"In a hymn ascribed to St. Thomas à Becket occur the lines:—
'Gaude Virgo, mater Christi,
Quæ per aurem concepisti,
Gabriele nuntio,'
and in an old glass window, now, I believe, in one of the museums of Paris, the Holy Ghost is represented hovering over the Virgin in the form of a dove, while a ray of light passes from his beak to her ear, along which ray an infant Christ is descending."[1] No discontinuity is traceable between these ideas and the general belief at the time when the Synoptic Gospels took shape,
"that superhuman personages and great religious leaders were born of virgin mothers through divine agency. So was Apollonius of Tyana; and Origen himself tells us (in Celsum 129), how Plato was said to have been born of Amphiktione, 'her husband Ariston having been restrained from coming together with her (συνελθεῖν) until she should bring forth the child begotten by Apollo.' In this and similar tales we make acquaintance with the intellectual atmosphere in the midst of which the Christian doctrine of the miraculous conception originated and grew up."[2]
The folklorist takes up the quest where the historian lays it down, and brings his cumulative evidence to prove that the belief is of no special time or people, but the offspring of barbaric confusion about life generally, and about birth specifically. David Hume anticipated modern theories of animism in the remark that "there is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious."[3]
Add to this attribution of life corresponding to our own
- ↑ Langlois, Peinture sur Verre, p. 147. Quoted in Lecky's Hist. of Rationalism, i. 212 (1875 edition).
- ↑ F. C. Conybeare. Letter on the recently discovered "Old Syriac Palimpsest of the Gospels." Academy, 22 December, 1894, p. 535.
- ↑ The Natural Hist. of Religion (Works, vol. iv. p. 446, ed. 1S26).
