of producing; for its consummate fitness, reserve, sobriety, and loftiness are unquestionable.  What solid reason is there for not accepting it?"+ It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine that St. Luke, whose accuracy and care have been, in recent years, so severely tested and found not wanting, should have been so careless as to append to his Gospel a spurious account of so momentous an occurrence as the human Birth of our Lord.  “Historical accuracy is not a capricious and intermittent impulse,” writes Bishop Alexander.  “It is a fixed habit of mind, the result of a particular discipline.  Historians of the school of the author of the Acts of the Apostles are not men to build a flamboyant portal of romance over the entrance to the austere temple of truth."#

—­ * St. Luke i. 1-4. + Gore, Dissertations, p. 18. # Bishop Alexander’s Leading Ideas of the Gospels, pp. 154, 155. —­

(2) The account in St. Matthew’s Gospel, if genuine, must have come from Joseph.  It is his perplexities which are in question, and Divine intimations are given to him, on three occasions, how to act for the safety of the mother and the Child.  The facts which appear in the Third Gospel are clearly prior to those reported in the First:  the Annunciation, Mary’s visit to Judaea, her return to Nazareth, precede Joseph’s discovery and dream, which follow appropriately upon the Virgin’s return.  How this account has been preserved in the First Gospel we do not know, for we know so very little about the authorship of that Gospel; but there is nothing at all unreasonable in Bishop Gore’s conjecture* that St. Joseph (who must have died before the public ministry of our Lord began) left some document detailing the circumstances of the Birth of Jesus Christ; that this document would have been given to Mary (to vindicate, by means of it, when occasion demanded, her own virginity), and that after Pentecost she may have given it to the family of Joseph, the now believing “brethren of the Lord,” and from their hands it passed into those of the author of the First Gospel.

—­ * Gore, Dissertations, pp. 28, 29. —­

The Evangelist dwells, as is well known, on the fulfilment of prophecy; but in regard to the particular prophecy of Isaiah, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel,"* it cannot with any probability be said that the prophecy suggested the event; for it does not seem at all likely that there was any Jewish expectation that the Christ should be born of a Virgin.  We can understand the prophecy being adduced in order to attest a story already current (this would be wholly after St. Matthew’s method); but the prophecy itself, with one’s eye on the Hebrew text of Isaiah,+ could scarcely have led to the fabrication of this particular story about the Messiah’s birth.  Probably the notion of a Virgin-born Messiah would have been alien to ordinary Jewish ideas.# In any case, the Jews did not so interpret the passage, and in fact, to quote Professor