rival the young nubile girl.  “A double ardor thus burns in the heart of him who lives with her, and the gratification of desire never extinguishes the bright flame which ever continues to increase in strength.”  Chrysostom describes minutely all the little cares and attentions which the modern girls of his time required, and which these men delighted to expend on their virginal sweethearts whether in public or in private.  He cannot help thinking, however, that the man who lavishes kisses and caresses on a woman whose virginity he retains is putting himself somewhat in the position of Tantalus.  But this new refinement of tender chastity, which came as a delicious discovery to the early Christians who had resolutely thrust away the licentiousness of the pagan world, was deeply rooted, as we discover from the frequency with which the grave Fathers of the Church, apprehensive of scandal, felt called upon to reprove it, though their condemnation is sometimes not without a trace of secret sympathy.[75]

There was one form in which the new Christian chastity flourished exuberantly and unchecked:  it conquered literature.  The most charming, and, we may be sure, the most popular literature of the early Church lay in the innumerable romances of erotic chastity—­to some extent, it may well be, founded on fact—­which are embodied to-day in the Acta Sanctorum.  We can see in even the most simple and non-miraculous early Christian records of the martyrdom of women that the writers were fully aware of the delicate charm of the heroine who, like Perpetua at Carthage, tossed by wild cattle in the arena, rises to gather her torn garment around her and to put up her disheveled hair.[76] It was an easy step to the stories of romantic adventure.  Among these delightful stories I may refer especially to the legend of Thekla, which has been placed, incorrectly it may be, as early as the first century, “The Bride and Bridegroom of India” in Judas Thomas’s Acts, “The Virgin of Antioch” as narrated by St. Ambrose, the history of “Achilleus and Nereus,” “Mygdonia and Karish,” and “Two Lovers of Auvergne” as told by Gregory of Tours.  Early Christian literature abounds in the stories of lovers who had indeed preserved their chastity, and had yet discovered the most exquisite secrets of love.

Thekla’s day is the twenty-third of September.  There is a very good Syriac version (by Lipsius and others regarded as more primitive than the Greek version) of the Acts of Paul and Thekla (see, e.g., Wright’s Apocryphal Acts).  These Acts belong to the latter part of the second century.  The story is that Thekla, refusing to yield to the passion of the high priest of Syria, was put, naked but for a girdle (subligaculum) into the arena on the back of a lioness, which licked her feet and fought for her against the other beasts, dying in her defense.  The other beasts, however, did her no harm, and she was finally released.