given to the human race by Jesus Christ, would seem to require His
Birth of a Virgin, for the Virgin-Birth is bound up with any really
Catholic notion of the Incarnation. For what is the Catholic
doctrine of Incarnation? Do we mean by Incarnation that on an
already existing human being there descended in an extraordinary
measure the Divine Spirit, so that He was by moral association so
closely allied to God that He might be called God? Do we mean that
some preminent saint, called Jesus, responded with such "signal
readiness" to the Divine Voice, "and realized more worthily than
any other man 'the Divine idea' of human excellence, so that to Him,
by a laxity of phrase not free from profaneness, men might thus
ascribe a so-called 'moral Divinity'"? Then, I say quite freely,
if that is what we mean, that the Virgin-Birth is, so far as we can
see, an altogether gratuitous addition, an unnecessary miracle. That
is, so far as I can understand it, the idea of Incarnation
entertained by moderns who reject or question the Catholic Faith.

But let me say as clearly as possible that this is not, and never
has been, what the Christian Church means by Incarnation. The New
Testament does not tell us of a deified man: no, we begin with a
Divine Person. "The 'I' in Him, His very self, is Divine, not
human; yet has He condescended to take our humanity into union
with His Divine Person, to assume it as His own." He who was from
all eternity a single Divine Person took upon Him our nature, and
was "made man;" and if this be so, what other entrance into
our condition is imaginable save that which we confess in the
Creed--that He was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary"? "The Creeds pass immediately from confessing Jesus
Christ to be 'the only Son of God' to the fact that He was 'born
of the Virgin Mary,' and neither of those articles of the Catholic