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