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THE INCARNATION
[Letter 25
accordance with the laws of humanity. But in these days the doctrine of the Miraculous Conception seems to me fraught with evil; partly because the weakness of the evidence makes the narrative a stumbling-block for many who are taught to consider this doctrine essential and who cannot bring themselves to believe it; partly because it tends to sanction a false and monastic ideal of life; to separate Jesus from common humanity and from human love and sympathy; and to encourage false notions about a material Resurrection of the body of Jesus, which naturally result in a false, bewildering, and disorderly expectation of a material Resurrection for ourselves.
