The fathers of our Church have disputed and quarreled in the most obscene terms, about this mystic impregnation by the Holy Ghost. St. Ambrose says:--"Non enim, secreta reseravit, sed immaculatum semen inviolabili utero spiritus sanctus infudit!"**
* The followers of Loatze say, that his mother became pregnant of him, by a junction of heaven and earth. This is a sublime and bold _conception_; and far excels the puerile prating about _ghosts, angels, dreams, and shadows_.
** Of the miraculous impregnation, St. Ambrose says, "Maria per aurem impregnata est."
In one of the Church hymns it was sung, "Non ex virili, sed mystico spiramine." Justin Martyr, in his apology, justifies these dogmas as modified by the Christians, _not because they were true_, but from the example of the heathen; he says:--"By declaring the Logos, the first begotten of God, our Master Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin, without any human mixture, and to be crucified and dead, and to have risen again, and ascended into heaven,--_we say no more in this, than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove_." This was honestly lugging in one fable to apologise for another. The logic of Tertullian on this subject was decisive, and peculiar to himself--it might be called an axiomatic, or self-evident mode of reasoning; for instance, he says, "I am not ashamed of maintaining that the son of God was born, _because it is itself a shameful thing_. I maintain that he died and rose again, _because it is absurd_" When preachers use such convincing arguments, there is no excuse for the incredulity of hearers. This great Father contended also, that souls were material--that they had sexes, and were as much begotten by each other; as our bodies are by the bodies of our immediate parents. He asserted also, that "_God is a body_."
"The word _begotten_ necessarily infers and associates the ideas of three distinct and separate Beings--the begetters, the begotten, and the person on whom he was begotten; and the term _begotten_, alluding as it does to the performance of a particular action, must imply a particular time when that action was performed and of course that there was a time when that action was performed; now as the very, definition of the word eternity is that which is _without beginning_ as well as _without end_, to talk of a person _begotten_ from eternity, is to compose a sentence of words the most contradictory to each other, or downright nonsense; it is to tell us of an action that was _begun without any beginning; of a finite infinite, or an immortal mortal!_" But the mystic conceptions, births, and incarnations of Paganism, being rooted in, and having exclusive allusion either to physical or moral principles, there were no such absurdities, terms, or monstrous perversions of them, as the early Christiana fell into, by converting mere words into _beings_, in forming their mythology.