That Mary was at every moment of her existence a spotless work of God's hands, was revealed from the beginning; during these later ages the attention of the faithful has been especially called to the first moment of that existence—the moment of her Immaculate Conception. Nothing new has been revealed, but what was implicitly believed has been in our own times explicitly defined.
Now, it is the belief of Catholics, that those to whose keeping the unalterable deposit was entrusted, were not intended to be mere keepers of the dead letter of revealed doctrine. Their task is, in the language of the early Fathers, to have a care lest any cunning flight of the human intellect should strive to adapt the dogmas of faith to its own shifting and wayward fancies. God gave us His teachers, as St. Paul writeth to the Ephesians, that we may not be swayed by every wind of doctrine.
Hence the Church, in our belief, may pass sentence on such philosophical principles, on such opinions of human science, as imperil the purity of dogma; and can exact intellectual submission to such pronouncements. She may, moreover, pronounce that error is contained in such or such writings, when ever it becomes necessary for the fulfilment of Christ's precept of keeping His sheep from poisoned pastures. But in passing these sentences she is not defining articles of faith; for assuredly it was not revealed to the Apostles that such heretics as Arius or Abelard, or Luther, or Jansenius, or Döllinger and his followers, were ever to be born, or that such or such a book was ever to be penned. Here we have one class of what are called dogmatic facts, that is, natural truths, not
