I consider it impossible, then, for those who believe the church to be one vast body in heaven and on earth, in which every holy creature of God has his place, and of which prayer is the life, when once they recognize the sanctity and greatness of the Blessed Virgin, not to perceive immediately that her office above is one of perpetual intercession for the faithful militant, and that our very relation to her must be that of clients to a patron, and that, in the eternal enmity which exists between the woman and the serpent, while the serpent's strength is that of being the tempter, the weapon of the second Eve and Mother of God is prayer. As then these ideas of her sanctity and greatness gradually penetrated the mind of Christendom, so did her intercessory power follow close upon and with them. From the earliest times that mediation is symbolized in those representations of her with uplifted hands, which, whether in plaster or in glass, are still extant in Rome--that church, as St. Irenaeus says, with which "every church, that is, the faithful from every side, must agree, because of its more powerful principality;" "into which," as Tertullian adds, "the apostles poured out, together with their blood, their whole doctrines." As far, indeed, as existing documents are concerned, I know of no instance to my purpose earlier than A.D. 234, but it is a very remarkable one; and, though it has been often quoted in the controversy, an argument is not the weaker for frequent use. St. Gregory Nyssen, [Footnote 18] a native of Cappadocia in the fourth century, relates that his namesake, Bishop of Neo-Caesarea, surnamed Thaumaturgus, in the century preceding, shortly before he was called to the priesthood, received in a vision a creed, which is still extant, from the Blessed Mary at the hands of St. John. [Footnote 18: _Vid_. "Essay on Doctr. Dev." p. 386.] {75}