All the above conceptions and incarnations are merely the poetical and allegorical fictions of Paganism. We have already seen that the first fabricators and compilers of our religion were men of the greatest honesty and veraciousness of character: and as they had just received the divine light of "the only true revelation," we are "bound to believe" that their story of a miraculous conception is the only true one, confirmed as it is by _ghosts, dreams, angels, and shadows_. It is true that it cannot boast of such remote antiquity as the foregoing prodigies; but it is ancient enough to constitute truth in the orthodox eye of _Faith_; and we must not give way to the impiety of supposing that it is an imitatio of any one of the heathen fables enumerated;** or the "blasphemy" of surmising that God's sending "his message to a carpenter's wife," is a varied version of Jupiter's loving message to Alcmena, by Mercury. * According to Macrobius, this was the solar god Bacchus, who appears at the winter solstice, as an infant. Plutarch says that at the winter solstice, Isis (Nature) brought forth a son, a weak and feeble infant. On the inscription at Sais, Isis says, "The fruit which I have produced, was, and will become a Sun." ** The whole story about the conception and birth, was told in precisely the same manner as it is now, in India, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, for more than 1,600 years before its alleged occurrence in Palestine.