venerable Paula.  Of the stock of the Gracchi, descended from the Scipios, she yet preferred Bethlehem to Rome, and left her palace glittering with gold to dwell in a mud cabin.”  Her husband was of royal blood and had died leaving her five children.  At his death, she gave herself to works of charity.  The poor and sick she wrapped in her own blankets.  She began to tire of the receptions and other social duties which her position entailed upon her.  While in this frame of mind, two Eastern bishops were entertained at her home during a gathering of ecclesiastics.  They seem to have imparted the monastic impulse, perhaps by the rehearsal of monastic tales, for we are informed that at this time she determined to leave servants, property and children, in order to embrace the monastic life.

Let us stand with her children and kinsfolk on the shore of the sea as they take their final farewell of Paula.  “The sails were set and the strokes of the rowers carried the vessel into the deep.  On the shore little Toxotius stretched forth his hands in entreaty, while Rufina, now grown up, with silent sobs besought her mother to wait until she should be married.  But still Paula’s eyes were dry as she turned them heavenwards, and she overcame her love for her children by her love for God.  She knew herself no more as a mother that she might approve herself a handmaid of Christ.  Yet her heart was rent within her, and she wrestled with her grief as though she were being forcibly separated from parts of herself.  The greatness of the affection she had to overcome made all admire her victory the more.  Though it is against the laws of nature, she endured this trial with unabated faith.”

So the vessel ploughed onward, carrying the mother who thought she was honoring God and attaining the true end of being through ruthless strangling of maternal love.  She visited Syria and Egypt and the islands of Ponta and Cyprus.  At the feet of the hermit fathers she begged their blessing and tried to emulate the virtues she believed they possessed.  At Jerusalem she fell upon her face and kissed the stone before the sepulcher.  “What tears, she shed, what groans she uttered, what grief she poured out all Jerusalem knows!”

She established two monasteries at Bethlehem, one of which was for women.  Here, with her daughter, she lived a life of rigid abstinence.  Her nuns had nothing they could call their own.  If they paid too much attention to dress Paula said, “A clean body and a clean dress mean an unclean soul.”  To her credit, she was more lenient with others than with herself.  Jerome admits she went to excess, and prudently observes:  “Difficult as it is to avoid extremes, the philosophers are quite right in their opinion that virtue is a mean and vice an excess, or, as we may express it in one short sentence, in nothing too much.”  Paula swept floors and toiled in the kitchen.  She slept on the ground, covered by a mat of goat’s hair.  Her weeping