For if after the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ Himself the kingdoms of Damascus and Judaea had not come to an end, and if we could not see with our own eyes their lands released from them, and given over to foreign idolaters to inhabit; and, moreover, if the old (b) stately beauty of their very Temple had not become sand and thorns, and if no impure idolaters had come as their enemies to attack them with bow and arrow, urged on by the Lord Himself from abroad, and stayed in their country making every place and every city their own; and on the other side, if by the teaching of our Saviour no nations brought to believe in Him had changed from the sands and thorns of their ancient barrenness and brought forth a holy and godly spiritual harvest; and again, if they who saw Christ with their eyes had not rejected Him, if they who heard Him speak had not turned a deaf ear to Him, and if the rest of the prophecy could not be proved to have been most exactly fulfilled from the days of Jesus our Saviour—then He would not be the subject of the prophecy. But if the fulfilment of the prophecies is. as the saying is, clear to a blind man, as only brought to pass from the period of His coming, why need we any longer be in doubt about the Virgin Birth, or refuse by wise reasoning to base our belief in that which was the beginning of this matter, on the evidence of what we can even now see? And what do we even now see, but the Jews' disbelief in Him, so clearly fulfilling the oracle, which said: "Hearing ye shall hear and not understand, and seeing ye shall see and not perceive, for the heart of this people is waxed hard," and the siege of Jerusalem, and the total desolation of their ancient Temple, and the settling of foreign races on their land, enslaving them with stings, that is to say with harsh enactments—for this is meant by the figures of the flies and bees—and above all the transformation of the heathen world from its former desolation into the field of God. Who would not be struck with astonishment at these spectacles? And who would not agree that the prediction is truly inspired, when he heard that these words were consigned to books and taken care of by our ancestors a thousand years ago, and only brought to a fulfilment after our Saviour's coming? If, then, the prediction was wonderful, and the result of the prediction yet more wonderful, and beyond all reason, why should we disbelieve that the actual entrance of Him that was foretold was allotted a miraculous and superhuman kind of birth, especially as the clear evidence of the other miracles, as marvellous (as the Birth itself) in their sequence from that Birth compels us to accept the evidence of the other wonders connected with Him.