Christ, would seem to require His Birth of a Virgin, for the Virgin-Birth is bound up with any really Catholic notion of the Incarnation.  For what is the Catholic doctrine of Incarnation?  Do we mean by Incarnation that on an already existing human being there descended in an extraordinary measure the Divine Spirit, so that He was by moral association so closely allied to God that He might be called God?  Do we mean that some preminent saint, called Jesus, responded with such “signal readiness” to the Divine Voice, “and realized more worthily than any other man ‘the Divine idea’ of human excellence, so that to Him, by a laxity of phrase not free from profaneness, men might thus ascribe a so-called ‘moral Divinity’”?  Then, I say quite freely, if that is what we mean, that the Virgin-Birth is, so far as we can see, an altogether gratuitous addition, an unnecessary miracle.  That is, so far as I can understand it, the idea of Incarnation entertained by moderns who reject or question the Catholic Faith.

But let me say as clearly as possible that this is not, and never has been, what the Christian Church means by Incarnation.  The New Testament does not tell us of a deified man:  no, we begin with a Divine Person.  “The ‘I’ in Him, His very self, is Divine, not human; yet has He condescended to take our humanity into union with His Divine Person, to assume it as His own.”  He who was from all eternity a single Divine Person took upon Him our nature, and was “made man;” and if this be so, what other entrance into our condition is imaginable save that which we confess in the Creed—­that He was “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary”?  “The Creeds pass immediately from confessing Jesus Christ to be ‘the only Son of God’ to the fact that He was ’born of the Virgin Mary,’ and neither of those articles of the Catholic Faith can be abandoned without disturbing the foundations of the other."*

—­ * Swete, Church Congress Report (1901), p. 164. —­

If Christ was born naturally of human parents, He must, one would think, have taken to Himself a human personality; He must have existed in two persons as well as in two natures.  But what we are to insist on in thinking of and teaching this mystery is this truth of the single Divine Personality of our Lord.  The old Nestorian heresy (with certain important modifications) is being resuscitated among us.  Nestorianism, new and old, begins from below, and speaks of a man who by moral “association” became “Divine;” it speaks, that is to say, of a deified man.  The Christian Faith begins from above-it speaks of Him who from all eternity was God, taking upon Him our flesh.  He took upon Him our nature, but He did not assume a human personality.  He wrapped our human nature round His own Divine Person.  On the Nestorian theory, God did but benefit one man by raising him to a unique dignity; on the Catholic theory, He benefitted the race of men, by raising human nature into union with His Divine Person.