the baptismal font and concerted that she
should bear the name of Monica.

There are in life many things which, in themselves, seeming to the
vulgar and the heedless to be trivial and without consequence, may yet
be causes pregnant of terrible effects, mainsprings of Destiny itself.
Amid such portentous trifles I would number the names so heedlessly
bestowed upon us.

It surprises me that in none of the philosophic writings of the learned
scholars of antiquity can I find that this matter of names has been
touched upon, much less given the importance of which I account it to be
deserving.

Possibly it is because no one of them ever suffered, as I have suffered,
from the consequences of a name. Had it but been so, they might in their
weighty and impressive manner have set down a lesson on the subject,
and so relieved me--who am all-conscious of my shortcomings in this
direction-from the necessity of repairing that omission out of my own
experience.

Let it then, even at this late hour, be considered what a subtle
influence for good or ill, what a very mould of character may lie within
a name.

To the dull clod of earth, perhaps, or, again, to the truly
strong-minded nature that is beyond such influences, it can matter
little that he be called Alexander or Achilles; and once there was a man
named Judas who fell so far short of the noble associations of that name
that he has changed for all time the very sound and meaning of it.

But to him who has been endowed with imagination--that greatest boon and
greatest affliction of mankind--or whose nature is such as to crave for
models, the name he bears may become a thing portentous by the images
it conjures up of some mighty dead who bore it erstwhile and whose life
inspires to emulation.

Whatever may be accounted the general value of this premiss, at least as
it concerns my mother I shall hope to prove it apt.

They named her Monica. Why the name was chosen I have never learnt; but
I do not conceive that there was any reason for the choice other than
the taste of her parents in the matter of sounds. It is a pleasing
enough name, euphoniously considered, and beyond that--as is so commonly
the case--no considerations were taken into account.

To her, however, at once imaginative and of a feeble and dependent
spirit, the name was fateful. St. Monica was made the special object of
her devotions in girlhood, and remained so later when she became a wife.
The Life of St.