To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship of the ancient heathens, would be equivalent to pulling down the whole Roman Catholic image-worship--the _Madonna_ element--and reforming the faith to Protestantism. The enforcement of the late dogma of the Immaculation was prompted by this very secret reason. The science of symbology was making too rapid progress. Blind faith in the Pope’s infallibility and in the immaculate nature of the Virgin and _of her ancestral female lineage to a certain remove_ could alone save the Church from the indiscreet revelations of science. It was a clever stroke of policy on the part of the vicegerent of God. What matters it if, by “conferring upon her such an honor,” as Don Pascale de Franciscis naïvely expresses it, he has made a goddess of the Virgin Mary, an Olympian Deity, who, having been by her very nature placed in the impossibility of sinning, can claim no virtue, no personal merit for her purity, precisely for which, as we were taught to believe in our younger days, she was chosen among all other women. If his Holiness has deprived her of this, perhaps, on the other hand, he thinks that he has endowed her with at least one physical attribute not shared by the other virgin-goddesses. But even this new dogma, which, in company with the new claim to _infallibility_, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered _heresy_ of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their _sacrificing cakes_ to the Virgin, whom they claimed to _be Virgin-born_.[168] The new sentence, “O, Virgin Mary, _conceived without sin_,” is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a “_blasphemous heresie_” by the orthodox fathers.