But it is especially since the enunciation of the gospel that the intellectual and moral dignity of woman has been elevated, and that Christian women have taken so noble a place in human society. What I demand is, that absurd prejudices, coarse names, and worn-out jests should not drag them down from the exalted rank assigned to them by the gospel into frivolity and materialism. Let me be clearly understood. I desire, above all, not _femmes savantes_, but, for the sake of husbands, children, and households, intelligent, attentive, and judicious women, well-instructed in all things necessary and useful for them to know as mothers, heads of households, and women of the world; never disdainful of practical duties, but knowing how to occupy not only their fingers, but their minds, understanding the cultivation of the whole soul. And I add that we ought to dread as disastrous evils those frivolous, giddy, self-indulgent women who, in idleness, ignorance, and dissipation, seek for pleasure and amusement; who are hostile to exertion and to almost every duty, incapable of study or of continuous mental effort, and therefore unfitted to exercise any important influence over the education of their children, or over the affairs of their household or of their husbands. III. On these conditions I willingly resign the name of learned woman, claiming it for no one. And yet before laying it aside, I would remark that ages more Christian than our own were far from disdaining it. The disciple and biographer of the illustrious St. Boniface plainly tells us that St. Boniface loved St. Lioba for her solid erudition, _eruditionis sapientia._ This admirable virgin, in whom the light of the Holy Ghost enhanced an enlightenment laboriously acquired from study, united to purity and humility (those virtues which preserve all things in a heart) a knowledge of theology and canon law that became one of the glories of the new-born German church. And, moreover, St. Boniface, far from despising his spiritual daughter's efforts to rise to intellectual pursuits, sometimes robbed the apostolate of hours which he deemed well spent in correcting the literary compositions and Latin verses of Lioba, and in answering her in a similar style; poetic messages carried across seas by confessors and martyrs. {28} And if, going back to earlier ages, we closely examine the records of history, we find that, after the establishment of Christianity, feminine names are constantly met with on the literary monuments most revered by posterity; as, for instance, the celebrated Hypatia, who had Clement of Alexandria for a disciple; the illustrious St. Catharine, teacher of Christian philosophy; and, again, St. Perpetua, who wrote the acts of her own martyrdom and recorded the glory of her companions.