appears to me to be false. The word "Virgin" is perhaps the only word in the service and ritual of the Church of England (if the Athanasian Creed be left out of consideration, owing to the non-natural and humane interpretations of it which have been sanctioned by high authority) which has made me doubt at times whether I ought to do official work as a minister in that Church. As regards the "resurrection of the body," asserted in one of the Creeds, I feel little or no difficulty: for St. Paul's use of the term "spiritual body" allows great latitude to those who would give a spiritual interpretation to the phrase in the Creed; and I trust that I have made it clear to you that I accept Christ's Resurrection as a reality, though a spiritual reality.[1] But the words implying the birth from the Virgin stand on a different footing. In the Resurrection of Jesus I believe that there was a unique vision of the buried Saviour, apparent to several disciples at a time; but in the conception and birth of Jesus I have no reason for thinking that there was anything unusual apparent to the senses. What can I mean then by saying that Jesus is "born of a Virgin"?
All that I can mean is this. Human generation does not by any means account for the birth of a new human spirit. So far as we are righteous, we all owe our righteousness to a spiritual seed within us; "we are not," as Philo would say, "the result of generation but the work of the Unbegotten." So far as we are righteous, we are "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John i. 13). But of the Lord Jesus Christ we are in the habit of saying and believing
- ↑ I must admit that a more serious difficulty is presented to Sponsors by the interrogative form of the Creed in the Baptismal service, to which they are expected to reply in the affirmative: "Dost thou believe .. in the Resurrection of the flesh?" But I can hardly think that many clergymen would wish to reject an otherwise eligible Sponsor who confided to them that he could only accept "flesh" in the sense of "body," and that too in the Pauline sense of "spiritual body."
