ore of the sea as
they take their final farewell of Paula. "The sails were set and the
strokes of the rowers carried the vessel into the deep. On the shore
little Toxotius stretched forth his hands in entreaty, while Rufina, now
grown up, with silent sobs besought her mother to wait until she should
be married. But still Paula's eyes were dry as she turned them
heavenwards, and she overcame her love for her children by her love for
God. She knew herself no more as a mother that she might approve herself
a handmaid of Christ. Yet her heart was rent within her, and she
wrestled with her grief as though she were being forcibly separated from
parts of herself. The greatness of the affection she had to overcome
made all admire her victory the more. Though it is against the laws of
nature, she endured this trial with unabated faith."

So the vessel ploughed onward, carrying the mother who thought she was
honoring God and attaining the true end of being through ruthless
strangling of maternal love. She visited Syria and Egypt and the islands
of Ponta and Cyprus. At the feet of the hermit fathers she begged their
blessing and tried to emulate the virtues she believed they possessed.
At Jerusalem she fell upon her face and kissed the stone before the
sepulcher. "What tears, she shed, what groans she uttered, what grief
she poured out all Jerusalem knows!"

She established two monasteries at Bethlehem, one of which was for
women. Here, with her daughter, she lived a life of rigid abstinence.
Her nuns had nothing they could call their own. If they paid too much
attention to dress Paula said, "A clean body and a clean dress mean an
unclean soul." To her credit, she was more lenient with others than with
herself. Jerome admits she went to excess, and prudently observes:
"Difficult as it is to avoid extremes, the philosophers are quite right
in their opinion that virtue is a mean and vice an excess, or, as we may
express it in one short sentence, in nothing too much." Paula swept
floors and toiled in the kitchen. She slept on the ground, covered by a
mat of goat's hair. Her weeping was incessant. As she meditated over the
Scriptures, her tears fell so profusely that her sight was endangered.
Jerome warned her to spare her eyes, but she said: "I must disfigure
that face which, contrary to God's commandment, I have painted with
rouge, white lead and antimony." If this be a sin against the Almighty,
bear witness, O ye daughters of Eve!