Conceived by the Holy Ghost Born of the Virgin Mary” "Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." MATTHEW 1: 20. CHAPTER VI THE AFFIRMATION OF THE INCARNATION After nineteen hundred years, the local circumstances in which the birth of our Lord occurred, and the little communities connected with it, retain the central place in human thought. No one can speak their names, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Judæa, without feeling how the world has changed since they were first heard in connection with Jesus Christ, and how truly that great and almost indescribable change in the world and in the life of men is because of him. Whatever tradition may have attached to the original story (and you know how tradition seeks to exaggerate great events in human life), and however speculation has been concerned with the person and work of the Lord Jesus, the fact of his birth stands unaffected. We read, as all the world reads on Christmas day, the story of the first announcement of the birth of a real person-the greatest of men. Wrapped, as the quaint narrative says, in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, there was a child who was to prove in later life what the angels announced, the long-looked-for Messiah and King, Jesus, who should save his people from their sins. The angels proclaimed his birth, and the very earth itself seemed to join with the heavens above in the joy which men as yet so little understood, but which was to be henceforth the fountain of all joy. From that hour, all human history needed to be rewritten that rewriting of history which, in these days, is frequently upon our lips, especially in connection with man's life and with the structure of society of which Christ is the hope. We have often to remind ourselves of the greatness of the change that has taken place, even in our own day; a change that would be marvelously emphasized for us if we could stand with the men of the past and look out upon the world of modern science as it is to-day. Suppose Sir Isaac Newton were permitted to come back, and some reverent teacher should open to him the attainments of natural science now, what significance would be given to his saying when he described himself as "a child playing with the pebbles on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him"! Or suppose that thoughtful philosopher Kepler, discovering the laws of the heavens as he interpreted the law by which the physical universe is bound into oneness, were now to come back and see how that law has been amplified in its realiza tion, how from it have sprung countless other laws, until, like blossoms upon a tree in its new fruitage, the science of things on the earth has opened out into a science of the universe, in which the distinction between the natural and the supernatural has disappeared, and only the natural and the unnatural, the normal and the abnormal, remain. Or suppose, after a half century, Humboldt were permitted to return, and were moved to write again the story of man's present scientific knowledge, would he for a moment desire to bring out, or remind people of what he wrote in the past? He would be the first to say, "That may all be thrown aside. The work must be begun anew. There is nothing in the story of that day that can compare with the story of this: there is little, indeed, worth remembering. Geology, chemistry, biology, astronomy, all are new." All their deductions, their speculations, were as a child's knowledge. Not that man's thought is deeper or profounder, or his intellectual force greater to-day than in the past, but because of the vast addition that has been made to human knowledge, and in the furnishing of so much new material to-day, the records of the physical world are practically begun anew. Still more completely did human history need to be rewritten, as the story of man's moral development and of his relations to God, as these were affected by |