hat is where materialism always comes to grief, for on its
own premises it cannot account for the emergence of intelligence and
all the higher qualities of human nature. A divine element, a
spiritual quickening, is required for the evolution of anything Godlike
in our mundane sphere; it is a virgin birth. Lower acting upon lower
can never produce a higher. It is the downpouring and incoming of the
higher to the lower which produces through the lower the divine manhood
which leaves the brute behind. This is the sense in which it is true
that Jesus was of divine as well as human parentage. We do not account
for Him merely by saying that He was the son of Joseph and Mary and the
descendant of a long line of prophets, priests, and kings; we have to
recognise that His true greatness came from above.

+True of all higher human experience.+--The same thing holds good in a
lesser degree of everything worthy of Jesus in human experience. We do
not account for any man's goodness or greatness by pointing to his
ancestry. Heredity may account for a great deal, but it is inadequate
as an explanation of genius or high moral achievement. If we go back
far enough, we shall find that our ancestry was barbarous, and, judging
from its tendencies, not at all likely to produce the Christ-man of
future ages. Wherever the Christ-man appears, we have to acknowledge
that the principal factor in his evolution is the incoming of the
divine spirit. It is only another way of stating what has already been
stated above, that the true man or higher self is divine and eternal,
integral to the being of God, and that this divine manhood is gradually
but surely manifesting on the physical plane. The lower cannot produce
the higher, but the higher is shaping and transforming the lower; every
moral and spiritual advance is therefore of the nature of a virgin
birth--a quickening from above. The spiritual birth described in the
conversation between our Lord and Nicodemus as given in the third of
John is, properly speaking, a virgin birth. "That which is born of the
flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." "Ye
must be born anew," or, literally, "quickened from above." Every man
who deliberately faces towards the highest, and feels himself
reenforced by the Spirit of God in so doing, is quickened from above;
the divinely human Christ is born in him, the Word has become flesh and
is manifested to the world.

+Human history