The ultimate effect of conventual life on the minds of women is open to serious question. The founders of the movement were matrons of pagan education. The little circle on the Aventine, as we have seen, was versed in the knowledge of the time. But learning was already in its decline. About the time that Marcella was a victim to the barbarians who destroyed the glory of Rome, the last great feminine representative of the genius and culture of the classic world, the beautiful and gifted Hypatia, was dead in Alexandria, a sacrifice to the mad passions of a fanatical mob that marched under the banner of One who came into the world with a message of peace and good will to men. Even the semi-mythical St. Catherine, the patron saint of science, philosophy, education, and eloquence, who lived not long before,--if at all,--was brought up on Plato and taught by pagan masters. So clear was the intellect of this prodigy of wisdom and knowledge that she was called upon to dispute with fifty of the most learned pagans, and, if the legends are to be trusted, vanquished them all on their own ground. The philosopher and the saint were trained in the same schools, and they were alike martyrs to their own learning and talents, though one was a partizan of the old order of things, the other of the new. But those who followed them do not seem to have equaled the early women who were the product of pagan schools. Polite letters were discouraged, if not forbidden. St. Jerome himself mourns over the lost hours spent over Cicero and the poets, though, fortunately for his fame, he never wholly broke away from their influence. “What has Horace to do with the Psalter, or Vergil with the gospels, or Cicero with the apostles?” he said to Eustochium. No pursuit of secular knowledge was ever countenanced in the large bodies of women swayed by a spiritual director who would have burned Sappho and Euripides if he could, and dominated by a visionary emotionalism turned out of its natural channels and centered on a single idea. Great ability asserted itself, not in learning, but in organization, leadership, and an ever-narrowing discipline.