The revolution effected in Roman society through these intelligent patrician matrons, whose names had great prestige, and whose wealth seems to have been inexhaustible, was a vital and important one. The women also show us, even in their often intemperate zeal, the magnificent possibilities of the Roman character. But their value to us lies largely in the results of the work they began, which expanded into the vast system of convents that soon overspread the known world. That these have been an unmixed good no one will contend to-day, but that they fulfilled a mission which was, on the whole, a blessing in its time, few, I think, will deny. For centuries they furnished an outlet for the administrative talents as well as the surplus energies and emotions of women. They were also a refuge for multitudes who had no secure place in the world, and for those who did not wish to subject themselves to the slavery of a forced and loveless marriage. If they were not the best things possible, they were the best things available. So far as these women led lives of active charity, and forgot their own comfort in gentle ministrations to the poor and suffering, the results were good for themselves and the world. When they lost their poise in ecstatic visions, spent long hours in useless austerities and morbid introspection, crushing every natural impulse in the effort to attain an impossible holiness that was as airy and unsubstantial as the fabric of a dream, they became abnormal, and the results were distinctly bad; it was in the last analysis the apotheosis of emotionalism. The old extremes of sensuality were followed by equal extremes in another direction. To glorify pain, to neglect the person, to substitute states of exaltation for family ties, was a mark of piety. The movement started with an ideal of virgin purity that depreciated any life but that of a celibate. The immoralities that early began to creep in with the theories of spiritual marriage, even among the cenobites of the desert, to the dismay of the fathers themselves, were doubtless due in part to the repression of tender human affections, and in part to the vow of obedience which placed pure and saintly women at the mercy of the wolves in sheep’s clothing that speedily overran the church and the world.