It was with no shadows that Leo fought, but for the foundations of Christian faith and human morality; to preserve for the Church her Divine and human Christ, His Divine omnipotent love, His suffering human sympathy; to preserve for the world the sacredness of family life, the pure love of husband and wife, of father, mother, and child, the Divine creation of the body as well as the soul. For in those days paganism was scarcely dead, or, at all events, scarcely crumbled into harmless dust, with powerless poetic shades, noiselessly gliding around their former haunts; but still retaining in death a deadly malaria of corruption and disease. Leo’s fervent words Ethne found, more and more, were no mere holiday strains of soothing or exciting music, but a clarion call making no uncertain sound, summoning for the perpetual battle with sloth and selfishness, with the paralysis of hopelessness or of lazy content, with sin and wrong within and without. In the sonorous, sententious Latin, Leo’s strong words rang out, in the grand language of law and war which held its own so long in the Church, which at that time had been softened into none of its daughter-tongues, but stood, amidst the countless, shifting dialects of the barbarians, the one great language of law and literature, and of the Christian worship of the West. Leo himself knew no other; of Greek he was ignorant, or, at least, did not speak or write it. His letters had to be translated for the Eastern Church. From Damaris Ethne began indeed to learn something of her native Greek, but as yet only as a beautiful foreign language. Latin was becoming to her familiar as a mother-tongue, and she listened enrapt as Leo spoke in the great basilicas words such as these: “Templum Dei sumus, si Spiritus Dei habitat in nobis. Plus est quod fidelis suo habet animo quam quod miratur cœlo”—words which gained a double significance and force, because, like so many of Leo’s utterances, they were watchwords, they were weapons used against a lingering paganism which made many turn in idolatrous worship towards the sun, on the very steps of the Christian basilica. And again—“Oh, man, recognize the dignity of thy nature! Remember that thou art made in the image of God; once corrupted in Adam, now moulded anew in Christ.” She listened with eager delight to Leo’s “seven steps” of the Beatitudes: the first, Poverty of Spirit. “He commends the humility of souls, rather than the indigency of faculties.” Humility, he admitted, might be easier for the poor than for the rich, “nevertheless,” he said, “in many of the rich a mind is found which uses riches not to swell the tumour of pride, but to do works of loving-kindness, that is, counts it the greatest gain to relieve the miseries of others.”