of a god. His mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo
comes to her in the shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman
emperors, following the example of Augustus, claimed the title of
God. Illogically, such divine kings insist a good deal on their
royal human ancestors. Alexander, claiming to be the son of
Apollo, is equally determined to be the son of Philip. As the
gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give genealogies (the two
are different) establishing the descent of Jesus through Joseph
from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not Joseph
but the Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now
held that the story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation
borrowed from the Greek and Roman imperial tradition. But
experience shows that simultaneous faith in the descent from
David and the conception by the Holy Ghost is possible. Such
double beliefs are entertained by the human mind without
uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved. Many
instances might be given: a familiar one to my generation being
that of the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off
as a baronet was supported by an association of laborers on the
ground that the Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to
do a laborer out of his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew
and Luke may have been unconscious of the contradiction: indeed
the interpolation theory does not remove the difficulty, as the
interpolators themselves must have been unconscious of it. A
better ground for suspecting interpolation is that St. Paul knew
nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus came into the
world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from the dead
after three days as the son of God. Here again, few notice the
discrepancy: the three views are accepted simultaneously without
intellectual discomfort. We can provisionally entertain half a