one article, it seems to indicate, as Augustine remarked, that Jesus had for His parents the Holy Spirit and Mary. Nor was it an unreal or fanciful possibility, against which Augustine was contending. There was danger at this point.

Augustine held that the Incarnation was accomplished by the influence of the Holy Spirit acting in and from the conception of Jesus, but acting also on the personality of Jesus throughout His life. He laid the stress upon the Divine activity, not upon the human contribution of Mary. So also Athanasius, who ranks with Augustine as the other of the two greatest Church fathers, asserts the Incarnation as the work of Deity alone. He differs, however, from Augustine, in that he does not attribute the Divine agency to the Holy Spirit, but to the Eternal Son Himself, the second distinction in the Godhead, who from His preëxistent state came down and was made man. This thought of the preëxistence of Christ, to which no allusion is made in the Apostles' Creed, was uppermost in the consciousness of religious and theological teachers in the East, and is the badge of Eastern creeds as compared with Western. And so Athanasius speaks, as representing another way of looking at the Incarnation, when he says:

"For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes to our realm, howbeit He was not far from us before. For no part of creation is left void of Him: He has filled all things everywhere, remaining present with His own Father. But He comes in condescension to show loving kindness upon us and to visit us. He takes unto Himself a body and that of no different sort from Being Himself mighty, and Artificer of everything, He prepares the body in the Virgin, as a temple unto Himself, and makes it His very own. " ("De Incar.," 8.)

ours.

"When He was descending to us, He fashioned His body for Himself from a Virgin, thus to afford to all no small proof of His Godhead, in that He who formed this is also Maker of everything else as well." ("De Incar.," 17. Robertson's ed.)

But not to dwell on this divergence, which would require too much space for its development, and is irrelevant here, it is to be noted that both Athanasius and Augustine, as men filled with the God consciousness, attribute the Incarnation to God alone; and the human agent, the Mother of Christ, stands in the back

ground of their thought. But they lived at a time when changes were impending, were indeed already in process, and were revolutionizing the old Catholic Church, of the first three centuries, into the Church of the later Byzantine type, or in the West, of the Middle Ages. And the issue turned on the Virgin-birth. These two Church fathers stood on the dividing line; Athanasius died in 373 and Augustine in 430. Both felt some effect of the coming change. Athanasius uses language in speaking of Mary which anticipates the later usage, but the use was rare and exceptional, and may be taken as incidental. And Augustine, that stern man and most rigid of theologians, makes Mary an exception to the working of the all-prevailing law and curse of original sin. His opponent Pelagius would have exempted many others. In making the sole exception of Mary, Augustine seems to be governed rather by motives of courtesy and delicacy than of strict theology. His language has always been noted as somewhat peculiar. But even so, he more than once asserts that Mary was born in original sin. She was conceived in iniquity, for she sinned in Adam. But in the matter of actual transgression Augustine makes a concession in her favor. "Of the Holy Virgin Mary, of whom out of honor to the

Lord, I wish no question to be made where sins are treated of, - for how do we know what mode of grace wholly to conquer sin may have been bestowed upon her who was found meet to conceive and bear Him of whom it is certain that He had no sin?"

The writers in the first three centuries who have most to say about the Virgin-birth belong to the Western, or Latin Church. Justin Martyr defends it against Trypho the Jew; with Justin also originated the famous comparison of Eve and Mary. He lived at Rome, and had come there from Asia Minor, and may have brought with him from thence a tendency to the exaltation of Mary. Justin was followed by Irenæus, who had also felt the influence of Asia Minor and who expanded the famous illustration how Eve had brought sin and Mary redemption to the world. The comparison was an unfortunate one, but it struck the popular imagination, and it was given greater vogue by Tertullian. That some difficulty was experienced in presenting evidence for the Virgin-birth is seen in the great weight attached to the prophecy in Isaiah vii. 14. The Jews, who were familiar with Hebrew and with their own history, refused to accept it. Justin and Irenæus and Tertullian and others rested upon it, despite the objections.

Origen recognized the difficulty; he had incorporated in the parallel columns of his "Hexapla" three Greek versions of the Old Testament, which were intended as improvements on the Septuagint translation. These versions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, substituted νεάνις for παρθένος, making the famous passage read "a young woman instead of a "virgin." But when Origen was engaged in meeting the objections of Celsus, and among them the objection to the Virgin-birth, he remarks on this passage: "Now if a Jew should split words and say that the words are not, 'Lo, a virgin,' but ‘Lo, a young woman,' we reply that the word 'Olmah'- which the Septuagint have rendered by 'a virgin,' and others by 'a young woman' — occurs, as they say, in Deuteronomy as applied to a virgin (Deut. xxii, 23, 24). Other arguments were sought from the sphere of animal life, where cases of parthenogenesis were cited, to show creative skill and power. Nor was it thought an un

1 "Contra Celsum,” i, 36.

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2 The fable of the Phoenix was often used as an illustration. Cf. Rufinus, "Expos. Sym. Apost.," c. ii, who also mentions the case of bees. Cf. also Cyril of Jerusalem, who enlarges on the subject in his "Catechetical Lectures," xii, 22 ff.; but by his time the tendency to make the Virgin-birth an essential condition for the Incarnation was the most potent argument (ob. 386).