Palestine, and passed their lives like Jerome himself, under a rigid rule of prayer and labour. Paula died in Bethlehem. Her daughter and Jerome, less happy, were turned out of their peaceful retreat by a band of Arabs, bribed, we are told, by the heretics in Jerusalem, who burned and pillaged the monastic houses, dispersed the monks and nuns, and drove the venerable Jerome, then past the age of seventy years, to a bed from which he never rose again. The story of the pilgrimage of Paula is useful because it shows that the multiplication of the sacred sites was not due entirely to the invention of later times. At Cæsarea she saw the house of Cornelius the centurion, turned into a church; and here, also, was the house of Saint Philip, and the chambers of his four virgin daughters, prophetesses; on Mount Zion she saw the column where our Lord was scourged, still stained with His blood, and supporting the gallery of a church; she saw, too, the place where the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles; at Bethphage they showed her the sepulchre of Lazarus, and the house of Mary and Martha; on Mount Ephraim she saw the tombs of Joshua and Eleazar; at Shechem the well of Jacob, and the tombs of the twelve patriarchs, and at Samaria the tombs of Elisha and John the Baptist. Hither were brought those possessed with devils, that they might be exorcised, and Paula herself was an eye-witness of the miraculous cure effected. With regard to miracles, indeed, Antoninus Martyr, to whose testimony on the site of the church of the Holy Sepulchre we have referred in another place,[41] relates many which he himself pretends to have seen. If you bring oil near the true cross, he says, it will boil of its own accord, and must be quickly removed, or it will all escape; at certain times a star from heaven rests on the cross. He tells us, too, that there is on Sinai an idol, fixed there by the infidels, in white marble, which on days of ceremony changes colour and becomes quite black. Footnote 41: See Appendix. The impending fall of the empire, and the invasion of the hordes of barbarians, proved but a slight check to the swarms of pilgrims. For the barbarians, finding that these unarmed men and women were completely harmless, respected their helplessness and allowed them to pass unmolested. When, as happened shortly after their settlement in Italy and the West, they were gradually themselves brought within the pale of the Christian faith, they made laws which enforced the protection and privileges of pilgrims. These laws were not, it is true, always obeyed.