"These growing thoughts my mother soon perceiving By words at times cast forth, duly rejoiced, And said to me apart, 'High are thy thoughts, O Son; but nourish them, and let them soar To what height sacred virtue and true worth Can raise them, though above example high.'"] But in the Church traditions and enactments, another character was, from the fifth century, assigned to her, out of which grew the theological type, very beautiful and exalted, but absorbing to a great degree the scriptural and moral type, and substituting for the merely human attributes others borrowed from her relation to the great scheme of redemption; for it was contended that, as the mother of _the Divine_, she could not be herself less than divine; consequently above the angels, and first of all created beings. According to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, her tender woman's wisdom became supernatural gifts; the beautiful humility was changed into a knowledge of her own predestined glory; and, being raised bodily into immortality, and placed beside her Son, in all "the sacred splendour of beneficence," she came to be regarded as our intercessor before that divine Son, who could refuse nothing to his mother. The relative position of the Mother and Son being spiritual and indestructible was continued in heaven; and thus step by step the woman was transmuted into the divinity. But, like her Son, Mary had walked in human form upon earth, and in form must have resembled her Son; for, as it is argued, Christ had no earthly father, therefore could only have derived his human lineaments from his mother. All the old legends assume that the resemblance between the Son and the Mother must have been perfect. Dante alludes to this belief: "Riguarda ormai nella faccia ch' a Christo Piu s' assomiglia." "Now raise thy view Unto the visage most resembling Christ." The accepted type of the head of Christ was to be taken as a model in its mild, intellectual majesty, for that of the Virgin-mother, as far as difference of sex would allow.