more reasonable, probable, and useful. Man required an exemplar for
every stage of his existence up to the perfection of his frame. The
infant, and the child, and the youth, would all desire the human-God to
understand their eras; they would all, if generous and such as he would
love, long to feel that He has sympathy with them in every early trial,
as in every later grief. Moreover, the God coming down with supernatural
glories or terrors would be a needless expense of ostentatious power.
He, whose advent is intended for the encouragement of men to exercise
their reason and their conscience; whose exhortation is "he that hath
ears to hear, let him hear;" that pure Being, who is the chief preacher
of Humility, and the great teacher of man's responsible
condition--surely, he would hardly come in any way astoundingly
miraculous, addressing his advent not to faith, but to sight, and
challenging the impossibility of unbelief by a galaxy of spiritual
wonders. Yet, if He is to come at all--and a word or two of this
hereafter--it must be either in some such strange way; or in the usual
human way; or in a just admixture of both. As the first is needlessly
overwhelming to the responsible state of man, so the second is
needlessly derogatory to the pure essence of God; and the third idea
would seem to be most probable. Let us guess it out. Why should not this
highest Object of faith and this lowest Subject of obedience be born,
seemingly by human means, but really by divine? Why should there not be
found some unspotted holy virgin, betrothed to a just man and soon to be
his wife, who, by the creative power of Divinity, should miraculously
conceive the shape divine, which God himself resolved to dwell in? Why
should she not come of a lineage and family which for centuries before
had held such expectation? Why should not the just man, her affianced,
who had never known her yet, being warned of God in a dream of this
strange, immaculate conception, "fear not to take unto him Mary his
wife," lest the unbelieving world should breathe slander on her purity,