It is truly meet and just, right and available to salvation, that we should give thanks to thee, O Lord God, almighty: and that we
should, whilst invoking Thy power, celebrate the feasts of the blessed Virgin Mary; from whose womb grew the Fruit, which has filled with the Bread of angels. That Fruit which Eve took from us when she sinned, Mary has restored to us, and it has saved us. Not as the work of the serpent is the work of Mary. From the one, came the poison of our destruction; from the other, the mysteries of salvation. In the one, we see the malice of the tempter; in the other, the help of the divine Majesty. Be the one, came death to the creature; by the other the resurrection of the Creator, by whom human nature, now not captive but free, is restored; and what it lost by its parent Adam, it regained by its Maker Christ.