Do not be sad; do not put down the beautiful death of your happy daughter to your sins. She has reached the waveless shore and come to everlasting life. Removed from the troubled waters of this present life, she stands upon the rock, and whatever good things she has gathered together, those she holds as a most secure treasure. You should rejoice and exult and be glad that, like an intelligent gardener gathering the ripe fruit, you have offered her soul to the common Lord of all. Applying the remedy of such thoughts as these to yourself and to my most honoured lady, her mother, increase the reward reserved to you under these circumstances, so that not only on account of her excellent early training, but also for humbly and thankfully bearing her happy departure hence, you may receive a great crown from our merciful God. To Olympias, A.D. 404. (_On the Virginal Life_, ii., t. iii., p. 542.) · · · · · · · Virginity is so great a thing, and requires so much labour, that when Christ had come down from heaven in order to make men angels, and to sow the heavenly life on earth, He did not venture even then to enjoin it or to make a law of it, but He _did_ teach death to self, than which there is nothing harder. He taught men to crucify themselves, always to do good to their enemies, yet He did not make a law of virginity. He left it to the free-will of His hearers, saying, _Let him who can, take it._ It is a weighty undertaking: it has arduous wrestlings with the sweat of combat, and its path is rugged and precipitous. This is plainly shown by those in the Old Law, who were full of good deeds. For Moses, that great man who summed up the prophets in his person, the intimate friend of God, who enjoyed so much favour with Him as to be able to snatch six hundred thousand from the chastisement of a divine stroke, and was so great as to command the sea, who parted the ocean, drew water from the rock, and transformed the atmosphere, who changed the Nile’s waters into blood, who opposed Pharaoh with an army of frogs and locusts, and changed the whole face of creation, and worked a thousand other wonders, and many virtuous deeds,—for he was remarkable in every way,—yet he could not even look at _these_ wrestlings, but needed marriage and the society of his wife, with its security. He dared not launch himself on the ocean of virginity fearing its waves. Then there was the patriarch who immolated his son and was strong enough to tread upon the most tyrannical of nature’s feelings. He had courage to sacrifice his son, that son being Isaac, in the bloom of his age, in the very flower of his youth, his own and only-begotten son, vouchsafed to him contrary to all hope, and full of righteousness, his one stay in his old age. He it was who led this son forth to the mountain for that consummation, and prepared the altar and laid the wood upon it, who placed the victim in