It is to me a most strange phenomenon that so many learned and devout men stumble at this doctrine, and I can only account for it by supposing that, in matter of fact, they do not know what we mean by the immaculate conception; and your volume (may I say it?) bears out my suspicion. It is a great consolation to have reason for thinking so--for believing that in some sort the persons in question are in the position of those great saints in former times who are said to have hesitated about it, when they would not have hesitated at all if the word "conception" had been clearly explained in that sense in which now it is universally received. I do not see how any one who holds with Bull the Catholic doctrine of the supernatural endowments of our first parents, has fair reason for doubting our doctrine about the Blessed Virgin. It has no reference whatever to her parents, but simply to her own person; it does but affirm that, together with the nature which she inherited from her parents, that is, her own nature, she had a superadded fulness of grace, and that from the first moment of her existence. Suppose Eve had stood the trial, and not lost her first grace, and suppose she had eventually had children, those children from the first moment of their existence would, through divine bounty, have received the same privilege that she had ever had; that is, as she was taken from Adam's side, in a garment, so to say, of grace, so they in turn would have received what may be called an immaculate conception. They would have been conceived in grace, as in fact they are conceived in sin. What is there difficult in this doctrine? What is there unnatural? Mary may be called a daughter of Eve unfallen. You believe with us that St. John Baptist had grace given to him three months before his birth, at the time {64} that the Blessed Virgin visited his mother. He accordingly was not immaculately conceived, because he was alive before grace came to him; but our Lady's case only differs from his in this respect, that to her grace came not three months merely before her birth, but from the first moment of her being, as it had been given to Eve.