But the time came—­as it always must—­for the sundering of all earthly ties; austerities and labors accomplished too soon their work.  Even saints are not exempted from the penalty of violated physical laws.  Pascal died at thirty-seven.  Paula lingered to her fifty-seventh year, worn out with cares and vigils.  Her death was as serene as her life was lofty; repeating, as she passed away, the aspirations of the prophet-king for his eternal home.  Not ecstasies, but a serene tranquillity, marked her closing hours.  Raising her finger to her lip, she impressed upon it the sign of the cross, and yielded up her spirit without a groan.  And the icy hand of death neither changed the freshness of her countenance nor robbed it of its celestial loveliness; it seemed as if she were in a trance, listening to the music of angelic hosts, and glowing with their boundless love.  The Bishop of Jerusalem and the neighboring clergy stood around her bed, and Jerome closed her eyes.  For three days numerous choirs of virgins alternated in Greek, Latin, and Syriac their mournful but triumphant chants.  Six bishops bore her body to the grave, followed by the clergy of the surrounding country.  Jerome wrote her epitaph in Latin, but was too much unnerved to preach her funeral sermon.  Inhabitants from all parts of Palestine came to her funeral:  the poor showed the garments which they had received from her charity; while the whole multitude, by their sighs and tears, evinced that they had lost a nursing mother.  The Church received the sad intelligence of her death with profound grief, and has ever since cherished her memory, and erected shrines and monuments to her honor.  In that wonderful painting of Saint Jerome by Domenichino,—­perhaps the greatest ornament of the Vatican, next to that miracle of art, the “Transfiguration” of Raphael,—­the saint is represented in repulsive aspects as his soul was leaving his body, ministered unto by the faithful Paula.  But Jerome survived his friend for fifteen years, at Bethlehem, still engrossed with those astonishing labors which made him one of the greatest benefactors of the Church, yet austere and bitter, revealing in his sarcastic letters how much he needed the soothing influences of that sister of mercy whom God had removed to the choir of angels, and to whom the Middle Ages looked as an intercessor, like Mary herself, with the Father of all, for the pardon of sin.

But I need not linger on Paula’s deeds of fame.  We see in her life, pre-eminently, that noble sentiment which was the first development in woman’s progress from the time that Christianity snatched her from the pollution of Paganism.  She is made capable of friendship for man without sullying her soul, or giving occasion for reproach.  Rare and difficult as this sentiment is, yet her example has proved both its possibility and its radiance.  It is the choicest flower which a man finds in the path of his earthly pilgrimage.  The coarse-minded interpreter of a