I T is to me a strange phenomenon," wrote the late Cardinal Newman, "that so many learned and devout men stumble at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and I can only account for it by supposing, in matter of fact, they do not know what we mean by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception." The Cardinal is right; the "learned and devout men" to whom he refers, in attacking the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, are assailing it, not in the sense in which it is defined by the Church, but in the sense only in which they themselves fancy it must be defined by Her. There is a proverb which says: "He that understands amiss, concludes worse." This being so, it may not be altogether out of place to give here in a foreword to this most interesting and edifying volume, all in praise of God's Mother, a short exposition of the doctrine without the knowledge of which it is no easy matter to arrive at a true estimate of Mary's dignity and sanctity. And here, let me observe, that my experience teaches me that one of the chief reasons why It learned and devout men," outside the Church, do not understand the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, is because they misunderstand the doctrine of Original Sin. Not knowing the rule, they cannot realize the exception to the rule; not recognizing the penalty, they cannot see the privilege; in other words, not appreciating what we mean by the stain and guilt of Original Sin, they do not and cannot know what is meant by exemption from it. Besides personal sin, which may be mortal or venial, there is another sin called a quasi-personal sin. It is the sin inherited by the human family from Adam, who, as origin and constituted head of the human family, has transmitted to his posterity that state of forfeiture of grace, into which he fell when he transgressed God's law in the Garden of Paradise. Revelation teaches us that Adam, having forfeited for himself through an act of prevarication Sanctifying Grace, together with all its formal effects, and those preternatural gifts, with which God had dowered his being when He created it, has, as our rightly constituted head, transmitted to us those fatal consequences of his lawlessness. Accordingly, each member of the human family is conceived and is born in a state of forfeiture and disinheritance. Hence the cry of the royal psalmist: -" Behold I was conceived in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." Since Adam's fall, Man, his descendant, comes into this world despoiled of that divine life of grace which finally develops into the life of glory. Till reinstated in grace, Man, being without supernatural life, is without a supernatural end to life. He is a wandering star, and, till grace restores him to divine sonship, he is no heir of God or co-heir with Christ. I have stated the rule-let me now pass on to its exception. Mary is its exception. When we speak of her Immaculate Conception we mean to say that Mary did not incur the fatal consequences of Adam's fall from Grace; we mean to say that she, by the special favour of God, was exempted from Original Sin, so that there was no moment of her life, either after or before her birth, in which she was in a state of forfeiture. On the contrary, sinless and stainless in her origin, she started her race for Heaven, enriched with a wealth of grace, short only of infinite.