moral perfections He expresses God so far as we can know Him and man so far as man can hope and grow.

How Son of God.

Is His Sonship different from ours, or only an expansion of the fullness and perfection of our sonship? This last seems to me a most important question. If He was born as we were born—that is, as to the beginning of His earthly life, there can be no pre-eminent sense in which He was the Son of God. He was either a happy accident of natural birth or a "sport" in evolution.

The Virgin Birth.

This brings us to that doctrine which is the greatest challenge to the doubter: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary,"—a doctrine fiercely fought by Harnack and yet by no means to be dismissed as he dismisses it. His teaching on this point seems to me the result of his theory of Christianity. If one seeks to rid Christianity of the supernatural, here is the place to begin.

Dignity of the Story.

A Greater Puzzle.

But who will not feel the force of the position that, granted God was to be incarnate, the story of Christ's incarnation is the noblest and most probable? He is not born of a man's lust nor of a woman's desire—but of the submission of untainted womanhood to the direct creative power of God. The alternative to this is the Divinest man in all the world born of sinning and not yet married parents. If the new doctrine of heredity be true that men may inherit good as well as evil, we still have an astounding fact to account for; namely, the birth of such a child from such conditions, that is, with all the good kept in and all the bad left out.

Parthenogenesis a Fact.

When men speak of a virgin birth as incredible and impossible and as the weakest of all Christian doctrine, do they know or have they forgotten that parthenogenesis (virgin birth) is a fact in nature; existing, for example, in as highly organized insects as the honey bee? There are other insects which are parthenogenetic at one time and sexually productive at another. There are also hints of it in human life known to anatomists which can not be fully discussed here.

Among the Bees.

A Small Departure from Nature.

The virgin queen bee produces males in abundance, but can not produce females until she has made her nuptial flight and met her mate in an embrace invariably fatal to him. Nor does she ever need to meet another. From that time on, she is the fruitful mother of every kind of bee life the hive needs; the undeveloped females called neuters and those who become queens by being fed on royal food. Virgin birth is therefore imbedded in nature's order. To occur in the human species nature need call in no novelty. Christ, if born of a virgin, was born with the smallest possible departure from the order of nature. A process known in a lower form of life was carried into the higher to produce the unique being called for by the spiritual needs of mankind.

The Historical Statement.

Passing over the historical assertions which follow the doctrine of the virgin birth, "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried," because there is nothing in these statements difficult or incredible, we reach the doctrine of His resurrection, "the third day He rose from the dead," a doctrine next to that of the virgin birth in natural difficulty of acceptance.

Christ's Resurrection.

Surprise of Disciples.

The Fact Accounts for History.

Faith in this seems to me to depend on how far we have accepted Christ's Deity and His incarnation. If by the Holy Ghost we have been able "to say that Jesus is the Lord;" if by that blessed energy we perceive His Divine mastership; if by the same energy we feel that He has transformed us into the image of His dear Son; raising us "from the death of sin into the life of righteousness" it is not difficult to believe that Jesus "the power of the Resurrection" rose from the dead. "The fact of the Resurrection and belief in the fact is not explicable by any antecedent conditions apart from its truth."5 The disciples did not expect what they saw. His death was for them so far as we can see, without hope. They were not able yet to interpret His prophecy that He would build again His temple, nor understand the spirituality of His kingdom. These facts seem to me utterly to demolish the theory of a vision called up by eager, yea, agonizing, expectation. The idea of the Resurrection justifies His prophecies as to Himself and the fact accounts, better than any theory which denies the fact, for the faith and founding of the early Church as well as for the course of subsequent history and of the believer's experience.

Slow Belief in Resurrection.

It is much to see that belief became belief only with great difficulty. The idea of the Resurrection was strange and alarming to the disciples. "They were terrified and affrighted and supposed they beheld a spirit." Slowly by tests of sense as well as by persuasions of teaching did the disciples come to believe that the Christ of the Resurrection was the same Christ who suffered on the cross.

Not an Invention.

An Eye-witness Story.

It seems impossible that the Resurrection could have been an invention or that the account of it could be a work of the imagination. The last is almost as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. In detail, in naturalness, even in the presence of difficulties and hindrances to easy belief of the story, the narrative seems that of an eye-witness. No reasoning can bring faith, however, to one who denies the miraculous. As a fact, the Resurrection is incapable of naturalistic explanation. To those who deny the miraculous I can only again point out how Huxley cuts out the a priori argument from Hume as worthless. As quoted in his biography, Huxley says: "We are not justified in the a priori assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, can not change. The assumption is illegitimate because it involves the whole point in dispute."

Ascent into Heaven.

The Ascension.

Nature not Wholly Love.

Evil and Good.

Necessarily miraculous also is the doctrine, "He ascended into heaven." In this He passed from the visible into the invisible; from the conditions of human life to those of the life of a spirit; from the work of redemption to that of intercession. If His resurrection be accepted, His ascension presents no difficulties to faith. This, with His incarnation, and the facts of His earthly life are the manifestation of the tender side of God to the senses even as His wisdom and power are shown to the senses by the facts and laws of nature. As to the doctrine, "God is love," nature's word can never be conclusive. In the natural kingdom joy and sorrow, ease and pain, love and hate, kindness and cruelty, trust and terror exist side by side, as do life and death. No man concludes, from nature alone, that God is ruled by love. Because man can not conclude this, Ormuzd and Ahriman are found substantially in all religions, as in that of the Parsees, except in the Christian. Here the warfare is not to be eternal. The victory of good is to come. Divine help is promised, that it may be secured in every soul. The conquest of evil by good is within that Christian omnipotence which Paul knew. "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." It requires a Christ to show that the path to rest is through toil; that the way to ease is through suffering; that the highway to life passes through death. Only thus can "mortality be swallowed up of life."

The Meaning of Jesus.

Christ as