way of Christ, as ' alone horn mthout sin f and the ' im- maculateness' ascribed to the Virgin cannot possibly, in the connection, be inteqireted of her conception, or even of her birth ; for, if it could, then Christ could not be said to be the 'only' one of men honi without sui" (professor Smith, ut sup.).
No better does the case fare in the medifeval Church. " The amount of the argument and the residt of the tes- timony here are, that the doctrine was first invented in the 12th century, that it was opposed by the greatest and best of the scholastics, and that it made its way, in spite of this opposition, through the force of popidar su- perstition, and from the necessary working out of the inherent tendencies of a system of creature-worship. Some of the mediieval testimony we have already ad- duced ; we add only the most important citations. An- selm (1070), though cited for the immaculate concep- tion, teaches in his Cur JDeus Homo (ii, 16) that Mary was conceived in sin: 'Virgo tamen ipsa, mide assump- tus est, est in iniquitatibus concepta, et inpeccatis conce- jnt earn mater ejus, et aim originali peccato nata est, quoniam et ipsa in Adam peccavit, in quo omnes pecca- verunt.' " (See also the close of that chapter and the next, ii, 17.) We thus notice that, up to the time of Bernard, that is, for the first eleven centuries of our era, no writer of the Church used such strong language about the holiness of the Virgin jMarj' as he did in his letter to the canons of Lyons (1140) already referred to. He writes ; " The mother of God was, without doubt, sanc- tified before she was born ; nor is the holy Church in er- ror in accoimting the day of her nativity holj-. I think that even a more abundant blessing of sanctification de- scended on her, which not only sanctified her birth, but also preserved her life from aU sin, as happened to none other of the children of men. It was bciitting, indeed, that the queen of virgins should pass her life in the priv- ilege of a singidar sanctity, and free from all sin, who, in bearing the Destroyer of all sin and death, obtained for aU the gift of life." There is certainly, even here, no ad- vocacy of the immaculate conception of Mary. Exactly similar views were held by Peter Lombard, whose Four Books of Sentences were "the theological text-book of the IMiddle Ages," and " upon which all the great scho- lastics made their comments and built their systems. He says {Liber Sentent. iii, distinct, iii) of the flesh of Marj% Avhich our Lord assumed, that it was ' previously obnoxious to sin, like the other flesh of the Virgin, but by the operation of the Spirit it was cleansed.' . . . 'The Holy Spirit, coming into Marj', purified her from sin, and from all desire of sin.' " Verj^ explicit is also the testimonj' of Alexander of Hales, the irrefragable doctor and master of St. Bonaventura, the commentator on Lombard : " It was necessary that the blessed Virgin, in her generation, should contract sin from her parents; she was sanctified in the womb." Bonaventura, the seraphic doctor, the glory of the Franciscans, who died in 1274, and was canonized in 1482, is exhaustless in the praise of Mary in his Speculum and Corona. He sanc- tifies her veneration in the most rapturous terms. Yet on this question he is also decided, explicitly declaring that " the sanctification of the Virgin was after she had contracted original sin ;" she was "sanctified in the ^^•omb" (lib. iii, dist. iii, p. 1, qu. 2, 3). Albertus Magnus, who taught in Cologne 1260 to 1280, made the same avowals. Bonaventura was the pupil of Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus of Bonaventura, and next suc- ceeds the greatest of all the scholastic theologians, Thomas Aquinas, "the angelic doctor," who died in 1274, was canonized in 1323, and in 1567 was declared by Pius V to be " teacher of the Church." In his Smn- ma Theologia, p. iii, qu. 27, art. i, it stands, " Mary was sanctified in tlie womb." Art. 2. " Not before the infusion of the soul; for if she had been she M'ould not have incur- red the stain of original sin, and would not have needed the redemption of Christ." Art. 3. The complete deliv- erance from original sin was only given her when she conceived Christ ("Ex prole redmidaverit in matrem,
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 509 IMMACULATE CONCEPTION