no Christian woman should be allowed to visit the prisoners. The _Breviarium_ tells us that St. Justina, upon whom a famous magician named Cyprian had tried all manner of unhallowed arts, so far prevailed over him that she brought him to know the true God, and to abandon his idols and sorceries. But examples such as these of the intellectual influence of women upon their friends, and even upon strangers and enemies, would multiply under our hands into a volume, if we could stop to collect them all. Martyrdom was, in the early ages, the almost inevitable end of zealous faith and active evangelization. St. Cecilia ranks among the most prominent of those who, strong with a supernatural strength, gladly gave up life, youth, health, and beauty, for the sake of principle. Let us put it in that form, for even now there are many who respect in the abstract a single-minded devotion to principle. This devotion would be essentially called manliness in our day; yet the women of the early church--some mere children in years, some threatened with what would make a woman waver in her determination far more than mere physical torture could, the loss of her honor, some again with natural diseases or weakness upon them--showed a superabundant amount of this very _manliness_. Cecilia has long been the patroness of music, and we read in her _Acts_ that she employed both vocal and instrumental music in the service of the Most High, fitly using the most beautiful of arts to glorify Supreme Beauty. Her love for the Holy Scriptures was such that she often wore them on her bosom in the folds of her robe, and that long before the Canon of Scripture had been fixed, and before the Holy Book could have the world-wide reputation which the church has now bestowed upon it. Cecilia’s will, made in presence of Pope Urban, consisted in the giving of her palace for a church, and the distributing of her remaining wealth to the poor. Her death was heroic, and, as her life-blood was ebbing slowly from her, she only thought of converting her executioners. Oblivious of bodily pain, she exhorted them to throw off the yoke of idolatry, and succeeded so far as to cause them to exclaim, “It is only a God who could have created such a prodigy as his servant Cecilia!” The body of the martyr was interred in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, in a chapel hollowed out of the earth, and somewhat larger than the other chambers of the same catacomb: it was the sepulchre of the popes, and the placing of her body in this sepulchre was a mark of the extraordinary respect due to her generous munificence and her heroic courage. Thus has the old church, so truly called the “mother church,” always recognized and rewarded merit, whether in man or woman. Susannah, a relation both of Pope Caius and of the Emperor Diocletian, and daughter to Gabinius, a man as learned as he was noble, was another instance of how religion can reconcile profound instruction with deep piety, and unite both to beauty