, but later reflection has convinced me that
in point of fact it operates as a hindrance to spiritual religion and a
real living faith in Jesus. The simple and natural conclusion is that
Jesus was the child of Joseph and Mary and had an uneventful childhood.

+The truth in the doctrine of the virgin birth.+--And yet, as with
every tenet which has held a place in human thought for any
considerable length of time, there is a great truth contained in the
idea of a virgin birth. It is the truth that the emergence of anything
great and beautiful in human character and achievement is the work of
the divine spirit operating within human limitations. This idea is
very ancient, and there is no great religion which does not contain it
in some form or other. One form of it, for example, can be discerned
in the Babylonian creation myth with its parallel in the book of
Genesis. The home of the primitive Chaldeans, the stock whence
Israelites, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic communities
sprang, was in the low-lying territory surrounding the Persian gulf.
During the rainy seasons these lands were flooded by the overflow of
the great rivers. The sun of springtime, rising upon this mass of
waters which stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see,
drew forth from their bosom the life and beauty of summer flowers and
fruit. From observation of this regularly recurring phenomenon the
primitive Semites constructed their creation myth, one version of which
appeared in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, a version much
later than the Babylonian, but an outgrowth of the same idea. They
thought of a primeval waste of water covering everything. As the
writer of the Genesis account has it: "The earth was without form and
void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." In the Babylonian
version this primeval water was personified as a woman--Tiamat. They
thought of the sun of heaven as impregnating this virgin matrix with
the seeds of cosmic life--quite an accurate conception from the modern
point of view. Later on this idea became spiritualised in a much
higher degree. The religious mind came to regard the physical,
mundane, or distinctively human principle as the matrix upon which the
spirit of God brooded, bringing to the birth a divine idea. And this
is perfectly true too, as anyone can see. Nothing great and noble in
human experience can be accounted for merely in terms of atoms and
molecules. T