scholars have difficulty in tracing any of these accounts but
the first directly to Jesus Himself; but they come from the earliest
period of the Church, and they have satisfied many generations of
thoughtful Christians as explanations of the uniqueness of the Person of
their Lord. Some of them do not seem to be as helpful to modern
believers, and are even said to render Him less intelligible. We must
beware on the one hand of insisting too strongly that a believer in
Jesus Christ shall hold a particular view of His origin; the diversity
in the New Testament presentations of Christ would not be there, if all
its writers considered all four of these statements necessary in every
man's conception of his Lord. And on the other hand, we must point out
that it is a tribute to Jesus' greatness that so many circumstances were
appealed to to account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual
value. All four insist that Jesus' origin is in God, and that in Jesus
we find the Divine in the human. All four--a spiritual endowment, a
spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of God in
Man--may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if
we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which
these affirmations have been made in the past. The question of Jesus'
origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its
antecedents, but by its results--"By their fruits ye shall know them."
No man, today, should be hindered from believing in Christ, because he
does not find a particular statement in connection with His origin
credible. Christ is here in our world, however He entered it, and can be
tested for what He _is_. To know Him is not to know how He came to be,
but what He can do for us. "To know Christ," Melancthon well said, "is
to know His benefits."

The third question, How are we to conceive of the union of Deity and
humanity in Him? is a problem which exercised the Fourth, Fifth and
Sixth Centuries of the Christian Church to the exclusion of almost all
others. The theologians of those times worked out (and fought out) the
theory of the union of two "natures" in one "Person," which remains the
official statement of the Church's interpretation of Christ in Greek,
Roman and Protestant creeds. But the philosophy which dealt in "natures"
and "persons" is no longer the mode of thought of educated people; and
while we may admire the mental skill of these earlier theologians,