fortitude, patriotism, conjugal and parental love; but how seldom do we read of those who were capable of an exalted friendship for men, without provoking scandal or exciting rude suspicion?  Who among the poets paint friendship without love; who among them extol women, unless they couple with their praises of mental and moral qualities a mention of the delights of sensual charms and of the joys of wine and banquets?  Poets represent the sentiments of an age or people; and the poets of Greece and Rome have almost libelled humanity itself by their bitter sarcasms, showing how degraded the condition of woman was under Pagan influences.

Now, I select Paula, to show that friendship—­the noblest sentiment in woman—­was not common until Christianity had greatly modified the opinions and habits of society; and to illustrate how indissolubly connected this noble sentiment is with the highest triumphs of an emancipating religion.  Paula was a highly favored as well as a highly gifted woman.  She was a descendant of the Scipios and the Gracchi, and was born A.D. 347, at Rome, ten years after the death of the Great Constantine who enthroned Christianity, but while yet the social forces of the empire were entangled in the meshes of Paganism.  She was married at seventeen to Toxotius, of the still more illustrious Julian family.  She lived on Mount Aventine, in great magnificence.  She owned, it is said, a whole city in Italy.  She was one of the richest women of antiquity, and belonged to the very highest rank of society in an aristocratic age.  Until her husband died, she was not distinguished from other Roman ladies of rank, except for the splendor of her palace and the elegance of her life.  It seems that she was first won to Christianity by the virtues of the celebrated Marcella, and she hastened to enroll herself, with her five daughters, as pupils of this learned woman, at the same time giving up those habits of luxury which thus far had characterized her, together with most ladies of her class.  On her conversion, she distributed to the poor the quarter part of her immense income,—­charity being one of the forms which religion took in the early ages of Christianity.  Nor was she contented to part with the splendor of her ordinary life.  She became a nurse of the miserable and the sick; and when they died she buried them at her own expense.  She sought out and relieved distress wherever it was to be found.

But her piety could not escape the asceticism of the age; she lived on bread and a little oil, wasted her body with fastings, dressed like a servant, slept on a mat of straw, covered herself with haircloth, and denied herself the pleasures to which she had been accustomed; she would not even take a bath.  The Catholic historians have unduly magnified these virtues; but it was the type which piety then assumed, arising in part from a too literal interpretation of the injunctions of Christ.  We are more enlightened in these times, since modern Christian civilization