her: " The peerless queen of air, who as sandals to her feet, the silver moon doth wear."
Brethren, for us Catholics, the ultimate proof that Mary was immaculately conceived must ever be the fact that for centuries this truth was accepted by the entire Catholic world, and defined at last as an article of our faith by Pius IX. in 1854. Nor are we without reasons for the faith that is in us. This privilege of Mary was foreshadowed in the words of God to the demon-seducer of our first parents: " I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed, and she shall crush thy head." We can readily understand the enmity between Mary's Son and Satan, but that Mary herself should, as promised, vanquish the serpent, is explainable only on the theory that she was never for an instant subject to him by sin, that she was immaculately conceived. Jesus and Mary were prefigured in Adam and Eve — they are as like as the light of to-day and to-morrow, and yet they differ as the waning twilight from the coming dawn. Adam's hands, outstretched toward the forbidden fruit, point to death and darkness; the hands of Christ in Gethsemani, receiving from the angel the chalice of His sufferings, point to life and light: and it was not until the water from the side of Christ on the cross trickled down on Adam's skull that life met death in Baptism. Adam was made of immaculate earth, as yet uncursed — a true figure of the stainless Virgin who was to conceive and bear the Saviour. " Holiness becometh Thy house, O Lord," says the Psalmist; and Mary's body was the house of the
