Section IV

the virgin Mary

(Luke 1; Matt. 1)

It was six months after Elisabeth, the mother of the promised forerunner of Messiah, had conceived, that the second and greater manifestation of the theocratic Spirit of God took place. Mary, the Israelite maiden of Nazareth, the betrothed of Joseph, received the heavenly message. The angel Gabriel appeared to her, and brought her the message that she was to be the mother of the Messiah.

This wonderful event is a rhythm of the mutual action which took place between the highest and most glorious influences of the theocratic Spirit of God, and the most elevated and holiest frame of that elect soul, who was to be the starting-point of a new and higher creation. The majesty of that power of God which was bringing grace, and founding the kingdom of salvation, suddenly appears before her mind in a holy hour of prayer as a bright vision. She experiences the first effect of this manifestation; the word of God, from the mouth of the angel, that she is highly favoured of God, the elect among all women, resounds through her soul. Hence, the first word of the message is a greeting from God, in which her reconciliation, her peace with God, and her high vocation are assured to her. The blessed and glad surprise of the assurance of her eternal election penetrates her whole being.

But scarcely was this experience vouchsafed unto her, than her soul was troubled to its depths. In the surprise of humility, she was unable to understand the meaning of the salutation: she cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. She thus confirmed its effect, and made way for the second part of this message. Another and still brighter effulgence of the revealing power of God follows upon this humble fear. It is answered, and assured to her, that the highest blessing in Israel is destined to her, that she is to bring forth the Messiah. The angel already calls Him, and her rejoicing heart also calls Him, Jesus, the help of God, the salvation of God. He stands before her soul in His glory, the Son of the Most High. His form is justly Israelite: He appears as the royal son of David, who is to possess the throne of His father. But His nature is Christ-like: His kingdom is eternal; a kingdom which will develop itself in the infinity of the Divine Spirit is promised Him.¹ Lost in the heartfelt aspirations of pure love, she contemplates Him whom she is to bring forth. All the longings of Israel, nay, of humanity, for the divine-human Lord and Saviour, for Him who was to be the honour of the human race, kindle within her heart, and her whole soul is dissolved in desires after Him, under the influence of the divine announcement sent to her from heaven.

But she feels that this Being, as the highest thought of God, His express image, His most glorious communication and gift, soars high above her. How can she become the mother of the Messiah-she the virgin? Not desponding doubt, but the enlightened inquiry of a clear understanding, expresses its helplessness in presence of the Eternal by this: How? Mary inquires, with a greatness and purity in which all maidenly bashfulness is absorbed, in which true maidenliness expresses itself in perfect liberty of mind: ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’² Then follows the third and most exalted operation of the divine manifestation? The Holy Spirit bears her spirit beyond the limits of the old æon. She is baptized, in full inspiration, into the death of surrender to the dealings of God. Her development has now attained the climax of the earlier humanity. Painters rightly represent Gabriel as presenting to Mary the branch of lilies. The lily branch denotes her own life, in this perfect, inspired frame. ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God!’ Thus that divine operation which she experiences sounds like a saying which enlightens her whole being. The Holy Ghost perfects her frame of mind, and the power of God completes, while this frame continues, that creative work whose result was the germination and production of the flower of the human race from her life, the lily flower from the lily branch. The Word becomes flesh.

Mary abides in the glory of God’s wonder-working power. She feels certain that Omnipotence is at hand, when Divine Grace and Truth make a promise. Assurance enters her soul as a distinct word of God: with God nothing shall be impossible.

Thus her glance is enlightened to penetrate the sphere of God’s wonder-working power. In this clear vision of the realm of the new revelation, her soul perceives her friend Elisabeth; it is announced to her that the childless and barren one has conceived.

Thus had the operation of God appointed and depicted her lot. She must have felt what was before her, while treading this path of miracle: how she might become an enigma to her betrothed husband; lose her honour in the eyes of the world, and be led into the very darkest path—a path of death to a Jewish virgin. But it was the Lord who had called her, and He could testify for her. She said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy word,’ In God’s strength she quickly decided, ready even to enter upon the darkness of shame, though more painful to a maiden heart than death itself. And thus was she truly the mother of Jesus, of the hero of God, who endured the cross, despising the shame, and saved the world by His death upon the cross. Henceforth God is to be her fame. But the abrupt manner in which her words break off, her deep silence, is very significant. She was absorbed in the contemplation not only of the glory, but of the deathlike sternness of her destiny.

Human nature had in its religious development, in its pressure towards the light, under the leading of the Spirit of God, now attained that wondrous height, which formed the centre of its historical, the end of its natural, the beginning of its spiritual course. As its first æon, the æon of natural life, had begun with a miracle, so its second or spiritual æon could not but proceed from a miracle. In other words, it must proceed from a truly new principle, a principle breaking through the old æon, with the superior force of a higher grade.

The Gospel announcement of the miraculous descent of Christ from the Virgin was opposed by all contemporaries whose theories of inspiration were infected by an Ebionite mutilation, and sometimes passed over, or but slightly touched upon, even by more orthodox theologians. There is, however, no reason for thus treating this doctrine, though fear of the profanation which this holy mystery so soon incurs from common minds might induce us rather to defend it than to bring it prominently forward. They who do not hold it in its connection with all the essential doctrines of Christianity, and a thoroughly christological view of life and of the world, and they who do not cherish it, in the simplicity of childlike faith, as the most glorious, the central miracle of the world’s history, cannot profit by it. But it is one thing not to bring this dogma prominently forward, and quite another to doubt or reject it. Its positive denial robs every other doctrine of Christianity of its full value. Neither the death of Christ nor His resurrection can be known in their whole significance, if His birth is positively misconceived. In this case, there is a crack in the bell, and its pure, full, penetrating sound is gone.

The discovery was thought to have been made, that this doctrine was non-essential, as being insufficient for its purpose. This arose, however, from the assumption, that it was set up by the Christian Church, for the purpose of representing the life of Christ as free from original sin, by reason of His miraculous birth. The sagacious remark was consequently made, that the removal of male instrumentality in the origin of a human being did not suffice to prevent his hereditary sinfulness, since there was still the instrumentality of the sinful mother, and the influence of her sinfulness upon the life of her child.³ This line of argument might indeed be of importance, if the assumption were a correct one. But the question is not, what is the result of a dogma? but, what are we taught concerning one of the great original facts of Christianity? and this sagacious argument looks, by the side of this teaching, something like a child by the side of a man whose knee he barely reaches.

This doctrine has been attacked by the remark, that the earlier expressions of the Evangelists concerning it are not borne out by the Gospels, in which, on the contrary, Jesus is often designated the son of Joseph⁴ (Luk 2:41; Luk 2:48; Luk 4:22; Mat 13:55; Joh 6:42). It seems, then, to be required that, in Christ’s life, those duties which sons and step-sons owe to their parents, as such, should be omitted. It would certainly be acting in a strictly dogmatical manner thus, in compliance with the requisition of critics, to sacrifice the due expression of filial respect to a doctrinal form.

Nay, it has been required that Jesus should have appealed to His miraculous origin, when the Jews spoke of His lowly condition. This requisition, however, need only be mentioned; its true value cannot be unappreciated by any candid mind.⁵

But when it is asserted that this doctrine is found in none of the writings of the apostles, except in the Gospel tradition of the childhood of Jesus, such an assertion can only be explained upon the supposition of a most imperfect acquaintance with the signification of those genuine christological definitions which so frequently recur in the New Testament.⁶ John clearly enough defines the miraculous origin of Christ, when he says, chap. 1:14: ‘The Word was made flesh.’ On the assumption of the natural descent of Jesus from Joseph and Mary, he could at most have said, The Word came in the flesh; but that the Word Himself should have become flesh, denotes a creative incident; the miraculous entrance of the all-embracing idea, in the concrete manifestation, the complete identity of the Eternal Word and human flesh, in the element of a new life. No doubt can exist of the import of this deeply significant saying, when we hear Jesus (chap. 3:6) lay down the rule: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit; and make (ver. 3) the being born again of the Spirit the condition of entrance into the kingdom of heaven to all men who, as flesh, are born of the flesh.⁷ The son of Joseph could only have become a prophet of God by being born again, and could not have been the Redeemer born in the flesh; nor could it have been said of Him (ver. 30), He that cometh from above, is above all. The Apostle Paul, too, undoubtedly refers to the same fact, when he represents Christ (1Co 15:47) as the man from heaven.⁸ He agrees with John in proclaiming the miraculous origin of Christ. The Christology of both is clear and decided, and raised, even in its first incident, above every Ebionite misconception. Paul represents this man, who is the Lord from heaven, as the second man, in decided contrast to the first man, who is of the earth, earthy. He is the heavenly counterpart to the earthly man, the second Adam; He was consequently made a quickening spirit, as Adam was a living soul (ver. 45). Thus even in His origin He was the second man, as Adam was the first. Had He become man in the usual course of the Adamic generations, He must have been attributed, collectively with the whole race, to the first man, to Adam. But it was that which was new, which was miraculous in His origin, it was His actual origination from the life of the Spirit, which made Him the second man. The statement of the apostle is, under this aspect, not merely an announcement, it is also a proof of the mystery in question. The review of Cerinthus, that it is an impossibility, has of late been repeated with approbation.⁹ It is said that such a generation would be the most striking departure from every law of nature,¹⁰ and again that we must not indeed, even in a Christian point of view, confound the notion of a wonder with that of a miracle. A wonder is the effect of a new principle of life at its first appearance in a pre-existing and subordinate sphere of life, an effect produced by some sort of means. A miracle, on the contrary, is doubly contrary to nature, monstrous, and therefore only a fictitious wonder. On one side, it is deficient in means or historical proof; on the other, in dynamic foundation or ideal proof. It must, therefore, certainly be considered a miracle, that a human being should, in the midst of the Adamic generations, be born without paternal generation; and in opposition to such a fiction, it might always be remarked, that God never works superfluous wonders. It must, indeed, be granted that the first human beings originated without natural generation, but that, when once the way of generation had been ordained of God, the coming of a human being was not to be expected in any other manner. The plant, e.g., begins, so to speak, with a wonder in its origin, in the seed, or in the root; but when its development has once begun, the stock continues advancing in regular progression according to law, till it reaches its destined height. Then, however, something new appears, viz., the blossom, the wonder of the summit, corresponding to the wonder in the ground. The blossom is not to be compared to a miracle, but to a wonder. There is an adequate cause for it, but, at the same time, plant-life appears therein as a new, and often an ennobled and elevated principle. It is not enough to say of this wonder, it might happen, for it is in the very nature of the plant that it must happen. It was thus also that the tree of human nature, according to the profound hint of the Apostle Paul, shot upwards from the dark earth toward heaven,—the wonder in the ground, the root of the race, Adam, corresponding to the wonder of the summit, of the development of the race, entering into a spiritual and heavenly life, the flower of the human race, even Christ.

When we consider that the second man appeared during the later stage of human life as the climax of the whole organism, as the counterpart to the first man who was its foundation, we obtain a harmonious and exclusive view, plainly bearing within itself a character of internal necessity. It may be indeed inconvenient to gaze upwards to this exalted height of humanity; uncomfortable to acknowledge that the second man, the principle of the world’s end, has already appeared in our midst; difficult to suppose that humanity has already reached the highest point of its religious development, while its branches still spread abroad in such rank luxuriance; but it is really far more difficult to expose our view of the future lot of the human race to the supposition of an ‘evil’ endlessness, to ignore the unity of the race in its development, and to reject the announcement of the close of this development in its consummation, in the one individuality which presents the phenomenon of the divine life in the human. The flower of humanity has unfolded itself in the climate of God’s presence;¹¹ it has received the fulness of His life, and now pours forth the same for ever, in order to consecrate by its blessing the wild plant, and to ennoble it for life in heaven. As the first man originated, without father and without mother, from that creative agency of God which spiritualized the dust of the earth, so did the second man originate without father, by that effectual power of the Most High which spiritualized humanity.¹²

Generation is certainly an honourable and noble form of human origin; nevertheless, being in itself only a function of natural life, its result can be only a natural one, i.e., an unspiritualized, undeified human life.¹³ It is capable of sinking below the level of innocence, and in its rudeness and wildness might lay the foundation of a ruder and more savage form of human life. It does not, however, exclude the influences of the Spirit, and can even, under its consecrations, receive continually increasing light.¹⁴ The Franciscans have represented the consecration of origin amidst which Mary entered the world, in the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin—a dogma which is the true type of a mediזval myth.

Mary issued from the theocratic race, which was consecrated by the Spirit, at the time when it had attained its highest development. In her person, the mutual penetration of flesh and spirit, the consecration of matter, had attained its highest power; and it was under such conditions that the birth of ‘that holy thing,’ in which the Word was to become flesh, took place. But the form of generation, even at the climax of its consecration, is not to be placed on a level with the formation of a human being taking place in the pure element of human inspiration, under the agency of the divine power. That inspiration of Mary, under which Christ was conceived and born, is represented as a permanent elevation of mind; hence her song of praise is not introduced, like that of Zacharias, with the words: She was filled with the Holy Ghost. She was continually filled with the Holy Ghost in these glorious days of her visitation. Our due estimation of the uniqueness of Christ’s origin depends on our appreciation of the contrast which such a state of inspiration presents to what is obscure, enslaved, and often selfish in ordinary generation.¹⁵ Natural generation not only always entails an incongruence between flesh and spirit, such as must be shown to be annulled in the principle of Christianity, but must result in a particularity in the being begotten, such as must not appear in the new spiritual head of mankind. Not to mention the contamination of disease derived from their natural life, the curse of an evil disposition in their blood inherited in his blood, each descendant receives from his father and mother, through the reception into his own life of a proportion of the several partialnesses of theirs, a character which is both limited and infected with peculiarities; hence he can be but a single member in the organism of humanity, nay, he must be such; and it is with reference to this his destination that his peculiar gift, his province, his virtue exists. But for this very reason, no mere son of Joseph could, as the head of mankind, include the whole race. None but the Son of Mary, conceived by the divine operation, could, as the Son of man, become the spiritual head of humanity.¹⁶

With the birth of this second man, the first æon of the human race, that of natural human life, terminated, and its second æon, that of spiritual human life, began. The opponents of the doctrine of the miraculous birth of Christ cannot comprehend this idea, because they do not comprehend the general sublimity of reality, the ascending series of reality, the succession of æons which are ever exhibiting increasingly glorious spheres of life and manifestations of God’s power. According to their view, we are now in the midst of that course of unalterable conformity to law, on the part of nature and of life, which is utterly unsusceptible of modification. The progress of natural laws is like an immeasurable railroad, without beginning or end. We ourselves are in the train, without remembrance of the beginning or hope of the end, and they who should alight would be crushed by the inexorable wheels. Such monotony and necessity is, however, no faithful type of the world of the Christian, nay, not even of the world of the geologist, who has a faint glimmer of the æon, in the relation of the present world to that insular primitive world in which gigantic amphibii, perhaps the ancient dragons and griffins, grotesquely sported among the marshy primitive islands. A second and higher form of life then appeared in place of the first, and geologists allow us a better prospect of a third than many theologians. It is upon the massive and firm basis of a succession of æons that the New Testament develops its plan of the world. This is entirely æonic in its nature. It soars on eagles’ wings towards heaven, and does not travel by the railroad of a mechanical philosophy along an interminable plain. The æon is a period of creation produced by and developing a new principle which forms its rhythm; it is the inner clock, the spring which is in all that is developed in vital progression. This period is at the same time an eternity, a special manifestation of the eternal. The æon begins with a principle which in a miraculous manner breaks through, seizes, and elevates into its own higher life, the former æonically developed sphere of life. Thus Adam was the principle of the first æon of mankind; thus Christ was that of the second. To him, therefore, who can rise to the æon doctrine of the New Testament, the reason of Christ’s miraculous birth will be manifest.

Even the heathen had some notions of this miracle, because they had an obscure perception of hereditary curse and inherited blessing, of desecrating or consecrating generation. They dreamed in significant myths of the Son of the Virgin; Hercules and Romulus, Pythagoras and Plato, as well as many others, were esteemed sons of gods. These dreams were types of the Coming One.¹⁷ When Isaiah spoke of the Virgin’s Son, whom he represented as a sign from God to his unbelieving sovereign (Isa 7:14), he expressed in his prophetic saying concerning the virginity of the mother and the consecration of her Son, who was to be called Immanuel, the mystery of that spiritual consecration of births, whose perfected fruit was to appear in the birth of Jesus. Many relatively virgin, that is, theocratically consecrated births, were to form the ascending series by which the miraculous birth of Christ was brought about. More and more virgin-like were the dispositions in which the noblest daughters of the theocracy became mothers; more and more divinely consecrated were the sons, who might be considered the produce of the most elevated theocratic dispositions; and ever more and more were these, the noblest children of Israel, conceived and born amidst the aspirations and hopes of their mothers to bring forth the Messiah, or at least a preliminary Messiah, a hero of God anointed with the Spirit. This was the consecration to whose working in Israel Isaiah referred, when he made the virgin-mother a sign of deliverance, and fore-appointed for her new-born son the name of Immanuel. At the termination of this continual consecration which took place along the line of Israel, the Virgin and her Son were to appear.

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Notes

1. To avoid a partial view of the origin of spiritual, vital phenomena, it is needful always to distinguish between their historical and ideal origin. Every individual has his historic origin in his genealogy (Traducianism); his ideal origin in the direct realization of the divine idea of his life (Creatianism).¹⁸ According to the former, an individual is a result of an infinite series of causes; according to the latter, a new and isolated being, a new divine thought, a singularity, destined, as an individual, to become, as a person, a celebrity. It is the historic origin of Christ with which we have hitherto been occupied. His antecedents begin in paradise. Christ is the seed of the woman, the express image of God, the development of that which had been defined as the image of God in the disposition of the first man. Religion is the first and most general form of the coming of Christ; God manifests Himself in man, man lays hold on God. But this piety on the part of man was at first uncaused, and consequently uncertain. Religion was shaken, obscured, and rendered for the most part passive, by the fall. It retained, however, a fundamental feature of activity. This became dead in Abraham. Man again laid hold on God in His word; God again called man by his faith. This was the second form of the coming of Christ, or the first stage of Christology in fallen humanity, the era of the promise. Then followed the era of the law. In the law, the mediator-prophet traced for the covenant people the first lineaments of Christ’s life;—in the moral law, the lineaments of His deeds; in the ceremonial, the lineaments of His sufferings. The law pronounced a curse upon the transgressor, and thereby prophesied a blessing in the Coming One, who would perfectly conform to it. It was placed over the people, but its essence lay in the life of the people. Nor did this essence consist alone in the prophet who was the mediator of the covenant, but also in the covenant feeling of the people, and the covenant dealings of God with them. Thus was the era of the prophets introduced. This was the era of the commencement of the real incarnation of God in His people. The covenant people shone with the brightness of the increase (Werden) of Christ among them, that is, in the inspired frames and announcements of their prophets. The flower had fully expanded, but now the blossom vanished, and the silent period of the formation of fruit followed. The theocratic life began, as an inner life, to seize upon and penetrate the people to its very core, and the period of popular christological life, especially under the Maccabees, appeared. Finally, the last stage of historic instrumentality occurred, the stage of the concentration of the christological formation in the life of Mary.

Without an appreciation of this historic instrumentality, we cannot attain to a clear recognition of the conformity to law manifested in the miraculous element of the life of Christ. We should, however, be entangled in misunderstandings of equal importance, by losing sight of the ideal in the historic origin of Christ. According to His ideal origin, He is not the Son of David, but the Son of God. In Him, the express image of God, the fulness of His being is manifested. The Son of God is, with reference to the Father, the expression, the character (Heb 1:3) of His being; with reference to the world, the motive for which it was produced (Col 1:15-16), according to the ideal significance of its nature; with reference to the relation between God and the world, the Logos, the Word in which the revelation of God and the spiritual enlightenment of the world is clearly expressed. Christian dogmatism has sought clearly to express the ideality of Christ’s origin, by decidedly holding that the divine Word did not take the person, but the nature of man. See Hase, Lehrbuch der evang. Dogmatik, p. 272. The decisions arrived at are in accordance with Scripture, in so far as they are calculated to exclude human limitation, speciality, and partialness from the individuality of Christ; but inasmuch as they trench too much upon His human individuality, they are akin to Monophysitism.

2. The Evangelist Matthew (chap. 1:22) refers the passage Isa 7:14, concerning the Virgin and her Son Immanuel, to the birth of Christ, with the words: ‘All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel; which, being interpreted, is God with us.’ For discussions on this passage, see Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 174. For its right understanding, it is necessary first to obtain a due estimate of the historical import and occasion of these words. Isaiah is giving a sign that the Lord will deliver the land from the attacks of the kings of Israel and Syria. He gives the sign to the house of David, after it had been hypocritically deprecated by king Ahaz, that the ‘virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name God with us;’ and adds, that ‘before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.’ It cannot be misunderstood that Isaiah is here speaking of a child who was to be born in the immediate future. The rejoicing of the land in this future is denoted by two incidents. First, the virgin, as soon as her child is born, shall express the disposition of the best in the land by the name she will give to her son: God with us! And then, when the child begins to awaken to moral consciousness, all danger will have disappeared. The rationalistic critic, however, insists upon making this immediate reference the exclusive one; and he thus explains the sign: ‘Prosaically expressed, before nine months have elapsed, the condition of the land shall be more hopeful, and within about three years the danger will have disappeared.’ The reference to Jesus, it is subsequently said, is pressed upon the prophet by the Evangelist (Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 180). The ‘prosaic’ explainer should not have forgotten that history is quite peculiar in Israel. First, it is worthy of remark, that the prophet turns from the unbelieving individual, and speaks to the house of David. Then the sign is at all events strangely chosen. The young woman (עַלְמָה) in question is still a virgin, or at any rate has not yet conceived. Now it is fore-announced, (1) that she shall conceive, (2) that she shall bear a son, and (3) that she shall have the theocratic courage to call his name Immanuel. The choice of such a sign must certainly be regarded as Messianic, by those who clearly perceive the difference between Messianic types and prophecies. The theocrat, filled as his mind is with anticipations, unconsciously forms prophetic types; for it certainly accords with the progress of that life which was perfected in Christ, that the sprouting leaf should unconsciously prophesy of the coming flower. The highest kind of types are those typical frames of mind found in the Messianic psalms, and to this class the present passage undoubtedly belongs. Prophecies, strictly so called, are conscious predictions; the more general kind are unconscious, yet nevertheless prophecies in types. First of all, the Alma, the Israelite virgin, who by her theocratic consecration carries virginity into marriage, is significant. This incident is that which is properly typical, the very nerve of the passage; it is ethic virginity, which in its progress brings to maturity the salvation of Israel. The next is a : she shall bear a son. The third belongs to prophecy strictly so called: she shall call him, God with us. The courage of that period shall be manifested by her disposition. Rightly did Matthew perceive the fulfilment of this prophetic and presentient expression, when the Virgin Mary brought forth the Son that had been promised her in a stable, amidst the machinations of Herod, and had the courage, in spite of the circumstances under which he was born, to call His name Jesus: the help of God, the salvation of God. (Comp. my work Ueber den geschichtlichen Charakter der kanon. Evangelien, p. 62.)

3. With respect to the psychology of the matter in question, theology is as little bound to explain the origin of Christ in the spiritualization of His mother, as the origin of Adam in the spiritualization of the earth. The striking natural analogies which occur in the usual course of nature are of a morbid kind. Physicians have spoken of a ‘fœtus formation, or growth of a human embryo, in a male or immature female body.’ See Hamburger, Entwurf eines naturl. Systems der Medizin, p. 368. ‘The sufficiency of a single individual for procreation is a law with the lower animals, and cannot therefore be directly denied to the higher. Hence such sufficiency must certainly be an internal property with them:’ p. 369.

1) It is hardly necessary to enter into the general assumption of criticism, that a promise or description of Messiah is circumscribed by Jewish narrowness because it appears in the costume and colouring of Israelite Messianism. For this assumption everywhere proceeds from the view that these descriptions can be only understood in a carnal and pharisaically narrow sense, while in fact they were understood by all the genuine children of the Israelite spirit in their symbolical, or rather their idealreal signification, in which also it was that they were uttered by the prophets. These critical notions presuppose that Christ could not be the Saviour of the world, in the conviction of the faithful Israelite. The measure in which the expressions of Old Testament Christology were understood and applied in a New Testament meaning, entirely depended on the individual degree of enlightenment of those who made use of these expressions, The Messianic idea of Mary must be regarded as essentially eel with the life of Christ Himself, since it became in her bosom the birth of Christ.

2) [Ellicott (Hist. Lect. p. 49) calls this the question ‘of a childlike innocence that sought to realize to itself, in the very face of seeming impossibilities, the full assurance of its own blessedness.’—ED.]

3) See Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 183 ; Schleiermacher, der christl, Glaube, vol. ii. p. 67. Although Schleiermacher pronounces the view, that male instrumentality was set aside in the generation of the Redeemer, insufficient for its intended purpose, and therefore superfluous, yet he seeks to maintain a higher operation, ‘which as a divine and creative agency was able, even if the generation were a perfectly natural one, so to change both the paternal and maternal influence that no sinfulness should be inherited.’ [On the question whether nativity from a virgin does of itself secure freedom from sin, Witsius (De Œcon. Fed. II. iv. 11) contents himself with quoting two diverse opinions. Müstricht says, it behoved the second Adam to be in the first Adam naturaliter sed non faderaliter, that is, to belong to our race, and yet to be free in His own person from the consequences of the fall; and this he thinks was accomplished by His birth from the Virgin. It seems obvious from Scripture that His extraordinary generation conferred on Him at once all that is conferred on others by regeneration, He was not born of the will of man, but of the will of God, and was therefore wholly pure from sin. It is difficult to see how this could otherwise have been effected. Young (Christ of History, 264) says:—‘It would have been incongruous, even offensive, had He not been thus physically separated from all of human kind’ An interesting chapter on this subject occurs in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (ii. 8), in which he takes occasion to state that there are four modes in which God can make man,— ‘aut de viro et de femina, sicut assiduns usus monstrat; aut nec de viro nec de femina, sicut creavit Adam ; aut de viro sine femina, sicut fecit Evam; aut de femina sine viro.’—Ep.]

4) The assertion, found also in Schleiermacher, that even the genealogies oppose the earlier accounts of the Evangelists, ‘by simply and inartificially referring to Joseph, without any respect to these statements,’ must be designated a false one, with respect to Matt. i. 16 and Luke iii, 23. In the former, the ever-recurring ‘ ʻbegatʼ (ἐγέννησε) is not repeated in the case of Joseph; in the latter, ‘being the son of Joseph’ is qualified by the words, ʻas was supposed’ (ὡς ἐνομίζετο),

5) Strauss, Leben Jesu, i, 185,

6) Schleiermacher der christliche Glaube, ii. 25; Strauss, Leben Jesu, i. 185.

7) Compare Neander, Life of Christ, p. 17.

8) Οὕτω καὶ γέγραπταμ ʻἘγένετο ὁ ,πρῶτας ἄνθρωποςʼ Αδὰμ εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν·ʼ ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδὰμ εἰς πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν. Ἀλλ’ οὐ πρῶτον τὸ πνευματικὸν, ἀλλὰ τὸ ψυχικὸν ἔπειτα τὸ πνευματικὸν. Ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς χοϊκός· ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπυς ὁ κύριος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ.  Vers. 45-47.

9) Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 182.

10) Id. p. 181

11) 1 Cor. xv. 47; John i. 18, iii. 13.

12) The passage, Gal. iv. 4, in which Christ is represented as made of a woman, is said to contribute nothing to the doctrine of His miraculous descent. Certainly the being ‘made of a woman’ may express merely the humanity, and even the weakness of man, as, ¢.g., Job xiv.1, But the definition here obtains a meaning of its own, from its connection with the words: when the fulness of the time was come (τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόναυ), God sent forth His Son. For when the apostle further designates Him who was sent, as γενόμενος ἐκ γυναικός,, this is certainly an expression for that culminating point, which was to appear in the fulness of the time, as the conclusion of the old won, To say that the fulness of the time had arrived, was to say that a new vital principle had appeared. The actual instrument of its introduction into the world was the consecrated woman ; in His ideal descent, He is the Son of God. But this new man subjected Himself to the law of the old human nature, in order to elevate it to His own Sonship. So far docs the expression γενόμενον ὑπὸ νομον (made under the law) forma contrast to γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός (made of a woman).

13) As then we have opposed that which seems to us the supernatural in the person of the Redeemer, so also natural generation, as being an act of the procreative power of human nature, through the joint instrumentality of the sexes, has been declared insufficient to account for His origin.’ Schleiermacher, der christl. Glaube, vol. ii. p. 66.

14) The doctrine, that human nature is consecrated by the influence of the Spirit that a still more mighty hereditary blessing was opposed to the hereditary curse, is evident even in the promise of the woman’s seed (Gen. iii. 15), and in the blessing of Noah (Gen. ix. 26, 27), but especially in the grant which Abraham received, that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed (Gen. xxii. 14). This frequently recurs both in the Old and New Testaments ; e.g., Isa. lxv. 20, 23; 1 Cor. vii. 14. The most heterogeneous minds, Talmudists and modern poets, concur in the assertion of this truth. The Rabbis taught (comp. Zelpke, die Jugendyeschichte des Herrn, p. 47 : ‘Omnes illi qui sciunt se sanctificare, ut par est (ubi generant) attrahunt super id spiritum sanctitatis et exeuntes ab eo illi vocantur filii Jehovee. Ea hora, qua filius hominis se sanctificat ad copulandum se cum conjuge confilio pact, datur super eum spiritus alius, plene sanctus,’ And Göthe uttered the significant lines:—

Man konnte erzogene kinder gebären

Wenn die Aeltern selber erzogen wären,

Had the modern Church as diligently cherished the doctrine of the inherited blessing, as it has that of the inherited curse, it might have far more successfully encountered many attacks, especially the dogma of Anabaptism. For the great prejudice of this sect consists in its denial of the Lord’s work in the very depths of human nature, His blessing in the line of Christian generation, by a rude and abstract application of the doctrine of hereditary sin,

15) Comp. Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, p. 830 (Clark’s Tr.)

16) This truth flashed upon Bruno Bauer, in a passage of his early review of Strauss’s Leben Jesu, in the Berl. Jahrbuch, cited by Krabbe in his lectures on the Leben Jesu, p. 71; and even though his announcement of it is defective in scholastic formule, yet this exposition cannot be called, as Krabbe insists, philosophical nonsense. Comp. Hanne, Rationalismus und spek. Theol., p. 96.

17) Compare Neander, Life of Christ, 18. Remarks opposed to this view, as, ¢.9., those of Strauss, Leden Jesu, vol. i. p. 208, are noticed in the First Book of this work, under the title, Ideality of the Gospel History. [See also on the virgin-born Budh, and cuore pete nhe of the East, in Kitto’s Bible Illustr., Life of our Lord, pp. 80-94.—ED.]

18) [Traducianism is the doctrine (maintained by Tertullian as being favourable to the doctrine of original sin) that the soul is propagated per traducem, just as the body is. Creatianism, on the contrary, maintains that every human soul is created as such, and united with the body in the womb,—ED.]