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Letter LIV. To
Furia.
A letter of guidance to a widow on the best means of
preserving her widowhood (according to Jerome ‘the second of the
three degrees of chastity’). Furia had at one time thought of
marrying again but eventually abandoned her intention and devoted
herself to the care of her young children and her aged father. Jerome
draws a vivid picture of the dangers to which she is exposed at Rome,
lays down rules of conduct for her guidance, and commends her to the
care of the presbyter Exuperius (afterwards bishop of Toulouse). The
date of the letter is 394 a.d.
1. You beg and implore me in your letter to write to
you—or rather write back to you—what mode of life you ought
to adopt to preserve the crown of widowhood and to keep your reputation
for chastity unsullied. My mind rejoices, my reins exult, and my heart
is glad that you desire to be after marriage what your mother Titiana
of holy memory was for a long time in marriage.1539
Her prayers and supplications are heard. She has succeeded in winning
afresh in her only daughter that which she herself when living
possessed. It is a high privilege of your family that from the time of
Camillus1540
| 1540 Lucius Furius
Camillus, the hero who conquered Veii and freed Rome from the
Gauls. | few or none of your house are
described as contracting second marriages. Therefore it will not
redound so much to your praise if you continue a widow as to your shame
if being a Christian you fail to
keep what heathen women have jealously guarded for so many
centuries.
2. I say nothing of Paula and Eustochium, the fairest
flowers of your stock; for, as my object is to exhort you, I do not
wish it to appear that I am praising them. Blæsilla too I pass
over who following her husband—your brother—to the grave,
fulfilled in a short time of life a long time of virtue.1541
Would that men would imitate the laudable
examples of women, and that wrinkled old age would pay at last what
youth gladly offers at first! In saying this I am putting my hand into
the fire deliberately and with my eyes open. Men will knit their brows
and shake their clenched fists at me;
In swelling tones will angry Chremes rave.1542
| 1542 Horace, A. P. 94:
the allusion is to a scene in the Heauton Timorumenus of Terence. |
The leaders will rise as one man against my epistle; the mob of
patricians will thunder at me. They will cry out that I am a sorcerer
and a seducer; and that I should be transported to the ends of the
earth. They may add, if they will, the title of Samaritan; for in it I
shall but recognize a name given to my Lord. But one thing is certain.
I do not sever the daughter from the mother, I do not use the words of
the gospel: “let the dead bury their dead.”1543
For whosoever believes in Christ is
alive; and he who believes in Him “ought himself also so to walk
even as He walked.”1544
3. A truce to the calumnies which the malice of
backbiters continually fastens upon all who call themselves Christians
to keep them through fear of shame from aspiring to virtue. Except by
letter we have no knowledge of each other; and where there is no
knowledge after the flesh, there can be no motive for intercourse save
a religious one. “Honour thy father,”1545
the commandment says, but only if he does
not separate you from your true Father. Recognize the tie of blood but
only so long as your parent recognizes his Creator. Should he fail to
do so, David will sing to you: “hearken, O daughter, and
consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people and thy
father’s house. So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty, for
he is thy Lord.”1546
Great is the
prize offered for the forgetting of a parent, “the king shall
desire thy beauty.” You have heard, you have considered, you have
inclined your ear, you have forgotten your people and your
father’s house; therefore the king shall desire your beauty and
shall say to you:—“thou art all fair, my love; there is no
spot in thee.”1547
What can be
fairer than a soul which is called the daughter of God,1548
and which seeks for herself no outward
adorning.1549
She believes in Christ, and, dowered
with this hope of greatness1550
| 1550 Hac ambitione
ditata. | makes her way to her
spouse; for Christ is at once her bridegroom and her Lord.
4. What troubles matrimony involves you have learned in
the marriage state itself; you have been surfeited with quails’
flesh1551
even to loathing; your mouth has been filled
with the gall of bitterness; you have expelled the indigestible and
unwholesome food; you have relieved a heaving stomach. Why will you
again swallow what has disagreed with you? “The dog is turned to
his own vomit again and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the
mire.”1552
Even brute beasts and flying birds do
not fall into the same snares twice. Do you fear extinction for the
line of Camillus if you do not present your father with some little
fellow to crawl upon his breast and slobber his neck? As if all who
marry have children! and as if when they do come, they always resemble
their forefathers! Did Cicero’s son exhibit his father’s
eloquence? Had your own Cornelia,1553
| 1553 Furia’s
sister-in-law Blæsilla was through her mother Paula descended from
the Gracchi. See Letter CVIII. § 33. | pattern at
once of chastity and of fruitfulness, cause to rejoice that she was
mother of her Gracchi? It is ridiculous to expect as certain the
offspring which many, as you can see, have not got, while others who
have had it have lost it again. To whom then are you to leave your
great riches? To Christ who cannot die. Whom shall you make your heir?
The same who is already your Lord. Your father will be sorry but Christ
will be glad; your family will grieve but the angels will rejoice with
you. Let your father do what he likes with what is his own. You are not
his to whom you have been born, but His to whom you have been born
again, and who has purchased you at a great price with His own blood.1554
5. Beware of nurses and waiting maids and similar
venomous creatures who try to satisfy their greed by sucking your
blood. They advise you to do not what is best for you but what is best
for them. They are for ever dinning into your ears Virgil’s
lines:—
Will you waste all your youth in lonely grief
And children sweet, the gifts of love, forswear?1555
Wherever there is holy chastity, there is also frugal
living; and wherever there is frugal living, servants lose by it. What
they do not get is in their minds so much taken from them. The actual
sum received is what they look to, and not its relative amount. The
moment they see a Christian they at
once repeat the hackneyed saying:—“The Greek! The
impostor!”1556
| 1556 See Letter XXXVIII.
§ 5. | They spread the
most scandalous reports and, when any such emanates from themselves,
they pretend that they have heard it from others, managing thus at once
to originate the story and to exaggerate it. A lying rumour goes forth;
and this, when it has reached the married ladies and has been fanned by
their tongues, spreads through the provinces. You may see numbers of
these—their faces painted, their eyes like those of vipers, their
teeth rubbed with pumice-stone—raving and carping at Christians
with insane fury. One of these ladies,
A violet mantle round her shoulders thrown,
Drawls out some mawkish stuff, speaks through her
nose,
And minces half her words with tripping tongue.1557
Hereupon the rest chime in and every bench expresses hoarse
approval. They are backed up by men of my own order who, finding
themselves assailed, assail others. Always fluent in attacking me, they
are dumb in their own defence; just as though they were not monks
themselves, and as though every word said against monks did not tell
also against their spiritual progenitors the clergy. Harm done to the
flock brings discredit on the shepherd. On the other hand we cannot but
praise the life of a monk who holds up to veneration the priests of
Christ and refuses to detract from that order to which he owes it that
he is a Christian.
6. I have spoken thus, my daughter in Christ, not
because I doubt that you will be faithful to your vows,1558
| 1558 Propositum. The
word was passing from the meaning of a purpose into that of a formal
vow. | (you would never have asked for a letter
of advice had you been uncertain as to the blessedness of monogamy):
but that you may realize the wickedness of servants who merely wish to
sell you for their own advantage, the snares which relations may set
for you and the well meant but mistaken suggestions of a father. While
I allow that this latter feels love toward you, I cannot admit that it
is love according to knowledge. I must say with the apostle: “I
bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to
knowledge.”1559
Imitate
rather—I cannot say it too often—your holy mother1560
whose zeal for Christ comes into my mind as
often as I remember her, and not her zeal only but the paleness induced
in her by fasting, the alms given by her to the poor, the courtesy
shewn by her to the servants of God, the lowliness of her garb and
heart, and the constant moderation of her language. Of your father too
I speak with respect, not because he is a patrician and of consular
rank but because he is a Christian. Let him be true to his profession
as such. Let him rejoice that he has begotten a daughter for Christ and
not for the world. Nay rather let him grieve that you have in vain lost
your virginity as the fruits of matrimony have not been yours. Where is
the husband whom he gave to you? Even had he been lovable and good,
death would still have snatched all away, and his decease would have
terminated the fleshly bond between you. Seize the opportunity, I beg
of you, and make a virtue of necessity. In the lives of Christians we
look not to the beginnings but to the endings. Paul began badly but
ended well. The start of Judas wins praise; his end is condemned
because of his treachery. Read Ezekiel, “The righteousness of the
righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression; as for
the wickedness of the wicked he shall not fall thereby in the day that
he turneth from his wickedness.”1561
The Christian life is the true Jacob’s ladder on which the angels
ascend and descend,1562
while the Lord
stands above it holding out His hand to those who slip and sustaining
by the vision of Himself the weary steps of those who ascend. But while
He does not wish the death of a sinner, but only that he should be
converted and live, He hates the lukewarm1563
and they quickly cause him loathing. To whom much is forgiven, the same
loveth much.1564
7. In the gospel a harlot wins salvation. How? She is
baptized in her tears and wipes the Lord’s feet with that same
hair with which she had before deceived many. She does not wear a
waving headdress or creaking boots, she does not darken her eyes with
antimony. Yet in her squalor she is lovelier than ever. What place have
rouge and white lead on the face of a Christian woman? The one
simulates the natural red of the cheeks and of the lips; the other the
whiteness of the face and of the neck. They serve only to inflame young
men’s passions, to stimulate lust, and to indicate an unchaste
mind. How can a woman weep for her sins whose tears lay bare her true
complexion and mark furrows on her cheeks? Such adorning is not of the
Lord; a mask of this kind belongs to Antichrist. With what confidence
can a woman raise features to heaven which her Creator must fail to
recognize? It is idle to allege in excuse for such practices
girlishness and youthful vanity. A widow who has ceased to have a
husband to please, and who in the apostle’s language is a widow
indeed,1565
needs nothing more but perseverance only. She is mindful of past
enjoyments, she knows what gave her pleasure and what she has now lost.
By rigid fast and vigil she must quench the fiery darts of the devil.1566
If we are widows, we must either speak as
we are dressed, or else dress as we speak. Why do we profess one thing,
and practise another? The tongue talks of chastity, but the rest of the
body reveals incontinence.
8. So much for dress and adornment. But a widow
“that liveth in pleasure”—the words are not mine but
those of the apostle—“is dead while she liveth.”1567
What does that mean—“is dead
while she liveth”? To those who know no better she seems to be
alive and not, as she is, dead in sin; yes, and in another sense dead
to Christ, from whom no secrets are hid. “The soul that sinneth
it shall die.”1568
“Some
men’s sins are open…going before to judgment: and some they
follow after. Likewise also good works are manifest, and they that are
otherwise cannot be hid.1569
The words mean
this:—Certain persons sin so deliberately and flagrantly that you
no sooner see them than you know them at once to be sinners. But the
defects of others are so cunningly concealed that we only learn them
from subsequent information. Similarly the good deeds of some people
are public property, while those of others we come to know only through
long intimacy with them. Why then must we needs boast of our chastity,
a thing which cannot prove itself to be genuine without its companions
and attendants, continence and plain living? The apostle macerates his
body and brings it into subjection to the soul lest what he has
preached to others he should himself fail to keep;1570
and can a mere girl whose passions are
kindled by abundance of food, can a mere girl afford to be confident of
her own chastity?
9. In saying this, I do not of course condemn food which
God created to be enjoyed with thanksgiving,1571
but I seek to remove from youths and girls what are incentives to
sensual pleasure. Neither the fiery Etna nor the country of Vulcan,1572
nor Vesuvius, nor Olympus, burns with
such violent heat as the youthful marrow of those who are flushed with
wine and filled with food. Many trample covetousness under foot, and
lay it down as readily as they lay down their purse. An enforced
silence serves to make amends for a railing tongue. The outward
appearance and the mode of dress can be changed in a single hour. All
other sins are external, and what is external can easily be cast away.
Desire alone, implanted in men by God to lead them to procreate
children, is internal; and this, if it once oversteps its own bounds,
becomes a sin, and by a law of nature cries out for sexual intercourse.
It is therefore a work of great merit, and one which requires
unremitting diligence to overcome that which is innate in you; while
living in the flesh not to live after the flesh; to strive with
yourself day by day and to watch the foe shut up within you with the
hundred eyes of the fabled Argus.1573
This is
what the apostle says in other words: “Every sin that a man doeth
is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against
his own body.”1574
Physicians and
others who have written on the nature of the human body, and
particularly Galen in his books entitled On matters of health,
say that the bodies of boys and of young men and of full grown men and
women glow with an interior heat and consequently that for persons of
these ages all food is injurious which tends to promote this heat:
while on the other hand it is highly conducive to health in eating and
in drinking to take things cold and cooling. Contrariwise they tell us
that warm food and old wine are good for the old who suffer from
humours and from chilliness. Hence it is that the Saviour says
“Take heed to yourselves lest at any time your hearts be
overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and cares of this
life.”1575
So too speaks the apostle: “Be
not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.”1576
No wonder that the potter spoke thus of the vessel which He had made
when even the comic poet whose only object is to know and to describe
the ways of men tells us that
Where Ceres fails and Liber, Venus droops.1577
10. In the first place then, till you have passed the
years of early womanhood, take only water to drink, for this is by
nature of all drinks the most cooling. This, if your stomach is strong
enough to bear it; but if your digestion is weak, hear what the apostle
says to Timothy: “use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake
and thine often infirmities.”1578
Then as
regards your food you must avoid all heating dishes. I do not speak of
flesh dishes only (although of these the chosen vessel declares his
mind thus: “it is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink
wine”1579
) but of vegetables as well.
Everything provocative or indigestible is to be refused. Be assured
that nothing is so good for young Christians as the eating of herbs. Accordingly in another
place he says: “another who is weak eateth herbs.”1580
Thus the heat of the body must be tempered
with cold food. Daniel and the three children lived on pulse.1581
They were still boys and had not come yet
to that frying-pan on which the King of Babylon fried the elders1582
who were judges. Moreover, by an express
privilege of God’s own giving their bodily condition was improved
by their regimen. We do not expect that it will be so with us, but we
look for increased vigour of soul which becomes stronger as the flesh
grows weaker. Some persons who aspire to the life of chastity fall
midway in their journey from supposing that they need only abstain from
flesh. They load their stomachs with vegetables which are only harmless
when taken sparingly and in moderation. If I am to say what I think,
there is nothing which so much heats the body and inflames the passions
as undigested food and breathing broken with hiccoughs. As for you, my
daughter, I would rather wound your modesty than endanger my case by
understatement. Regard everything as poison which bears within it the
seeds of sensual pleasure. A meagre diet which leaves the appetite
always unsatisfied is to be preferred to fasts three days long. It is
much better to take a little every day than some days to abstain wholly
and on others to surfeit oneself. That rain is best which falls slowly
to the ground. Showers that come down suddenly and with violence wash
away the soil.
11. When you eat your meals, reflect that you must
immediately afterwards pray and read. Have a fixed number of lines of
holy scripture, and render it as your task to your Lord. On no account
resign yourself to sleep until you have filled the basket of your
breast with a woof of this weaving. After the holy scriptures you
should read the writings of learned men; of those at any rate whose
faith is well known. You need not go into the mire to seek for gold;
you have many pearls, buy the one pearl with these.1583
Stand, as Jeremiah says, in more ways
than one that so you may come on the true way that leads to the
Father.1584
| 1584 Jer. vi. 16. ‘The ways.’ Vulg. VA V.
‘More than one’ is Jerome’s Gloss. | Exchange your love of necklaces
and of gems and of silk dresses for earnestness in studying the
scriptures. Enter the land of promise that flows with milk and honey.1585
Eat fine flour and oil. Let your clothing
be, like Joseph’s, of many colors.1586
Let your ears like those of Jerusalem1587
be pierced by the word of God that the
precious grains of new corn may hang from them. In that reverend man
Exuperius1588
| 1588 Afterwards
Bishop of Tolosa (Toulouse). He is mentioned again in Letters CXXIII.
and CXXV. | you have a man of tried years
and faith ready to give you constant support with his advice.
12. Make to yourself friends of the mammon of
unrighteousness that they may receive you into everlasting
habitations.1589
Give your riches not to those who
feed on pheasants but to those who have none but common bread to eat,
such as stays hunger while it does not stimulate lust. Consider the
poor and needy.1590
Give to everyone
that asks of you,1591
but especially
unto them who are of the household of faith.1592
Clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick.1593
Every time that you hold out your hand,
think of Christ. See to it that you do not, when the Lord your God asks
an alms of you, increase riches which are none of His.
13. Avoid the company of young men. Let long baited
youths dandified and wanton never be seen under your roof. Repel a
singer as you would some bane. Hurry from your house women who live by
playing and singing, the devil’s choir whose songs are the fatal
ones of sirens. Do not arrogate to yourself a widow’s license and
appear in public preceded by a host of eunuchs. It is a most
mischievous thing for those who are weak owing to their sex and youth
to misuse their own discretion and to suppose that things are lawful
because they are pleasant. “All things are lawful, but all things
are not expedient.”1594
No frizzled
steward nor shapely foster brother nor fair and ruddy footman must
dangle at your heels. Sometimes the tone of the mistress is inferred
from the dress of the maid. Seek the society of holy virgins and
widows; and, if need arises for holding converse with men, do not shun
having witnesses, and let your conversation be marked with such
confidence that the entry of a third person shall neither startle you
nor make you blush. The face is the mirror of the mind and a
woman’s eyes without a word betray the secrets of her heart. I
have lately seen a most miserable scandal traverse the entire East. The
lady’s age and style, her dress and mien, the indiscriminate
company she kept, her dainty table and her regal appointments bespoke
her the bride of a Nero or of a Sardanapallus. The scars of others
should teach us caution. ‘When he that causeth trouble is
scourged the fool will be wiser.’1595
A
holy love knows no impatience. A false rumor is quickly crushed and the
after life passes judgment on that which has gone before. It is not indeed possible that any one
should come to the end of life’s race without suffering from
calumny; the wicked find it a consolation to carp at the good,
supposing the guilt of sin to be less, in proportion as the number of
those who commit it is greater. Still a fire of straw quickly dies out
and a spreading flame soon expires if fuel to it be wanting. Whether
the report which prevailed a year ago was true or false, when once the
sin ceases, the scandal also will cease. I do not say this because I
fear anything wrong in your case but because, owing to my deep
affection for you, there is no safety that I do not fear.1596
| 1596 Cf. Virg. A. iv.
298. | Oh! that you could see your sister1597
| 1597 Her cousin
Eustochium seems to be meant. | and that it might be yours to hear the
eloquence of her holy lips and to behold the mighty spirit which
animates her diminutive frame. You might hear the whole contents of the
old and new testaments come bubbling up out of her heart. Fasting is
her sport, and prayer she makes her pastime. Like Miriam after the
drowning Pharaoh she takes up her timbrel and sings to the virgin
choir, “Let us sing to the Lord for He hath triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.”1598
She teaches her companions to be music
girls but music girls for Christ, to be luteplayers but luteplayers for
the Saviour. In this occupation she passes both day and night and with
oil ready to put in the lamps she waits the coming of the Bridegroom.1599
Do you therefore imitate your kinswoman.
Let Rome have in you what a grander city than Rome, I mean Bethlehem,
has in her.
14. You have wealth and can easily therefore supply food
to those who want it. Let virtue consume what was provided for
self-indulgence; one who means to despise matrimony need fear no degree
of want. Have about you troops of virgins whom you may lead into the
king’s chamber. Support widows that you may mingle them as a kind
of violets with the virgins’ lilies and the martyrs’ roses.
Such are the garlands you must weave for Christ in place of that crown
of thorns1600
in which he bore the sins of the world.
Let your most noble father thus find in you his joy and support, let
him learn from his daughter the lessons he used to learn from his wife.
His hair is already gray, his knees tremble, his teeth fall out, his
brow is furrowed through years, death is nigh even at the doors, the
pyre is all but laid out hard by. Whether we like it or not, we grow
old. Let him provide for himself the provision which is needful for his
long journey. Let him take with him what otherwise he must unwillingly
leave behind, nay let him send before him to heaven what if he declines
it, will be appropriated by earth.
15. Young widows, of whom some “are already turned
aside after Satan, when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ
”1601
and wish to marry, generally make such
excuses as these. “My little patrimony is daily decreasing, the
property which I have inherited is being squandered, a servant has
spoken insultingly to me, a maid has neglected my orders. Who will
appear for me before the authorities? Who will be responsible for the
rents of my estates?1602
Who will see to
the education of my children, and to the bringing up of my
slaves?” Thus, shameful to say, they put that forward as a reason
for marrying again, which alone should deter them from doing so. For by
marrying again a mother places over her sons not a guardian but a foe,
not a father but a tyrant. Inflamed by her passions she forgets the
fruit of her womb, and among the children who know nothing of their sad
fate the lately weeping widow dresses herself once more as a bride. Why
these excuses about your property and the insolence of slaves? Confess
the shameful truth. No woman marries to avoid cohabiting with a
husband. At least, if passion is not your motive, it is mere madness to
play the harlot just to increase wealth. You do but purchase a paltry
and passing gain at the price of a grace which is precious and eternal!
If you have children already, why do you want to marry? If you have
none, why do you not fear a recurrence of your former sterility? Why do
you put an uncertain gain before a certain loss of self-respect?
A marriage-settlement is made in your favour to-day but
in a short time you will be constrained to make your will. Your husband
will feign sickness and will do for you what he wants you to do for
him. Yet he is sure to live and you are sure to die. Or if it happens
that you have sons by the second husband, domestic strife is certain to
result and intestine disputes. You will not be allowed to love your
first children, nor to look kindly on those to whom you have yourself
given birth. You will have to give them their food secretly; yet even
so your present husband will bear a grudge against your previous one
and, unless you hate your sons, he will think that you still love their
father. But your husband may have issue by a former wife. If so when he
takes you to his home, though you should be the kindest person in the
world, all the commonplaces of
rhetoricians and declamations of comic poets and writers of mimes will
be hurled at you as a cruel stepmother. If your stepson fall sick or
have a headache you will be calumniated as a poisoner. If you refuse
him food, you will be cruel, while if you give it, you will be held to
have bewitched him. I ask you what benefit has a second marriage to
confer great enough to compensate for these evils?
16. Do we wish to know what widows ought to be? Let us
read the gospel according to Luke. “There was one Anna,” he
says, “a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of
Aser.”1603
The meaning of the name Anna is
grace. Phanuel is in our tongue the face of God. Aser may be translated
either as blessedness or as wealth. From her youth up to the age of
fourscore and four years she had borne the burden of widowhood, not
departing from the temple and giving herself to fastings and prayers
night and day; therefore she earned spiritual grace, received the title
‘daughter of the face of God,’1604
and obtained a share in the ‘blessedness and wealth’1605
which belonged to her ancestry. Let us
recall to mind the widow of Zarephath1606
who thought more of satisfying Elijah’s hunger than of preserving
her own life and that of her son. Though she believed that she and he
must die that very night unless they had food, she determined that her
guest should survive. She preferred to sacrifice her life rather than
to neglect the duty of almsgiving. In her handful of meal she found the
seed from which she was to reap a harvest sent her by the Lord. She
sows her meal and lo! a cruse of oil comes from it. In the land of
Judah grain was scarce for the corn of wheat had died there;1607
but in the house of a heathen widow oil
flowed in streams. In the book of Judith—if any one is of opinion
that it should be received as canonical—we read of a widow wasted
with fasting and wearing the sombre garb of a mourner, whose outward
squalor indicated not so much the regret which she felt for her dead
husband as the temper1608
| 1608 i.e., that
of penitence. | in which she
looked forward to the coming of the Bridegroom. I see her hand armed
with the sword and stained with blood. I recognize the head of
Holofernes which she has carried away from the camp of the enemy. Here
a woman vanquishes men, and chastity beheads lust. Quickly changing her
garb, she puts on once more in the hour of victory her own mean dress
finer than all the splendours of the world.1609
17. Some from a misapprehension number Deborah among the
widows, and suppose that Barak the leader of the army is her son,
though the scripture tells a different story. I will mention her here
because she was a prophetess and is reckoned among the judges, and
again because she might have said with the psalmist:—“How
sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea sweeter than honey to my
mouth.”1610
Well was she called
the bee1611
for she fed on the flowers of
scripture, was enveloped with the fragrance of the Holy Spirit, and
gathered into one with prophetic lips the sweet juices of the nectar.
Then there is Naomi, in Greek παρακεκλημένη1612
| 1612 Jerome appears to
have read ימתנ
for ימענ. The
latter means ‘my pleasantness.’ | or she who is consoled, who, when her
husband and her children died abroad, carried her chastity back home
and, being supported on the road by its aid, kept with her her
Moabitish daughter-in-law, that in her the prophecy of Isaiah1613
| 1613 Made long
afterwards. | might find a fulfilment. “Send out
the lamb, O Lord, to rule over the land from the rock of the desert to
the mount of the daughter of Zion.”1614
I pass on to the widow in the gospel who, though she was but a poor
widow was yet richer than all the people of Israel.1615
She had but a grain of mustard seed, but
she put her leaven in three measures of flour; and, combining her
confession of the Father and of the Son with the grace of the Holy
Spirit, she cast her two mites into the treasury. All the substance
that she had, her entire possessions, she offered in the two testaments
of her faith. These are the two seraphim which glorify the Trinity with
threefold song1616
and are stored
among the treasures of the church. They also form the legs of the tongs
by which the live coal is caught up to purge the sinner’s lips.1617
18. But why should I recall instances from history and
bring from books types of saintly women, when in your own city you have
many before your eyes whose example you may well imitate? I shall not
recount their merits here lest I should seem to flatter them. It will
suffice to mention the saintly Marcella1618
| 1618 See Letters
XXIII., LXXVII., etc. | who, while she is true to the claims of
her birth and station, has set before us a life which is worthy of the
gospel. Anna “lived with an husband seven years from her
virginity”;1619
Marcella lived
with one for seven months. Anna looked for the coming of Christ;
Marcella holds fast the Lord whom Anna received in her arms. Anna sang
His praise when He was still a wailing infant; Marcella proclaims His glory
now that He has won His triumph. Anna spoke of Him to all those who
waited for the redemption of Israel; Marcella cries out with the
nations of the redeemed: “A brother redeemeth not, yet a man
shall redeem,”1620
and from another
psalm: “A man was born in her, and the Highest Himself hath
established her.”1621
About two years ago, as I well remember, I published a
book against Jovinian in which by the authority of scripture I crushed
the objections raised on the other side on account of the
apostle’s concession of second marriages. It is unnecessary that
I should repeat my arguments afresh here, as you can find them all in
this treatise. That I may not exceed the limits of a letter, I will
only give you this one last piece of advice. Think every day that you
must die, and you will then never think of marrying again. E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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