ead of hideous and eternal torture.

THE HONOR OF DIVINE PARENTAGE

One more tradition must be noted. The consummation of praise for a king
is to declare that he is the son of no earthly father, but of a god. His
mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo comes to her in the
shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman emperors, following the
example of Augustus, claimed the title of God. Illogically, such divine
kings insist a good deal on their royal human ancestors. Alexander,
claiming to be the son of Apollo, is equally determined to be the son of
Philip. As the gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give genealogies
(the two are different) establishing the descent of Jesus through Joseph
from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not Joseph but the
Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now held that the
story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation borrowed from the Greek
and Roman imperial tradition. But experience shows that simultaneous
faith in the descent from David and the conception by the Holy Ghost is
possible. Such double beliefs are entertained by the human mind
without uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved. Many
instances might be given: a familiar one to my generation being that of
the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off as a baronet
was supported by an association of laborers on the ground that the
Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to do a laborer out of
his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew and Luke may have been
unconscious of the contradiction: indeed the interpolation theory does
not remove the difficulty, as the interpolators themselves must have
been unconscious of it. A better ground for suspecting interpolation is
that St. Paul knew nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus
came into the world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from
the dead after three days as the son of God. Here again, few notice
the discrepancy: the three views are accepted simultaneously without
intellectual discomfort. We can provisionally entertain half a dozen
contradictory versions of an event if we feel either that it does not
greatly matter, or that there is a category attainable in which the
contradictions are reconciled.

But that is not the present point. All that need be noted here is that
the legend of divine birth was sure to be attached sooner or later
to very eminent persons in Roman imperial