General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1855 Original Publisher: P. Donahoe Subjects: Immaculate Conception Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. THE DOCTBINE CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF THE SACRED SCRIPTURES. The intimate relations which subsist between the Son of God and His Virgin Mother, render it impossible that she should ever have been tainted with original sin. Mary has been called the first-born of His creatures – the beloved one of God, in whom is no spot – the tabernacle which the Most High hath sanctified. And it is in perfect consistence with what we know of the divine attributes, that the Blessed Virgin should have been created in a manner and with such perfections as He, the source of infinite holiness and infinite purity, might, without making a covenant, so to speak, with sin, unite His divinity to her virginal flesh – for it was an integral part of her body He took. Except the hypostatic union of the divine nature of Christ with his humanity, no union of the divine and human natures could be so intimate as that which Christ had with the Virgin. In the former, the divine nature was inseparably and indivisibly united with the human nature, and constituted one Christ. In the latter, the divine person, at the very instant of conception, was so made one with the blessed Virgin – as to become substance of her substance – blood of her blood – flesh of her flesh. From that moment it became impossible to separate the Virgin Mother from her divine Son, and equally impossible to regard the human nature of the Virgin, of which He thus made His own, as ever having been the property of His chief enemy, the devil. St. Paul tells us,
It was fitting that …