when He entered into the conditions of human life, He entered it
not in all respects like us? I should mar if I ventured to
abbreviate Dr. Mason's admirable words, in which he presses
this argument--

"Like causes produce like effects. In similar circumstances, you
may expect the same forces to operate in the same way. But when
some new force is introduced, you cannot expect the same results.
The Birth of Christ, if He is what all the writers of the New
Testament believed Him to be, was necessarily unlike ours in that
one great respect. We had no existence before we were born,
however poets and poetical philosophers may play with the notion.
But the New Testament writers believed that He whom we know as
Jesus Christ was living with a full, vigorous, personal life for
ages before He appeared in the world as man. They maintained that
He was present and active in the making of the world, and
immanent in the development of human history, which formed
a new beginning at His Birth. They said He was God, the Only
Begotten Son of the Eternal Father, who came down from heaven,
and voluntarily entered into the conditions of human life. Admit
the possibility that they were right, and you will no longer
ask that His mode of entrance into our conditions should be
in all things like our own. If you acknowledge that Jesus Christ
was Divine first and became human afterwards, you cannot but say
with St. Ambrose, when you hear that He was born of a Virgin:
'Talis decet partus Deum'--a birth of that kind is befitting to
one who is God. We do not--no one ever did--believe Christ to be
God because He was born of a Virgin; that is not the order of
thought [and we have seen that it was certainly not the order of
Apostolic preaching]; but we can recognize that if He was God, it