dogma of Rome (1854), that Mary herself was sinless because immaculately conceived. That pushes the difficulty back by a generation, where it is not quite so apparent, but it is there. A similar attempt to strengthen a dogma by an appeal to science was the acceptance of the principle of "natural selection" as the analogue of predestination in the Calvinistic theology. The Divine decree of election, it was said, meant that God would save all who were worth saving. The trouble with these and other apologetics for ancient dogmas is that they are rationalistic, treading where Scripture has not ventured, not only going beyond the Word of God, but by implication weakening the Scripture teaching regarding the Holy Spirit's agency, as though the Holy Spirit were not adequate to the task of guaranteeing the sinlessness of Jesus. "And the child grew, and waxed strong in Spirit; and the grace of God was upon Him." The grace of God, the "sufficient grace," is noné other than the Holy Spirit, whose function it is in the economy of the eternal and ever blessed Trinity to unite together the Eternal Father and the Eternal Son in the bond of the infinite love; whose function on earth is to bring all mankind into the same unity of the Divine love and into loving obedience to the Divine will. Surely,

then, the Holy Spirit, who ever waits upon the Father and the Son, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, is adequate to explain the sinlessness of Jesus, without resort to some theory of natural law in the spiritual world.

A mistake has been made at this point, and we need to retrace our steps. There may be imitations, dim prophecies of spiritual law in the natural world, which may serve as confirmations of our faith; but to reverse the process and to project the natural into the spiritual order is to lead only to disaster. The experience of the ancient Catholic Church, as already given, is here a warning and not a precedent to be followed. And it is the reversion to that Catholic Church of the fifth century which in great measure explains the present embarrassment and sensitiveness about the Virgin-birth.

And this process, naturalistic rather than spiritual, has been accompanied by another motive, engendered in the great romantic movement which swept like a whirlwind over the last century. Romanticism in literature and art, or in the Church, is a term too large to be here defined, but of some of its fruits in the ecclesiastical sphere it may be said that they constitute a departure from the doctrine of Christ, as this Church hath received it. The Virgin-birth began

to rise into a prominence unknown since the Reformation, in consequence of the proclamation by Pope Pius IX (1854) of the dogma that Mary herself was immaculately conceived. To this motive must be added another - the influence of Italian art, which to many has become almost their only religion, where the mediaval worship of Mary has been presented as the central fact of the Christian faith. The appeal made by this feature of ecclesiastical art to the host of travellers and pilgrims who now visit Italy as a sacred land is responsible to some degree for giving an undue and exaggerated, even a morbid, prominence to the Virgin-birth, so that now when the clause is recited in the Creed, it is with difficulty we escape from it to the true and original purport of its insertion.

It may serve to show how far we have travelled from the consciousness of our Protestant forefathers, and from the spirit of our formularies, if we turn to some of the commentaries on the Creed, which once enjoyed great vogue, and are now become unfamiliar. Among them is Nowell's "Catechism," very influential in the sixteenth century and after. There it reads:

"Question. But why is there in this confession, the Apostles' Creed, mention made by name of the Virgin Mary?

"Answer. That He, Christ, may be known to be that true seed of Abraham and David, of whom it was from God foretold and foreshadowed by the prophecies of the prophets." (Parker Soc. ed., p. 135.)

In Archbishop Secker's "Lectures on the Catechism,"1 of which an American edition was published in 1835, it reads:

"The reason for inserting it [the name Mary] in the Creed most probably was because it is set down in Scripture, and that by naming the particular person of whom our Saviour sprung, He might appear to be of that family from which it was foretold He should arise, being born of this Virgin of the house of David." (P. 67.)

The Virgin-birth is not in the foreground of the consciousness of either writer; but both writers are in accord with the interpretation of the clause by Ignatius, who also insisted on

1 Archbishop Secker was born 1693 and died 1768. He was consecrated bishop of Bristol 1735; transferred to Oxford 1737, to which see was added the deanery of St. Paul's 1750; and enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury 1758.

Christ's descent from the house of David as an essential thing,' that Christ was Messiah fulfilling the expectation of the ages. Hence the importance of the genealogies in the prologues of Matthew and Luke, and not merely the incidents of the Virgin-birth.2

The difficulties waiting upon the creeds and their interpretation are not likely to diminish, rather will they increase, for the question at issue is the freedom of the clergy and laity. Is

1 See ante, p. 108.

3

It is now generally admitted that the genealogies trace the descent of Joseph and not of Mary.

3"The Church of England is based upon the Bible. The Reformation was essentially the creation of a new court of appeal, the shifting of the sanction for belief from the authority of the Church to the written word. The Church everywhere appeals to the written word; nothing which is not contained therein or justifiable therefrom can be imposed upon a Christian man whether lay or cleric. The minister is to be a student of the Word. 'Will you be diligent in . . . reading of the Holy Scriptures and in such studies as help to the knowledge of the same?""

Mark the word "studies": he is not to accept the documents as formal decrees with fixed traditional meaning, but as a literature of which he is progressively to learn the meaning. Now, if such be the position, it appears impossible to dispute the fact that, as study reveals a new content for the words, new meaning, new connotation in the Scriptures, there must be liberty of interpretation of the formularies. If the formularies be the index, the summary, the table of contents of the Scriptures, and if study, imposed as a sacred duty, reveal new meaning of the Scriptures, that new meaning must inevitably be admitted in ascertaining and determining the meaning of the formularies. Rev. W. Manning, M.A., in Hibbert Journal, January, 1906, p. 413.