becoming; and used always to communicate her ideas as if they had been suggested by somebody else, so that while instructing others, she appeared herself to be a pupil.”[32] Never, surely, was there a greater error than that into which one of our most learned critics has fallen, when he asserts that “the idea and place of woman has been _slowly and laboriously_ elevated by the Gospel.”[33] He could not have written thus had he been as familiar with the records of the Christian Church as with those of pagan antiquity. The most perfect exemplars of Christian womanhood appear in the history of the primitive ages. The grand ideal of the Roman virgin or matron, softened, purified, and elevated by the Gospel precepts and the Apostolic teaching, retaining all its former strength, but acquiring a new element of tenderness, produced those exquisite flowers of sanctity whom the Church appears in some sort to regard as her children of predilection. They were not the growth of one Church or province, but simultaneously, wherever the Christian faith was preached, they expanded their beautiful petals to the Sun of Justice; and we have in Rome an Agnes and a Cecilia; in Sicily a Lucy and an Agatha; in Carthage a Felicitas; in Alexandria a Catherine; a Blandina in Gaul, and in barbarous Britain, an Ursula. Whence arose this instantaneous regeneration of the womanly character? The Catholic hardly needs to ask himself the question, for the form on which it was modelled is so obvious that it requires not to be indicated. It grew out of no dead code of precepts, but out of the living memory of her, the Mother _par excellence_, the Virgin-Mother of God, and the model of all Christian virgins and mothers; she whose countenance St. Isidore describes as “gravely sweet and sweetly grave;” whose tranquil gait and gentle voice St. Ambrose has dwelt on, as well as her modesty and reverence, “rising up in the presence of her elders.” And it was she of whom he also says, gathering up the precious fragments of ancient tradition, that she was “diligent in reading,” _legendi studiosior_, a trait which reappears in the character of the holy women of early times, and which we are thus able to link on to the source whence they derived their ideal of womanly perfection.