But I would define more clearly the special character of your apostolate. In recounting to me the history of your soul, with its loves and hates, you have said, "I have hated three things: slavery, the Catholic Church, and immorality." Of the three hates only one remains. Slavery is no more: God has effaced the sign of Cain from the brow of your people with a baptism of blood. As for the Catholic Church, when you came to know it your hate was turned to love, and you have espoused it to battle more efficiently with it against the last enemy; and it is in the firm foundation of her dogmas, replacing the slippery sand whereon your uncertain feet trod; it is in the fecundity of its sacraments, substituted for the sterility of your worship; it is under the guidance of its hierarchy, and in the force of its unity, that you will combat the double immorality which dishonors the Christian world--the immorality of mind, which we in Europe call Rationalism, which you in America call Infidelity; two wounds unlike I know, but two wounds equally mortal: and the immorality of the heart, that which corrupts the senses as the former does thought. These two immoralities are sisters; one attacks the virginity of faith, the other the virginity of love, and both have found in woman a special enemy. To the serpent which crawls on its belly and eats the dust of the earth, the Lord has said from the beginning, in pointing to woman, who is the ideal being springing from the heart of man: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." [Footnote 84] [Footnote 84: Genesis iii. 15.] {195} But now, behold the woman above all women! Mary, the young wife, the young mother, going over the hills of Judea to visit her friend, advanced in years, and hopeless as it seemed in sterility. She carries in her womb the infinite weight of the Word, but her step is light like truth, like love. Under the charm of the chaste love of God she greets Elizabeth, who feels at her approach the germ of nature quicken within her breast. "From whence cometh this happiness that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" The children were yet mute, but their mothers prophesy, Elizabeth before John the Baptist, Mary before Jesus Christ. "Already," to speak with St. Ambrose, "already the day of the beginning of the salvation of man had begun," [Footnote 85] and because sin had commenced by woman, regeneration commenced by her. [Footnote 85: "Serpunt enim jam tentamenta salutis humanae." In Luc.]