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304 304 ST. EYE St. Eye. Same as Ia, or Hya. St EzelelSy May 7, June 7 (Eze- LEiND, Ezelind; in French, Alix; in Latio, Adelaib, or Adeleid), V. in England. AA.SS,j Prater, Perbape St. Alice Bich. St Ezelind, Ezeleis. St Ezelinda, May 4. 3rd ceDtniy. Wife of St. Florian, soldier and martyr, who was bom at Zeiselmaar, in Lower Anatria, and thrown into the river near Lorch, where he ia now honoured. P.B. F St Fabiola, Dec 27, + 39y, was a member of the illustrions Fabian family and a froquenter of the aaoetic Christian society which gathered ronnd St. Mabcella. Her piety seems to have been ardent but inconstant, and she fluttered from asceticism to the world and back again. Her parents married her at an early age to a dissolute noble- man. She obtained a divorce, and married again a husband as unsatis- factory as the first, and, without seeking a legal divorce, she left him also. Her conduct, though in accordance with Roman law, was condemned by the Christians, and on Easter Eve, after her second husband's death, she stood in the rank of the penitents at the door of the church of the Lateran, and made con- fession of her error in the presence of all Eomo. St. Fabiola is chiefly remarkable for having drawn from St. Jerome the de- nouncement of double marriage (the earliest utterance of the Church on the subject) contained in his fifty-fifth letter. Ho said that she was justified in leaving her first husband on account of his mis- conduct, but that the second marriage was a crime ; that the woman could not communicate with the Church until she had put away her second husband, and that she could not go back to the first. Eestorod to communion, Fabiola sold her estates and devoted her immense wealth to the service of the poor. She founded, with the help of Pammachius, the first hospital for the sick ; with her own hands she dressed the most loath- some wounds, and bore the helpless upon her shoulders. In all Bome there was scarcely a needy person who did not owe food or raiment to the charity of St. Fabiola. In 395 a sudden impulse led her to visit St. Jerome and St. Paula at Beth- lehem. She enjoyed St. Jerome's hos- pitality, while he sought, at her request, a lodging for her suited to her rank. When, however, she saw the poverty and simplicity of St. Paula's life, her impressionable nature was stirred, and she asked St. Jerome to seek only a lodging suited to a pious woman, who wished to live in solitude and have the happiness of seeing the place that had sheltered the Viboin Mart. Under his guidance she studied the Scriptures, asking more questions than she gave him time to answer. To satisfy her eager mind, he had previously written a treatise on the priestly vestments of Aaron, and he now began an explanation of the forty-two halting-places of the Israelites in the wilderness, which was not completed until she too had ** passed through the wilderness of this world, and come to the land of promise." The rumour of the descent of the Huns on Jerusalem drove Fabiola back to Bome. She busied herself in found- ing, at the port of the city, a hospice for pilgrims, on the model of that erected by St. Jerome at Bethlehem, and the fame of it spread through Egypt, Parthia, and Britain. She died in 899. At the request of her kinsman Oceanus, St. Jerome wrote a eulogy of her virtues. " I give you this," ho concludes, '* Fa- biola, the best gift of my aged powers, to be as it were a funeral offering ; let envy depart and detraction be silent . . . the soul which fell among thieves has been carried home upon the shoulders of Christ." It was not without hesita- tion that she was numbered among the saints of the 4th century, on account of her immense charity. Jerome's Letters (Fremantle's edition). Thierry, Saint Jcromi'. Tillemont.