The Childhood of Jesus

THE name Gospel of the Infancy is now commonly given to the narratives that make up the first two chapters of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, adding moreover, for the latter, the genealogy contained in the third chapter: these narratives refer to the birth of Jesus and to His life until the time of .His baptism. The value of these documents has become the object of most special attacks. Many scholars readily look upon them as a kind of prehistoric Gospel story written according to the law set forth by Heine in the preface of his edition of Apollodorus. At the beginning of all ancient historical records we find some myths. Those professors in the chief universities of Germany are few, indeed, who have not struck out of their Creed the belief in Christ's Virgin-Birth. How many are the ministers of the Evangelical Churches who still hold the Christmas night as a night with an historical significance? Until our own times, it is true, the Church of England had quite successfully withstood the blows of unbelieving critics, but it cannot be deni.ed that, within the last ten years or so, the traditional views have lost ground even at Oxford and Cambridge: a fact that is, moreover, only too plainly paralleled by Protestantism in the United States also. Parsons and ministers entrusted with the care of souls among common people are influenced by the decrease of belief in the higher spheres of Universities. As to the situation in the Catholic Church, she has nothing to fear for her dogma. The humblest of her children know well that under pain of the wreck of their faith, they must believe from the depth of their souls and profess with their lips, that "Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary." However, in spite of the precision and of the vigor of their belief, those Catholics who read cannot but notice the noise of the fight raging around them, and they feel instinctively the need to take up the defensive. On what historical grounds do they hold in its integrity that Christian dogma which Liberal Protestants throwaway so light-heartedly? The purpose of this little book is precisely to help them to answer that question.