Page:Wives and mothers in the olden time.djvu/32

16 of the city, imploring the restoration of the Pope to his see. This petition was granted. The mother of St. Paula, who held the highest rank among the Pioman ladies, was one of these illustrious petitioners. This was only a short time before Julian the Apostate, who had become sole master of the Empire, commenced that cruel persecution against the Church which was onry arrested by his tragic death.

A stronger love for the Church, a horror of heresy and religious divisions, and a strengthening of her faith in Jesus Christ and in the divinity of Christianity, were the confused impressions left on the mind of the child by this event, which was too important not to form a subject of conversation by every fireside.

But the time was at hand when Paula, developing into a woman, was to receive from the hands of her parents a spouse who would add to the lustre of her birth and dignity by his own. The exact date of this event is unknown, but in Rome the patrician families married very early in life, and Paula could scarcely have been more than fifteen at that time. She married a young Greek named Toxotius, who was descended on the mother s side from the family of Julius, which boasted of an ancestry dating from ^neas.

Virgil s JEncid. Toxotius, unhappily, did not share in the faith of his bride. He was, like his brother of whom we shall soon have occasion to speak one of those last patrician families in Eome which had not yet embraced Christi anity. These mixed marriages, in spite of their grave disadvantages, were not rare in the fourth century. St. Monica and Patricius, the parents of St. Augustine, were