In the reception of novices into the Roman Catholic sisterhood, one of the ceremonies performed was the presentation of a ring blessed by the bishop, usually of gold with a sapphire. After the benediction of the veil, the ring, and the crown, the novices receive the first as a mark of renouncing the world; the ring, by which they are married to the Son of God, and the crown, as a type of that prepared for them in heaven. The origin of this custom of espousals to Christ dates from a very remote period. ‘We meet,’ remarks Lingard, in his ‘History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,’ ‘for more than a thousand years after the first preaching of Christianity, with females who, to speak the language of our ancestors, had wedded themselves to God.’ On one of four rings of St. Eloy (6th century), preserved before the Revolution of 1793 in the treasury of the church at Noyon, in France, was inscribed:-- Annulus Eligii fuit aureus iste beati, Quo Christo sanctam desponsavit Godebertam. (This gold ring of the ever-blessed St. Eloy was that with which he married St. Godiberte to Christ.) John Alcock, Bishop of Ely (1486), gives ‘an exhortacyon made to relygyous systers in the tyme of theyr consecracyon by him: “I aske the banes betwyx the hyghe and moost myghty Prynce, Kyng of all kynges, Sone of Almyghty God, and the Virgyn Mary, in humanyte Cryste Jesu of Nazareth, of the one partye, and A. B. of the thother partye, that yf ony or woman can shewe any lawfull impedymente other by any precontracte made on corrupcyon of body or soule of the sayd A. B. that she ought not to be maryed this daye unto the sayd mighty Prynce Jesu, that they wolde accordynge unto the lawe shewe it.”’