express all this differently, but it has a direct bearing on life. It is
the doctrine of the Incarnation. We begins to perceive through it that
our own incarnations mean something, and that our task is to discover
what they do mean--what part in the world purpose we are designed to play
here.

"Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary is an emphasis on the
fact that man born of woman may be divine. But the ignorant masses of
the people of the Roman Empire were undoubtedly incapable of grasping a
theory of the Incarnation put forward in the terms of Greek philosophy;
while it was easy for them, with their readiness to believe in nature
miracles, to accept the explanation of Christ's unique divinity as due to
actual, physical generation by the Spirit. And the wide belief in the
Empire in gods born in this way aided such a conception. Many thousands
were converted to Christianity when a place was found in that religion
for a feminine goddess, and these abandoned the worship of Isis, Demeter,
and Diana for that of the Virgin Mary. Thus began an evolution which is
still going on, and we see now that it was impossible that the world
should understand at once the spiritual meaning of life as Christ taught
it--that material facts merely symbolize the divine. For instance, the
Gospel of John has been called the philosophical or spiritual gospel.
And in spite of the fact that it has been assailed and historically
discredited by modern critics, for me it serves to illuminate certain
truths of Christ's message and teaching that the other Gospels do not.
Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not refer to the miraculous birth. At
the commencements of Matthew and Luke you will read of it, and it is to
be noted that the rest of these narratives curiously and naively
contradict it. Now why do we find the miraculous birth in these Gospels
if it had not been inserted in order to prove, in a manner acceptable to
simple and unlettered minds, the Theory of the Incarnation, Christ's