Volume 21 — CHAPTER V. (continued 2)

The foundress of the Poor Clares, S. Clare of Assisium, was the daughter of a knight, and had to suffer contumely and opprobrium for entering the religious state instead of accepting proffered marriage. Her sister and mother were led by her virtues to follow her example, and they founded houses of the Poor Clares in all the principal cities of Italy and Germany. They wore no covering on their feet, slept on the ground, practised perpetual abstinence, and never spoke except when compelled by necessity or charity. S. Clare’s great fortune she gave to the poor, without reserving a farthing for herself. What but religion could suggest, sustain, and crown so martyr-like a life as this? The Little Sisters of the Poor are now nearest the model which S. Clare became; and the Little Sister of the Poor is greater in the sight of Almighty God and in the honest reverence of the human heart than a De Staël or a “Sand”!

We merely allude to S. Jane Frances de Chantal, the foundress of the Order of the Visitation, whom our American widow, Mother Seton, foundress of our Sisters of Charity, so strangely resembled in certain properties of character and circumstances of life. The conspicuous virtue of these two women was the same—humility. Space forbids more than allusion to other noted foundresses—Angela Merici, mother of the Ursulines; Catherine McAuley, of the Sisters of Mercy; Mme. Barat, foundress of the Order of the Sacred Heart, whose beatification is in progress; Nano Nagle, of the Sisters of the Presentation; and those holy, brave, and zealous women who are to-day leading their respective communities in every part of the world, whom to name, even in illustration of an argument, would be to offend. They are exercising within convent walls the sacrifices which made martyrs. They are sending pioneers of religion to the frontiers of civilization; equipping hospitals, asylums, and schools wherever and whenever called; carrying out faithfully on our continent the example set them by the foundresses of American charitable institutions; for our first hospital in New France was managed by three nuns from Dieppe, the youngest but twenty-two years of age; and in 1639 a widow of Alenson and a nun from Dieppe, with two Sisters from Tours, established an Ursuline Academy for girls at Quebec. Bancroft says: “As the youthful heroines stepped on the shore at Quebec they stooped to kiss the earth, which they adopted as their mother, and were ready, in case of need, to tinge with their blood. The governor, with the little garrison, received them at the water’s edge; Hurons and Algonquins, joining in the shouts, filled the air with yells of joy; and the motley group escorted the new-comers to the church, where, amidst a general thanksgiving, the Te Deum was chanted. Is it wonderful that the natives were touched by a benevolence which their poverty and squalid misery could not appall? Their education was also attempted; and the venerable ash-tree still lives beneath which Mary of the Incarnation, so famed for chastened piety, genius, and good judgment, toiled, though in vain, for the culture of Huron children.” Could anything but religion enable delicately-reared women to turn a last look upon the sunny slopes of France, where remained everything that their hearts cherished, and set out in 1639, in a slow ship, over an almost unknown ocean, with certain expectation never to return, and equally certain that in the new land they would encounter an almost perpetual winter and incur all the perils of the instincts of savages? What stately woman’s figure rises in profane history to the height of Mary of the Incarnation?

The part that woman has had in the building up and the spread of education has not, so far as we are aware, been adequately written. Perhaps it never will be; for the materials of at least fifteen centuries are, for the most part, carefully buried in convent archives, and their modest keepers shun publicity. The lack of popular knowledge in this portion of the history of education has induced the erroneous supposition that woman has done little or nothing for the intelligence of the race; that, until recently, the sex received slight instruction and possessed only superficial and effeminate acquirements; and that the free facilities which women are reaching after indicate an entirely new, an unwritten, chapter in the culture of the sex.

Each of these suppositions is unwarranted by facts. Women have shared in the establishment of educational institutions from the earliest period of which we have authentic record. Their resources have founded schools, their talents have conducted them. Whenever, from the days of S. Catherine to those of Nano Nagle, special efforts have been made to teach the people, women have furnished their full share of energy and brains. The opportunities which, even in periods of exceptional darkness or disturbance, were afforded for the higher education of women, were far in advance of the standard which prejudice or ignorance has associated with women in the past; and the increasing demand which we have on every side for a more substantial and scholarly training for the sex does not look forward to that which they have never had, but backward to what they have lost or abandoned.

Again we find Mr. Gladstone’s sneer answered; for religion—the Catholic religion—has been the sole inspiration of the part that woman has had in popular education. The magnitude of that part we will only outline; but enough will be shown of woman as a foundress, a teacher, and a scholar to indicate the rank to which she is entitled as an educator, and the motive which enabled her to attain it.

There were very few convents for women which were not also schools and academies for their sex. Many Christian women, even in the days of the Fathers, were not only skilled in sacred science, but in profane literature, and these, naturally and inevitably, taught the younger members of their own households, and, when they entered the service of the church, became teachers of the children of the people. In the IVth century Hypatia, invited by the magistrates of Alexandria to teach philosophy, led many of her pupils to Christianity, although she herself did not have the grace to embrace it; but her learning induced many women to profound and elegant study. We have spoken of S. Catherine, who confuted the pagan philosophers of that city of schools, and whose condition was the delight of her contemporaries. The mothers and sisters in those early days were not only willing but able to teach the science of Christianity and letters. S. Paul himself alludes to the instruction he received from his mother, Lois, and his grandmother, Eunice. It was S. Macrina who taught S. Basil and S. Gregory of Nyssa. It was Theodora who instructed Cosmas and Damian. “Even as early as the IId century,” says a distinguished scholar, “the zeal of religious women for letters excited the bile and provoked the satire of the enemies of Christianity.” S. Fulgentius was educated by his mother. So solicitous was she about the purity of his Greek accent “that she made him learn by heart the poems of Homer and Menander before he studied his Latin rudiments.” It was S. Paula who moved S. Jerome to some of his greatest literary labors; and the latter assures us that the gentle S. Eustochium wrote and spoke Hebrew without Latin adulteration. S. Chrysostom dedicated seventeen letters to S. Olympias; and S. Marcella, on account of her rare acquirements, was known as “the glory of the Roman ladies.” S. Melania and S. Cæsaria were noted for their accomplishments.

Montalembert declares that literary pursuits were cultivated in the VIIth and VIIIth centuries in the convents in England, “with no less care and perseverance” than in the monasteries, “and perhaps with still greater enthusiasm.” The nuns were accustomed “to study holy books, the fathers of the church, and even classical works.” S. Gertrude translated the Scriptures into Greek. It was a woman who introduced the study of Greek into the famous monastery of S. Gall. The erudite author of Christian Schools and Scholars says that “the Anglo-Saxon nuns very early vied with the monks in their application to letters.” There is preserved a treatise on virginity by Adhelm, in the VIIth century, which contains an illumination representing him as teaching a group of nuns. S. Boniface directed the studies of many convents of women.

Hildelitha, the first English religieuse, had received her education at the convent of Chelles, in France, “and brought into the cloisters of Barking all the learning of that famous school.” This institution, about five leagues from Paris, was founded by S. Clotilda, and one of its abbesses in the IXth century was Gisella, a pupil of Alcuin and sister of Charlemagne. It was in a convent school, that of Roncerai, near Angers, that Heloise received her education in classics and philosophy; and Hallam, who finds little to remark concerning convent schools—because, we presume, their archives were not sought by him—says that the “epistles of Abelard and Eloisa, especially those of the latter, are, as far as I know, the first book that gives any pleasure in reading for six hundred years, since the Consolation of Boethius.” The learning of S. Hilda was so highly esteemed that “more than once the holy abbess assisted at the deliberation of the bishops assembled in council or in synod, who wished to take the advice of her whom they considered so especially enlightened by the Holy Spirit.” Queen Editha, wife of Edward the Confessor, taught grammar and logic.

The scholarly women of the time were not all in England. Richtrude, daughter of Charlemagne, had a Greek professor. The historian from whom we have already quoted says, in Christian Schools and Scholars, that the examples of learning in the cloisters of nuns were not “confined to those communities which had caught their tone from the little knot of literary women educated by S. Boniface. “It was the natural and universal development of the religious life.”

Guizot ranks “among the gems of literature” the account of the death of S. Cæsaria, written by one of her sisters. Radegunde, queen of Clothaire I., read the Greek and Latin fathers familiarly. S. Adelaide, Abbess of Geldern, in the Xth century, had received a learned education, and imparted her attainments to the young of her sex. Hrotsvitha, a nun of Gandersheim, in the Xth century, wrote Latin poems and stanzas, which prove, says Spalding, “that in the institutions of learning at that day classical literature was extensively and successfully cultivated by women as well as by men.” In the XIIth century the Abbess Hervada wrote an encyclopedia, “containing,” remarks Mgr. Dupanloup, “all the science known in her day.”

Nor were women content to study and teach in their native countries. When S. Boniface needed teachers in Germany to complete the conversion and civilization of the country, he endeavored to enlist the enthusiasm of the English women of learning and piety; and Chunehilt and her daughter Berathgilt were the first to listen to his appeal. They are called by the historian valde eruditæ in liberali scientia. The Abbess Lioba, distinguished for her scholarship and her executive ability, also accepted the invitation of Boniface, and thirty nuns, of whom she was the head, reached Antwerp after a stormy passage, and were received at Mentz by the archbishop, who conducted them to the convent at Bischofsheim, which he had erected for Lioba. S. Boniface declared that he loved Lioba on account of her solid learning—eruditionis sapientia. Walburga, a subordinate of Lioba, went into Thuringia, and became abbess of the Convent of Heidesheim, where she and her nuns cultivated letters as diligently as in their English home. The church herself watched over these efforts of women to elevate their sex; for the Council of Cloveshoe, held in 747, exhorts abbesses diligently to provide for the education of those under their charge. In so great admiration and affection did S. Boniface hold Lioba that he requested that her remains might be buried in Fulda, so that they might together await the resurrection. Lioba survived the saint twenty-four years, during which she erected many convents and received signal assistance from Charlemagne.

The convent schools maintained by these disciples of S. Boniface were not the only ones in which women obtained more culture than is accorded to them in our own boastful time. At Gandersheim the course of study included Latin and Greek, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the liberal arts. One of the abbesses of this convent was the author of a treatise on logic “much esteemed among the learned of her own time.” It would be easy enough to continue this record; to carry on the chain of woman’s assistance—always under the guidance of religion—in the educational development of Europe. It is not easy to avoid dwelling on the aid she rendered in the foundation of colleges; of the standing which she attained in the universities, where, both as student and professor, she won with renown and wore with modesty the highest degrees and honors.

The catalogue of that metropolis of learning, the University of Bologna, a papal institution, contains the names of many women who appeared to enviable advantage in its departments of canon law, medicine, mathematics, art, and literature. The period which produced Vittoria Colonna, who received, her education in a convent, discovers Properzia de’ Rossi teaching sculpture in Bologna; the painter Sister Plautilla, a Dominican; Marietta Tintoretto, daughter of the “Thunder of Art,” herself a celebrated portrait-painter, whose work possessed many of the best qualities of her father’s; Elizabeth Sirani, who painted and taught in Bologna; and Elena Cornaro admitted as a doctor at Milan. We find a woman architect, Plautilla Brizio, working in Rome in the XVIIth century, building a palace and the Chapel of S. Benedict. In the papal universities, as late as the XVIIIth century, women took degrees in jurisprudence and philosophy; among them, Victoria Delfini, Christina Roccati, and Laura Bassi, in the University of Bologna, and Maria Amoretti in that of Pavia. In 1758 Anna Mazzolina was professor of anatomy in Bologna, and Maria Agnesi was appointed by the pope professor of mathematics in the University of Bologna. Novella d’Andrea taught canon law in Bologna for ten years. A woman was the successor of Cardinal Mezzofanti as professor of Greek. Statues are erected to the memory of two women who taught botany in the universities of Bologna and Genoa. It is well to mention these facts as a sufficient reply to the flippant charge, too frequently made, that the Catholic Church is “opposed” to the higher education of women.

The relation of women in religion to the education and refinement of the present day can be lightly passed over. In the convent schools in every part of the world young women receive the best education now available for their sex. The demands of society have affected the curriculum. It is not as abstract or classical or thorough as in the time of Lioba and Hrotsvitha, but it is the best; and it will return to the classical standard as quickly as women themselves make the demand. In a word, the orders of teaching women in the Catholic Church are, we repeat, a sufficient answer to Mr. Gladstone’s sneer at the status of women in religion. It was out of these that arose Catherine of Sienna—orator, scholar, diplomate, saint. Of these was S. Teresa, whom Mgr. Dupanloup characterizes as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, prose writers in the Spanish literature. Of these have been hundreds, thousands, of women, who, moved by the Spirit of God to his service, have found within convent-walls opportunities for culture which society denies, and who, in the carrying out of his divine will, have made more sacrifices, attained higher degrees of perfection, and lived lives of sweeter perfume and nobler usefulness, than the mind of Mr. Gladstone appears to be able to conceive. A religion which makes conquests enough among women, since it can inspire, control, and direct them thus, is the religion which must conquer the world.

Finally, Mr. Gladstone forgot the subtle power of mother and wife, and the marriage laws of the Catholic Church. The mother’s influence for good or evil, but especially for good, to which she most inclines, is second to none that moves the heart of man. Whether it be Cornelia, pointing to the Gracchi as her jewels; or Monica, pursuing and persuading S. Augustine; Felicitas, exhorting her seven sons to martyrdom; or the mothers of S. Chrysostom, S. Basil, and S. Anselm, converting their children to firmness in holiness; or whether it be the untutored mother of the savage, or the unfortunate head of a household setting an unwomanly example, the mother’s voice, issuing from the quivering lips or coming back silently from the tomb, is heard when all other sounds of menace, of appeal, of reproach, or of tenderness fail to reach the ear. Every mother makes her sex venerable to her son. The mother’s love is above all logic; it destroys syllogisms, refutes all argument. It cannot be reasoned against; and when the salvation of the child is the motive, there is no power given to man to withstand its seduction. “It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity.” Christ himself upon the cross was not unmindful of his mother; yet he was God! Says the greater Napoleon, “The destiny of the child is always the work of the mother.” To the end of time she will be, as she has ever been,

The faith of the mothers, if they believe in it, must become the faith of the sons and the daughters. That the Catholic mother believes, even Mr. Gladstone will hesitate to deny. In no faith but the Catholic have mothers accompanied their sons to martyrdom. In no faith but the Catholic is the mother taught to believe, while still a child at her mother’s breast, that she will be held responsible for the eternal welfare of her children; that they must be saved with her, or she must perish with them. For this salvation she will toil and pray and weep; for this she will spend days of weariness and nights without sleep; for this religion will keep her heart brave, and her lips eloquent, and her hand gentle and strong. For this she will work as neither man nor woman works for aught else; and for this she will lay down her life, but not until the sublime purpose is accomplished! That done, she is ready to die. For

If the mothers of England become Catholic, England becomes Catholic. The law is of nature. Love must win, if talent partly fails; for even in heaven the seraphim, which signifies love, is nearer God than the cherubim, which signifies knowledge.

ON A CHARGE MADE AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF A VOLUME OF POETRY

(WRITTEN NEAR WINDERMERE.)

STRAY LEAVES FROM A PASSING LIFE.