On a wet and windy evening last February over five hundred people gathered in a fine eighteenth century church in central Edinburgh to discuss the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. Given that the population of the city is about 500,000, one need not exaggerate the significance of the event. The interior of the church, modelled on St Andrew’s in the Via Quirinale in Rome, and thus neither cruciform nor circular but elliptical, provides a good arena for discussion. It is the church to which the dissenting ministers and elders went in procession when they withdrew from the General Assembly in 1843, to constitute the Free Church of Scotland.

The present controversy about the factual basis and importance of accepting the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is unlikely to split the Kirk, although the main Scottish newspapers were inundated with letters during the weeks after the Moderator of the Church of Scotland (the Right Reverend James Weatherhead) took the occasion of a Christmastide address to note that Scottish Presbyterians might believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation while being free to regard the stories in Scripture about the virginal conception of Jesus as purely ‘symbolic’.

The sermon was given in St Giles Cathedral, another site of great symbolic significance in Scottish history. Only a single scallop capital survives from the original early twelfth century building, in what is now substantially a fourteenth century structure. The central tower received its famous crown spire sometime before 1500.