eaving 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
woman's soul may pronounce that rash or dangerous in the intercourse of
life which seeks to cheer and assist her male associates by an endearing
sympathy; but who that has had any great literary or artistic success
cannot trace it, in part, to the appreciation and encouragement of those
cultivated women who were proud to be his friends? Who that has written
poetry that future ages will sing; who that has sculptured a marble that
seems to live; who that has declared the saving truths of an
unfashionable religion,--has not been stimulated to labor and duty by
women with whom he lived in esoteric intimacy, with mutual admiration
and respect?

Whatever the heights to which woman is destined to rise, and however
exalted the spheres she may learn to fill, she must remember that it was
friendship which first distinguished her from Pagan women, and which
will ever constitute one of her most peerless charms. Long and dreary
has been her progress from the obscurity to which even the Middle Ages
doomed her, with all the boasted admiration of chivalry, to her present
free and exalted state. She is now recognized to be the equal of man in
her intellectual gifts, and is sought out everywhere as teacher and as
writer. She may become whatever she pleases,--actress, singer, painter,
novelist, poet, or queen of society, sharing with man the great prizes
bestowed on genius and l