Are we to suppose that through the earlier millions of years, when only the elementary forms of life were present upon this globe, cause and effect went on unsuspended and unhindered, and that these processes, having once been started (engendered, let us assume, by the Immanent Will), held absolute sway over the development of life for millions and millions of years, until a time came when humanity appeared, and the idea of religion and a Deity entered the world; and that this process then became subject to a dethronement? Are we to believe that then intervention in a new form, and upon a different basis (not of cause and effect) began to take place? If that is the proposition, then, it seems to me, we are asked (having accepted the idea of a Creator) to impute to Him discreditable conduct--to believe that a point came in these causal processes which He had instituted when He could no longer “play the game” without arbitrary interference with its rules, and that the appearance of man upon the globe was the signal for a fatal weakening to His character. I have seen a clergyman cheat at croquet. He was the by-word of the neighbourhood for that curious little weakness; but I assure you that the spectacle of that reverend gentleman surreptitiously pushing his ball into better position with his foot instead of depending upon the legitimate use of his mallet, was no more ignoble a spectacle than that which I am asked to contemplate by believers in miracle when they present to my eyes a Deity who (upon their assertion) does similar things. Test upon this basis of morality the most crucial of all events in Christian theology. The idea of the Incarnation of God in human form as the final and logical fulfilment of the Creative purpose and process--the manifestation of the Creator in the created--has had for many great thinkers a very deep attraction. But if the process which brings Him into material being--the so-called Virgin-Birth--is not a process implicit in Nature itself and one that only depends for its realisation on man’s grasp of the higher law which shall make it natural and normal to the human race--if the Virgin-Birth is miracle instead of perfectly conditioned law revealing itself, then, surely, such a device for bringing about the desired end is “discreditable conduct”--because it discredits that vast system of evolution through cause and effect which we call “life.” From such an Incarnation I am repulsed as from something monstrous and against nature; and the doings and sayings of a being so brought into the world are discredited by the fact of a half-parentage not in conformity with creative law.