From a very different point of view, the ritual and hymnals of some of the Jews might facilitate the growth of the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin. For they might naturally speak of their Messiah as being a child of the virgin daughter of Sion, whose only husband was Jehovah. And hence in the Apocalypse, a book imbued with Jewish feeling, we find Jesus described (xii. 1-6) as the child of a woman who evidently represents Israel: “A woman arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was _with child_.... And she was delivered of a _son_, _a man child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron_.” This personification of the daughter of Israel or of Jerusalem as representing the nation, the bride of Jehovah, is very common in the prophets. You may find similar personifications in the New Testament. The Apocalypse describes the Church as the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, descending from Heaven “_as a bride_ adorned for her husband.” St. Paul speaks of the New Jerusalem, which is above (_i.e._ the spiritual Jerusalem, free from the law), as being “the _mother_ of us all.” Sometimes the personification of the Church is liable to be misinterpreted literally, as in St. Peter’s and St. John’s Epistles, where “the elect lady” “thine elect sister” and “the (lady) in Babylon” have been supposed by some to refer to individuals, but are believed by Bishop Lightfoot to represent the Churches of the places from which, and to which, the epistles were written. The whole of St. Paul’s Epistles presuppose the metaphor of a Virgin Church, and toward the end of the second century (177 A.D.) we find a very curious passage (in an epistle from the Church of Lyons) in which the repentance and martyrdom of some previous apostates are described as a restoration to “the Virgin Mother” of her children, “raised from the dead.” You see then how this personification runs through all Jewish and all early Christian literature, so that the Church, old or new, might be described as a woman; and I ought perhaps not to have omitted the strange dream in the second book of Esdras (x. 44-46) where Israel is a woman and the Temple is the son: “This woman whom thou sawest is Sion ... she hath been thirty years barren, but after thirty years Solomon builded the city and offered offerings, and then bare the barren a son.” Does not this continuous stream of thought shew how natural it would be for the earliest Jewish Christians to adore Christ in their hymns as the son of the daughter of Zion, the son of the Virgin Mother? Add to this the prejudice among the Gentile converts against a human paternity for the Son of God, the influence of the Alexandrine Jewish philosophy and the still more powerful influence of Isaiah’s prophecy about “the virgin,” and I think you will see that the causes at work to produce the belief in the Miraculous Conception were so strong that I may almost say a miracle would have been needed to prevent it.