Note 38 — VII

To what extent the law of atrophy has begun to work upon the doctrine of the virgin birth appears in the recent utterance of so eminent an evangelical scholar as Dr. R. F. Horton, of London. The following report of his remarks in a Christmas sermon in 1901 is taken from the Christian World, London. "We could not imagine Paul, Peter, and John all ignoring something essential to the Gospel they preached. Strictly speaking, this narrative in Matthew and Luke was one of the latest touches in the Gospel, belonging to a period forty or fifty years after the Lord had passed away, when men had begun to realize what he was—the Son of God—and tried to express their conviction in this form or that." The implication here is unmistakable, that, in Dr. Horton's view, subjective considerations in the minds of pious believers, rather than objective fact, form the basis of the story.