This picture of women as light-bearers to the great orators and philosophers just named is symbolic of them as the helpmates and inspirers of men in every field of human activity and in every age of the world's history. Always and everywhere, when permitted to occupy the same social plane as men, women have been not only as lamps unto the feet and as lights unto the paths of their male compeers in the ordinary affairs of life, but have also been their guiding stars and ministering angels in the highest spheres of intellectual effort. For nearly fifteen centuries St. Jerome has had the gratitude of the church for his masterly translation, known as the Vulgate, of the Hebrew Scriptures. But, had it not been for his two noble friends, Paula and Eustochium, who were as eminent for their intellectual attainments as they were for their descent from the most distinguished families of Rome and Greece, there would have been no Vulgate. For they were not only his inspirers in this colossal undertaking, but they were his active and zealous collaborators as well. Dante and Petrarch are acclaimed as the morning stars of modern literature, but both of them owed their immortality to the inspiration of two pure-minded and noble-hearted women. In the concluding paragraph of his Vita Nuova--the most beautiful love story ever written--Dante records his purpose to say of his inspirer, the gentle, gracious Beatrice Portinari, "what was never said of any woman." The outcome of this exalted purpose was the Divina Commedia, the world's greatest literary masterpiece. Petrarch, the father of humanism, is the first to give Laura de Noves credit for his attainments as a poet. In one of his poems he sings: "Blest be the year, the month, the hour, the day, The season and the time, and point of space, And blest the beauteous country and the place Where first of two eyes I felt the sway." Elsewhere in one of his prose dialogues with St. Augustine he declares, "Whatever you see in me, be it little or much, is due to her; nor would I ever have attained to this measure of name and fame unless she had cherished by those most noble influences that my feeble implanting of virtues which nature had placed in this breast."[234] A no less remarkable inspirer, but in an entirely different sphere of activity, was the devout and spotless Italian maiden, Chiara Schiffi, better known as St. Clara. She was, as is well known, the ardent cooperator of St. Francis Assisi in his great work of social and religious reform which has contributed so much toward the welfare of humanity. But it is not generally known what an important part she had in this great undertaking, and how she sustained the Poverello during long hours of trial and hardship. It was during these periods of care and struggle that we see how courageous and intrepid was "this woman who has always been represented as frail, emaciated, blanched like a flower of the cloister."