The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland

I cannot say why this strange unwholesome legend took such hold of me. Perhaps because it was unwholesome. I could not shake myself clear from it; and I had a haunting kind of prevision that more hung on it than its own superstitious fancy. I had just heard, too, of Joanna Southcote; and altogether my mind was, as it were, fascinated by this subject of virgin births--their possibility now as their certainty in times past--and by the whole range, indeed, of divine interposition in the works and ways of man.