted the advent of
the Jewish Messiah who should be born of a virgin. Modern scholars are
agreed that the word Olmah which Isaiah uses does n