It is true our present canonical gospels are silent as to the manner of Christ's birth; but one of the Apocryphal gospels, which gives the matter in fuller detail, and whose authority in the earlier ages of the Christian church was not disputed, declares that the manner of his birth was as related above. And, besides, some of the early Christian fathers fully indorsed the story. The same is related in the pagan bibles of heathen Gods. The motives which originated the reports of the immaculate conception of the Saviors, it may be further remarked, were of a two-fold character:-- 1. To establish their spotless origin (as the word immaculate means spotless.) 2. To make it appear that there was a Deific power and agency concerned in their conception. And we may observe here that it is not the Saviors alone who are reported to have been ushered into tangible existence without a human father, but it is declared of beings known and acknowledged to be men, as Plato, Pythagoras, Alexander, Augustus and a number of others. Of Plato an author remarks, "He was born of Paretonia, and begotten of Apollo, and not Ariston, his father." Both the manner, or process, and the source of the influence by which the Gods and Saviors were generated, seem to have been different in different countries, though the idea of "overshadowing with the Holy Ghost" seems to have been most current. Mr. Higgins says that "the Supreme First Cause was generally believe to overshadow, or in some other mysterious manner to impregnate, the mother of the God, or personage" (vol. i. 378). We are told that Pythais, the mother of Pythagoras, five hundred and fifty years B. C., conceived by a spectre or ghost (of course the Holy Ghost) of the God Apollo, or God Sol. In Malcolm's "History of Persia" (vol. i. 494) the author tells us that "Zoroaster was born of an immaculate conception by a ray from the Divine Reason." The immaculate conception of Juno of Greece is thus described by the poet:-- "Juno touched the flower; Its wondrous virtues such, She touched it, and grew pregnant at the touch; Then entered Thrace--the Propontic shore; When mistress of her touch, God Mars she bore."