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56 are truth and accuracy, not a polemical defence of the truths narrated. This belongs to the province of dogmatic theology.

Like other contested doctrines of Christianity, the infallibility of the head of the Church has had three periods: the first was a period of simple belief, the second a period of analysis and controversy, the third a period of gradual determination and final definition. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is a fair example. It has visibly passed through these three stages. It was implicitly contained in the universal belief of the Church, both East and West, that the Blessed Virgin was a person without sin, and sanctified by a pre-eminent and exceptional sanctification. This was the first period of unanalysed belief. The second period began in the Pelagian controversy, when S. Augustin, in affirming the universality of original sin, expressly excepted the mother of our Lord. This exemption from original sin was analytically accounted for in two ways—either that she was liberated from it and born without it, or that she was always free from it in the first moment of her existence. The former is the doctrine of the Immaculate Nativity, the latter of the Immaculate Conception. The third period dates from the eleventh century,