THE Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ had not said,—“I am Mary, the Immaculate;” She had said,—“I am the Immaculate Conception,” as if to mark the absolute, and, as it were, substantial character of the divine privilege granted to Her alone since Adam and Eve were created by God. It is as if she had said, not, “I am pure,” but, “I am purity itself;” not, “I am a Virgin,” but, “I am incarnate and living Virginity;” not, “I am white,” but, “I am whiteness!”
Any thing that is white may cease to be so; but, Whiteness is always white. It is its essence and not its quality.
Mary is more than conceived without sin; She is the Immaculate Conception itself; the essential and superior type; the archetype of unsullied humanity, of humanity as it proceeded from the hands of God, without having been tainted by the original stain, by the impure element which the fault of our first Parents mixed with the very source of that vast river of generations, which has flowed for the last six thousand years, and of which, each of us is a fleeting wave.
What would you do, if you wished to draw water pure from a muddy spring? You would pass it through a filter, and the water clears itself of its grosser elements. You then pass it through a second filter, then through a third, and so on. The time soon comes when the water becomes entirely pure and clear,—a liquid diamond. In the same manner did God act, when the original Spring was troubled. He chose a particular family in this world, and watched over it from age to age, from Seth unto Noah, from Shem unto David, from David even unto Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin. And when this human blood was thus filtered, so to speak, in spite of the accidents of some intermediate guilty persons, through nearly fifty generations of patriarchs and just men, there came into the world a creature absolutely pure; a creature without stain; a daughter of Adam entirely immaculate. She was called Mary, and Her fruitful Virginity produced Jesus Christ.
The Virgin, at that moment had desired to attest by her presence and her miracles, the last dogma defined by the Church, and proclaimed by St. Peter, speaking by the voice of Pius IX.
It was the first time in her life that the little shepherd-girl, to whom the divine Virgin had just appeared, had heard the words: “Immaculate Conception;” and, being entirely ignorant of their meaning, she exerted herself to the utmost on her way back to Lourdes to retain them in her memory. “I repeated them to myself all along the road, in order not to forget them,” she told us, one day; “and, up to the very door of the presbytery to which I was going, I kept saying, Immaculate Conception, Immaculate Conception, at each step I made, as I wished to take to the Curé the exact words of the Vision, in order that the chapel might be built.”
