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 was incessant. As she meditated over the
Scriptures, her tears fell so profusely that her sight was endangered.
Jerome warned her to spare her eyes, but she said: "I must disfigure
that face which, contrary to God's commandment, I have painted with
rouge, white lead and antimony." If this be a sin against the Almighty,
bear witness, O ye daughters of Eve! Her love for the poor continued to
be the motive of her great liberality. In fact, her giving knew no
bounds. Fuller wisely remarks that "liberality must have banks as well
as a stream;" but Paula said: "My prayer is that I may die a beggar,
leaving not a penny to my daughter and indebted to strangers for my
winding sheet." Her petition was literally granted, for she died leaving
her daughter not only without a penny but overwhelmed in a mass
of debts.