They had already been captivated in numbers by the mystic cults of the Orient. Out of the East, whence came the pagan gods as well as the luxury and sensualism which had sapped the moral life of Rome, came also the “still small voice” of a new faith, with unfamiliar messages of hope and consolation. It had been singing its hymns for nearly three hundred years in that great under-world, of which little note had been taken, except in periodical outbursts of persecution. In the vast network of dark passages and lighted cells which lay far from the light of the sun; beneath the shining temples and statues of the gods they were undermining; beneath the groves, and gardens, and fountains, and palaces in which vice reigned and idle voluptuaries were inventing new refinements of sin to spur their jaded senses--the disciples of a lowly faith which trampled upon all that these Epicureans loved, making a sin of pleasure and a joy of suffering, had met to offer incense at strange altars. It was women, with their natural tendency toward a personal devotion and a self-sacrifice strengthened perhaps by the forced self-effacement of centuries, who embraced with the most passionate fervor a religion that deified all that was best and most distinctive in their own natures. This religion, with its spirit of love, its trust in some other existence that would compensate a thousandfold for the sorrows of this, appealed to them irresistibly. Already it had brought peace and a martyr’s crown to multitudes of the poor and ignorant who had little to lose but their lives. It had gained, too, a firm foothold among the cultivated classes, who did not always forsake the things of the world in their acceptance of things of the spirit. But the fact that it had become a State religion had not made it a fashionable one, though its later votaries often outdid their pagan neighbors in luxury and worldliness. One day in the later years of the fourth century, a rich, noble, educated, and able woman withdrew in weariness and disgust from the vanities and unblushing vices of Roman society, fitted up an oratory in her stately palace on the Aventine, and asked her friends to join her in the worship, duties, and sacrifices of the Christian faith. This was the germ of the Church of the Household, the _Ecclesia Domestica_, on which St. Jerome has thrown so bright a light--the small beginning of the vast combinations of women, in which one of the greatest religious movements of the world found its strongest instrument and support. Nothing shows more clearly the strength and moral purity of the large body of Roman womanhood than the numbers who flocked to a standard that offered no worldly attractions, and imposed, as the first of duties, self-renunciation and the denial of all pleasures of sense. II