The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
By TIMOTHY BROSNAHAN, S.J. 

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"A certain woman, named Martha, received Him into her house. 
And she had a sister, called Mary, who sitting also at the Lord's 
feet, heard His word." (St. Lake x, 38, 39.) 

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• THE HEART of a 
H O L Y W O M A N " 

By 

Timothy Urosnahan, S.J. 

Second Printing 

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Copyright, 1927. 

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"The Heart of a Holy Woman" 

Y V T E read in Ecclesiasticus, chapter twenty-six, verse 
" " twenty-four: "As everlasting foundations upon a 

solid rock, so the commandments of God in the heart of 
a holy woman." 

To many these words of Holy Scripture may seem to 
have been written in a spirit of exaggeration. The in-
stability of woman's heart has become a commonplace of 
literature. Wit and wisdom have pooled their issues in 
an effort to make it a truism, which all who study man-
kind must respect. Essayists in many a well-built period 
have made the assertion of it gems of literature. To it 
historians have traced the downfall of statesmen and of 
kingdoms. Philosophers from calm heights have at-
tempted to analyze it. Moralists have earnestly warned 
us against it. The ephemeral and hebdomadal newspaper 
humorists have found it inexhaustible grist for their 
mills and many a poet, whose eyes were, for one reason 
or another, rolling in fine phrensy, has made it the theme 
of his song. The instability of woman's heart is the 
motive of many a drama, the moral of many a tale, the 
point of many a joke. It has become a proverb, a par-
able, and a pleasantry. That the heart of any woman, 
therefore, holy or otherwise, should be likened to the 
solid rock of an everlasting foundation seems gross flat-
tery on the part of the son of Sirach. 

Nor can it be denied that he gave utterance to a 

3 



4 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

strong assertion. I doubt if stronger may be found in 
Holy Writ. We are told that nothing is. so stable, so 
firm and so immoveable in righteousness as that which 
is usually taken as a type of instability. Theology 
teaches us that, outside of some exceptional cases, only 
those who enjoy the Beatific Vision, and those who 
await in purgation their predestined admission to it, are 
so confirmed in grace that they cannot fail. As long as 
we are wayfarers in this probationary world of faith, we 
must pick our steps along the pathway of life with the 
ever present conviction that we may stumble and fall. 
Yet inspired Wisdom tells us that the heart of a holy 
woman is as enduring a support for the commandments 
of God as is a solid rock for everlasting foundations. 

The text which I have cited attributes therefore to 
woman an aptitude for righteousness that is truly ex-
ceptional. On its truth depends, I think, the solution of 
some practical questions of the highest moment. Is it 
true then that woman may possess the extraordinary 
stability in righteousness that will make her heart the 
impregnable stronghold of God's commandments? If 
it is, her power for good or for evil is almost immeas-
urable. This is the question I wish to submit to your 
consideration this evenine. 

T H E S P H I N X 

There is a Greek legend of a fabled being, half-
woman and half-lion, called the Sphinx, who dwelt be-
side a profound abyss and had as her only visible means 
of support a riddle concerning man. This she proposed 
to all who came into her presence and then devoured 
those who failed to answer it. As the number of those 



5 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

who are confident that they can solve any problem and 
are eager and anxious to attack the most momentous is 
always large and immeasurably in excess of those who 
are capable of solving any, this leonine maiden is said 
to have been for unnumbered years in no want of food. 
At last however, when the riddle was solved, she threw 
herself into the abyss and was destroyed. A German 
poet with some glimmering of wisdom has said that 
every age has its sphinx which plunges into the abyss 
as soon as its problem is solved; and it is undoubtedly 
true that in every epoch of history mankind is confronted 
with a problem affecting its well-being, and on the right 
solution of which depend the future advance and welfare 
of the race. This problem on the surface differs for dif-
ferent ages; the social problems of today are not the 
problems of the fifteenth, the tenth, the fifth or the first 
century of the Christian era. But this difference is more 
apparent than real. In their last analysis the social 
questions of every age, whether they concern liberty, 
wages, education or mofality are one. Our ancestors had 
their riddles to solve, and our descendants shall have 
theirs, as we have ours; but ours differ from those of 
the past and the future only in some accidents. At 
bottom the problems of the Sphinx of time resolve them-
selves into the general one of so regulating and con-
trolling human conduct, of so adjusting and harmonizing 
the mutual relations of man with man that justice and 
equity, peace and friendship may prevail, that each and 
all may enjoy the largest and most far-reaching happi-
ness compatible with the limitations of our present exist-
ence and the fairest field for endeavor and enterprise. 
That men may enjoy liberty without allowing it to de-

J8pedal 
infestations 



6 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

generate into license; that governments may exercise 
authority without attempting the tyranny of paternal-
ism ; that the basis and foundation stone of society, the 
homes of a virtuous people, may be secure in the sunlight 
of peace and contented in an atmosphere of prosperity; 
that mutual reverence, charity and tolerance may prevail 
universally—this is the goal mankind has been attempt-
ing to attain in every age, this the aim of the statesman's 
philosophy and endeavor, this the problem of the sphinx 
of time. 

Now there is one and only one solution for the ques-
tion proposed by the sphinx of this or any other epoch. 
It was first proposed about five thousand years ago on 
the summit of Mount Sinai; and since the Son of Sirach 
was not indulging in oriental flattery the heart of a 
woman is the most effective instrument for working out 
that solution. 

Other solutions have been proposed in our times, 
through which we are promised panaceas for all the ills 
that afflict society. Prominent among these are dismal 
philosophies, raw and undigested legislation, and what 
is commonly known today as education. 

D I S M A L P H I L O S O P H Y 

Among these dismal philosophies there is one which 
is the parent of all the others and through its offspring 
has infested almost every department of human thought; 
a philosophy, which owes its origin to Darwin, who as 
Ruskin tells us "has a mortal fascination for all vainly 
curious and idly speculative persons, and has collected 
in the train of him every impudent imbecility of Europe, 
like a dim comet wagging its useless tail of phosphor-



7 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

escent nothingness across the steadfast stars"; a phi-
losophy which in its ultimate analysis destroys all mo-
rality, all nobility of life, and all refinement of social in-
tercourse, which- declares God an obscure and nebulous 
background behind the world of phenomena, and makes 
man the brother of the ass, the ape and the tiger. 

But the sphinx of time will not accept as a solution 
of its problem a philosophy which makes God more un-
known than an algebraic symbol, which degrades righte-
ousness to the level of expediency and utility, which de-
clares man to be an irresponsible and selfish automaton, 
and his life a gross, heartless and egotistic struggle for 
existence. It has always insisted on having a solution 
in keeping with the facts of man's nature and destiny. 

UNDIGESTED LEGISLATION 

In our democratic age a mighty efficiency is attrib-
uted by some to legislation. The number of sincere 
men and women who believe that injustice and vice may 
be legislated out of existence is a striking proof that 
goodness and common sense are not correlative terms. 
If they succeed in getting our lawgivers to enact pro-
hibitions and to assign sanctions for violations, they 
glow with the enthusiasm of an apostle who has con-
verted a nation. They forget that the statute books are 
filled with laws and ordinances; that laws are worth-
less for personal morality unless broad-based on a peo-
ple's will. Legislative enactments have the vitality of laws 
properly so called, when they are the expression of a 
people's moral standards. A simple experiment in hydro-
statics shows that water in two communicating vessels 
will not rise higher in one than in another. The reservoir 



8 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

of national and municipal morality must increase in 
depth before we may hope for an increase in height 
in the fountains of justice. Laws therefore, necessary 
though they be, derive their moral efficiency from the 
interior law that rules the heart. 

T H E EDUCATION NOSTRUM 

Education is another of our nostrums. A notion 
prevailed in medieval times that knowledge of the forces 
of nature necessarily implied intercourse with the powers 
of darkness. It seems to us who have pried so success-
fully into the material secrets of nature without any aid 
from his satanic majesty that this notion is ludicrous. 
But .we moderns have a superstitious notion of our own ; 
we fancy that education has in itself something Divine. 
A very ancient woman had the same conviction when she 
purchased the knowledge of good and evil by the loss 
of Eden. Some new women and old men are untiring in 
their efforts to propagate the belief that increased de-
velopment of the intellectual powers together with in-
creased knowledge is going to cure the ills of society, to 
restrain the passions of men, to make the lion lie down 
with the lamb and perhaps even make the "bulls" and 
the "bears" clasp one another in a loving financial em-
brace. We have engrossed this superstition of ours in 
letters of gold beneath the vaulted vestibule of our im-
posing national library. We have somehow reached the 
conviction that because education is a powerful and 
necessary ally it is the leader that directs and inspires 
the forces of social order and morality; that because it 
is an embellishment and a strength to our social and in -
dividual lives it is the force that gives viiality. 



9 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

Who loves not knowledge? Who shall rail 
Against her beauty? May she mix 
With men and prosper. Who shall fix 

Her pillars ? Let her work prevail. 

But Tennyson continues: 

What is she cut from love and faith 
But some wild Pallas from the brain 
Of Demons? Fiery hot to burst 

All barriers in her onward race 
For power. Let her know her place. 

She is second not the first; 
A higher hand must make her mild 

If all be not in vain; and guide 
Her footsteps, moving side by side 

With Wisdom, like the younger child. 

The thing we denominate education today has freed 
itself from the control of that higher hand. Religion, 
the fostering mother of morality, reverence, purity, self-
control and those other virtues that make childhood and 
youth lovable and radiant of promise for future woman-
hood and manhood, has since the unhallowed days of 
Horace Mann been banished from our public schools. 
This solemn folly of maintaining that morality is to be 
advanced, society is to be renovated, the state is to be 
supplied with good citizens by schools over the portals 
of which is written the legend—Leave religion behind all 
ye who enter here—may compete as a superstition, very 
successfully with any exploded nonsense of the Middle 
Ages. 



10 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

T H E R E A L SAFEGUARD 

But, there is another power for the safety or renova-
tion of society, which, because it can win men's hearts 
by its beauty and rule men's minds by its truth, can 
mould and fashion conduct; which, because it can pre-
sent the highest rewards and the noblest ideals, can 
restrain and soften his passions for low rewards and 
ignoble ideals; which, because it alone can give with 
authority standards of conduct that appeal to the best 
that is in man and to the whole man, because it alone 
can give any satisfactory solution of the problem of his 
present existence, the riddle of the Sphinx of time, will 
supply the interior law that will give justice and efficacy 
to legislation, and the higher hand that prevents knowl-
edge from becoming a wild Pallas from the brain of 
Demons. 

Morality and religion are the safeguard of society. 
Not the godless schoolhouse but the home over which 
a Christian mother presides is the seminary of good 
citizens; not the halls of legislation, but the temple of 
the living God is the source of effective law. It is not 
by dismal philosophies that men are to be ennobled, and 
society to be elevated, nor by legislation, nor by secular-
ized education; but by the observance of the Ten Com-
mandments, and the loving and faithful inculcation of 
them by her who lives them and to whom the God of 
nature and Christianity has committed the formation of 
our first moral judgments. 

If therefore an age, in which the full and unqualified 
observance of God's commandments is regarded as an 
iridescent dream, will ever be looked back upon as the 



11 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

nightmare of a materialized century; then to her, whose 
heart is capable of becoming an everlasting foundation 
for the commandments of God, is attributed a power we 
cannot exaggerate. If the poet's dream of the reign of 
righteousness and justice, when "all men's good shall 
be each man's rule, and universal peace lies like a shaft 
of light across the land and like a lane of beams athwart 
the sea, through all the circles of the golden year" is 
ever to be realized, then on her who can hasten that day 
is imposed a duty which becomes startling in the re-
sponsibility it implies. 

It may seem that I have wandered somewhat afield 
from my subject. But my wandering has had a purpose. 
If by this preamble I have succeeded in presenting the 
problem and making it of interest, I shall make no 
apology for its length, but proceed to investigate the 
truth of my text: "As everlasting foundations upon a 
solid rock, so the commandments of God in the heart of 
a holy woman." 

T H E MYSTERY I N G E N E S I S 

Before doing so, I ask you to notice the curious mys-
tery that is hidden in the narrative of Genesis describing 
the creation of our first parents. Two points in that 
narrative cast a side-light on our subject that is strange, 
coming as it does in the oldest historical record and in the 
first pages of revelation. Notice in the first place the con-
trast between the creation of man and woman. We are told 
that the "Lord God formed man out of the slime of the 
earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life and 
man became a living soul"; but woman He formed not 
from the slime of the earth, but from the body of man 



12 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

after it had been elevated to the supernatural state. He 
is formed out of the slime of the earth, she from the 
bone of his supematuralized body. Notice in the second 
place God's purpose in the creation of woman: she was [ 
to be man's helpmate. Not, be it understood, in a tempo-
ral and material sense only; but for attaining the pur-
pose of his creation. She must be his councillor and || 
comforter; she must encourage him when he is weak, 
reanimate him when he falls; she must be his better 
self, his inspiration, and his ideal. 

W O M A N I N P A G A N I S M 

If we turn now to history for a realization of the 
magnificent prophecy implied in the primal structure and 
mission of woman, we are confronted with a record, 
some pages of which are gloriously illumined with 
achievements of duty and heroism, and some are bla-
zoned with deeds of humiliation, degradation and infamy. 

The condition of woman throughout paganism is one 
of dishonor. Her influence is for evil. In the home— 
if home, in our sense of the word, it may be called—she 
exercised little of that tender control over the formation 
of the character of her boys, which we associate with 
the functions of a mother. She was usually excluded 
from the public life of society. She was degraded by 
polygamy and divorce, and reduced to the position of 
being little less than the chattel and the slave of man. 
Frederic Ozanam says: 

When she sought to free herself from the 
pressure of this harsh destiny; when by the pub-
licity of her charms or the brilliancy of her men-
tal gifts, she endeavored in her turn to siibjugate 



13 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

warriors, statesmen, philosophers and artists, she 
only succeeded in making them sharers in her 
degradation. When she had become the mis-
tress, she found in this name only another 
species of shame. 

Why dwell on the unsavory story! Woman, whose 
creation was so exceptionally glorious in the promise of 
good, was in Paganism an universal source of evil: 

If we remember that it is a woman who brings us 
into the world, whose moods, and temperaments and 
thoughts may help to the formation of character even 
in the days of our prenatal existence; that it is a woman 
who is our first teacher, in whose care and power we 
are during the most plastic years of our life; if we re-
member that unlike other teachers she has the unbounded 
love and reverence of her pupil, that she is looked up to 
as a divinity by the loyal young hearts and heads which 
she is forming; that in all the wide range of human in-
fluence there is no opportunity like hers—bearing all 
this in mind and much else that might be added, we 
shall not be surprised at the inference of a celebrated 
modern writer. "Woman," he says, "makes the world 
what it is from century to century." Therefore woman 
made Paganism. The corruption of that ancient world 
began at the domestic hearth. 

Now at first sight, it may seem that what I have 
said regarding woman's part in the degradation of hu-
manity under paganism is an argument against the truth 
enunciated in the book of Ecclesiasticus. If the de-
basement of ancient civilization is largely attributable to 
woman, one might conclude that woman is not capable 
of such power and influence as Holy Writ concedes her. 



14 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

Nevertheless the inference would not be just. Great 
powers for good connote great powers for evil; and reci-
procally those who have swayed men by the evil of 
their lives, might, had they directed their energies into 
nobler channels, have hastened on the golden year. The 
great minds and wills that have been the bane of hu-
manity, might have been its benefactors and saviors. On 
the other hand it has been said that if St. Ignatius of 
Loyola and St. Francis Xavier had not become great 
saints, they might have become heresiarchs before whom 
Luther and Calvin would have paled. If the Lord had 
not grasped Saul of Tarsus by the heartstrings and 
dragged him into the Church, Saul would, humanly 
speaking, have strangled the Church in its infancy. If 
Judas had not fallen he would have left a name as sym-
bolic of heroic sanctity as it now is of unutterable in-
famy. St. Theresa herself has acknowledged that if she 
had not been a fervent religious she would have been a 
reprobate. There is an old scholastic axiom: corruptio 
optimi est pessima—"the corruption of what is best re-
sults in what is most evil." The depths therefore to 
which woman fell during Paganism, shows the heights 
she might have attained. The influence she exerted for 
the degradation of mankind, shows the influence she 
might have exerted for its elevation. 

O L D T E S T A M E N T W O M E N 

Let us turn now to the brighter pages of history, 
pages suffused with the light of revelation. There we 
shall find women who satisfy the requirements of the 
mother of King Lamuel (Proverbs xxxi. 10-31). 



15 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

Who shall find a valiant woman? Far and 
from the uttermost coasts is the price of her. 
The heart of her husband trusteth in her. . . . 
She will render him good, and not evil, all the 
days of her life. . . . She hath opened her hand 
to the needy, and stretched out her hands to the 
poor. . . . Strength and beauty are her clothing 
and she shall laugh in the latter day. She hath 
opened her mouth to wisdom, and the law of 
clemency is on her tongue. . . . Her children 
rose up, and called her blessed; her husband, and 
he praised her. Many daughters have gathered 
together riches; thou hast surpassed them all. 
Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain; the 
woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be 
praised. 

Were I to attempt an historical confirmation of my 
text) this lecture would develop into an analysis of the 
lives of all the holy women of the Old Testament, to 
whom, because of their holiness and the fortitude and 
wisdom that comes as a dowry of holiness, were com-
mitted enterprises of great peril and moment; and the 
rising sun would find you tomorrow sitting here, reading 
an unfinished story. ' I doubt whether your patience 
would stand the strain of listening even to the praises 
of woman for so long a time. 

Yet it would be pleasant to corroborate the words of 
Ecclesiasticus by a detailed exposition of the gentle 
Rachel's story, for whom Jacob wisely served the seven 
years which seemed but a few days, because of the great-
ness of his love—Rachel who was the mother of Joseph, 
and such a mother she must have been to have moulded 
the character of such a son. 

The wise Deborah, to whom, seated under a palm-



16 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

tree between Rama and Bethel in Mount Ephraim, the 
children of Israel came for all judgment. When Jabin, 
the king of Chanaan, sent Sisara, thé general of his 
army, against the children of Israel, it was Deborah's 
strong wisdom that saved them. She called Barac, the 
captain of the forces of Israel, and ordered him to go 
against the enemies of God with ten thousand fighting 
men ; and when that valiant hero refused to go, unless 
this woman would go with him, she went indeed, but 
predicted that, because of the cowardice of the man, the 
victory would not be attributed to him, but to Jahel, 
Haber's wife, into whose merciless hands Sisara would 
be delivered. 

Strong Judith by one brave deed frustrated the rage 
of the Assyrian King. When Holofernes came at the 
command of Nabuchodonosor to punish the people of 
Israel for refusing to recognize his sovereignty, it was 
not through the instrumentality of the captains of Israel, 
but by the means of a woman armored in her saintliness, 
and following the inspiration of God that Israel was 
saved from the vengeance of brute force. While the 
captains of Israel were cowering in fright behind their 
walls in the presence of their multitudinous enemies; 
while all the peopl^-the old men, the women, the youn^ 
men and children—were terror-stricken, and weeping and 
in lamentation ; when they were on the point of capitulat-
ing to the enemy of God, Judith in the weakness of her 
womanhood and the strength of hèr saintliness routed 
armies that had met no -obstacles in their triumphant 
marches over the ruins of nations. 

The heroic mother of the Macchabees (2 Mach. vii, 
20, 21) beheld her seven sons tortured and slain in one 



17 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

day, and "bore it with good courage for the hope she 
had in God: and she bravely exhorted every one of them 
in her own language, being filled with wisdom and join-
ing a man's heart to a woman's thought." When the 
tyrant Antiochus brought her youngest son—the one on 
whom a mother seems to focus the concentrated love she 
might have shared with sons that were never born—and 
asked her to counsel the boy to save his life by violat-
ing the Mosaic law | this mother, with the man's heart 
and woman's thought, bending herself towards her son, 
said : 

My son, have pity on me that bore thee nine 
months in my womb, and gave thee suck three 
years and nourished thee and brought thee into 
this age. I beseech thee, my son, look upon 
heaven and earth and all that is in them, and 
consider that God made them out of nothing, and 
mankind also. So thou shalt not fear this tor-
mentor; but being made a worthy partner with 
thy brethren receive death, that in that mercy I 
may receive thee again with thy brethren. 

She accepted a second widowhood, the widowhood of 
childlessness, which every widowed mother can testify 
is more grievous than the first. The commandments of 
God found in her heart "the everlasting foundations 
upon a solid rock." She endured seven living martyr-
doms lest any of her sons, as might have happened had 
they not been supported by a woman's power, should 
lack the courage to endure one. Many a mother would 
sacrifice her life for her sons; it is a pure, a noble and 
a brave mother who would sacrifice her sons for God. 



18 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

T H E V I R G I N M O T H E R 

But ii was the advent of Christianity that brought 
woman the normal opportunities of exercising her 
powers. Outside of or beyond Christianity she pros-
pered as a rich poisonous flower, retaining her attraction 
but filling the atmosphere with the deadly aroma of sin. 
In the pagan world "between the servitude and blame-
worthy empire to which I have referred there was no 
refuge for her except in the recesses of the Temple under 
the veil of virginity, among the priestesses and vestals." 
She could secure her womanhood only by isolation from 
society and the loss of her impress on the broader rela-
tions of men. The woman was saved but the mother 
was lost. Among the Gentiles some traditional memory 
may have partially preserved the old oracle which had 
announced the intervention of a virgin in the redemp-
tion of the world; but lost the truth that this virgin 
would be a mother also. 

When the prophecy of Isaias, foretelling that a virgin 
should conceive, and bear a son, was verified, the whole 
human race was rehabilitated; because she, whose condi-
tion is the gauge and measure of the race's rise and fall, 
was elevated to the highest pinnacle of created excellence. 
When she whom we call in the Litany the Morning Star, 
first appeared as a herald of the rising Sun of Justice, 
there was realized here on earth, in flesh and blood, a 
living ideal of womanhood—an ideal in whom were found 
the two essential elements of an ideal: first an exemplar 
or pattern of perfection, and secondly, a beauty, the 
magnetic attraction of which impels almost irresistibly 
to effort at attainment. Every true ideal must present 



19 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

to the mind a perfection, as the aim of endeavor, and 
must fire the heart with desire for attainment. 

That ideal of womanhood has turned the stream of 
centuries out of the channel it had occupied for four 
thousand years; has leavened all literature with purity ; 
has refined arts by new and Divine themes; and has 
tended to make laws just, and government humane, and 
manners gentle. Probably in nothing more strikingly 
than in art has the change wrought by that ideal been 
told. What is the ideal of pagan art in its highest 
phases?—The physical beauty of Venus, the Goddess of 
Lust. What is the ideal of Christian Art? The purity 
of the Madonna, the spiritual beauty of the Mother and 
the Child. You have the whole story in that contrast. 
Is it strange then that this ideal of womanhood, this 
blessed vision of virginal purity and of sweet mother-
hood has not only changed the condition of woman, but' 
has remade her standards, her aims, her aspirations; has 
given her thoughts the breadth of heaven and depth of 
its blue translucent sky; has not only freed her from 
servitude to man; but has fundamentally refashioned all 
man's convictions? Is it strange that she, "our tainted 
nature's solitary boast," the highest and holiest woman-
hood should have been so mighty an influence, though 
she wrote no books, made no discoveries in science, 
though outside of one short poem we have little record 
of what she said? The greatest powers for the good of 
man, it has been said, have been the most silent. They 
have produced their effects by the strength and fitness 
of their resources. "Forces that are illimitable in the 
compass of their effects are generally obscure and un-
traceable in the steps of their movements. For instance 



20 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

what eye can follow the. increments of vegetable growth, 
the slow upheaval of continents, the measured progress 
of the sun across sky. They work like the coming of 
the dawn. Who can detect the separate fluxions of its 
advance?" Gravitation again, that works without a 
holiday forever and searches every corner of the uni-
verse, what eye can follow it to its fountains? And yet 
stronger and more elusive than gravitation, more sacred 
than the fluxions of the shadow on a sundial, stealthier 
than the growth of a forest has the beauty, the nobil-
ity, the charm and the holiness of the peerless Virgin 
Mother worked to the domestic, social and religious 
elevation of woman and therefore of humanity. By the 
Divine maternity of a Virgin was woman lifted from her 
especial degradation and destined to become the latent 
force giving vitality to civilization. In her degradation 
she pulled humanity down, in her elevation she lifted it 
up. 

T H E C H R I S T I A N W O M A N 

Thereafter society felt the quickening pulse of a 
new life and the home took on a new character, yielding 
to the gentle but potent influence of the holy house at 
Nazareth. In civil life woman continued it is true out-
side of man's sphere, but her own sphere has been en-
larged. She does not actively take part in legislation, 
but she moulds manners which are of greater weight 
than laws, and to which laws owe their origin and ef-
ficacy. She holds the initiative in education on which 
the future of any society depends. Man educates the 
world, but woman educates man. From her throne be-
side the hearth she exercises a sway over the present 



21 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

citizens and forms the manhood of the future one. Her 
ideals rule the sacred ministry of alms, and preside over 
the alleviation of suffering. Her homes for the poor and 
aged, her hospital for the sick and diseased have estab-
lished standards of social activity to which the world 
attempts to conform. Three domains of human life, 
childhood, suffering and poverty, that, is to say the 
largest part of humanity, acknowledge her unquestioned 
ascendency and authority. 

Similar changes took place in the family circle. The 
home became the dearest and most sacred thing on earth. 
The slave became what Genesis tells us she was created 
to be—a helper, a counselor, and a comforter. The 
mother sits among her children, the queen of the King-
dom of Home. Under her gentle rule and high ideals 
the boy and youth and maiden grow in grace as well as 
in years. Nor is her influence confined to the family 
circle. The consciousness that they could not look un-
abashed into the eyes of her whom they reverence more 
than all else on earth, if they should forget abroad the 
purity of home, has kept many a boy and girl from dan-
gerous paths. The ideal wife exercises a pious aposto-
late in regard to her husband. No true man returns at 
twilight to the sanctity of a home over which a true 
woman presides, without departing next morning with 
nobler purposes. His return thither each evening—like 
his approach at stated intervals to the sacrament of 
penance—prevents him from falling into utter material-
ism. Sisters are guardian angels to their brothers and 
idealizing seraphs to their fathers. And the vestals of 
paganism have been transformed into the spouses of 
Christ. 



22 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

One may say that henceforth nothing great was to 
he accomplished within the bosom of the Church with-
out some woman participating in the deed. First they 
stood as bravest martyrs in the amphitheater, they 
shared with the anchorites the possession of the desert, 
with philosophers the defence of Christianity, and with 
missionaries the propagation of the Faith. St. Cather-
ine held the wisest enthralled by the wisdom of her lec-
tures in the school of Alexandria. When Constantine 
set up the labarum at the Capitol, St. Helena planted 
the cross on the ruins of Jerusalem. While the tears aind 
prayers of Monica were redeeming the soul of the great 
Augustine, Nonna was forming the young heart of 
Gregory Nazianzen, and Jerome was supported physi-
cally and spiritually in his labor of translating the Vul-
gate by the devotion of Paula and Eustochium. St. Basil 
and St. Benedict, the first legislators of the cenobitic life 
in the West, were aided by their sisters, Macrina and 
Scholastica. St. Clotilda made France the eldest daugh-
ter of the Church. Bertha, the great granddaughter of 
Clotilda, introduced Christianity into the pagan court of 
Canterbury and prepared the way for the landing of St. 
Augustine and his forty missionaries on the island. Later 
the Countess Matilda upholds with her chaste hands the 
tottering throne of Gregory VI ; the wisdom of Queen 
Blanche rules throughout the reign of St. Louis; Joan 
of Arc, a village maiden, leads old soldiers to battle and 
saves France; Isabella of Castile with a woman's wis-
dom discards the wisdom of learned men and presides 
over the discovery of a new world. In times nearer to 
our own we see St. Theresa standing amid the Doctors 
and Bishops of the Church and founders of religious 



23 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

orders an acknowledged leader of that revival by which 
the reformation of society was accomplished. And 
if we turn to our own country can we ever forget the 
saintly story of Mrs. Seton, to whom in this new world 
Archbishop Carroll entrusted the task which St. Vincent 
de Paul had first committed to Louise de Marillac, of en-
riching the Church of America with the coronets of 
Charity, or the steadfast endurance of the gentle Alice 
Lalor, through whose noble self-sacrifice Archbishop 
Neale transplanted in Georgetown the spirit of Madame 
de Chantal; or the heroic courage of Mother Julia, who 
joining a man's heart to a woman's thought, has laid al-
most within the shadow of the Catholic University of 
your Church the foundations of a home of learning, 
wherein Catholic maidens may hereafter drink deep from 
the fountain of human knowledge unsullied by the slime 
of evil? 

But the fear lest I trespass too far on your kindness 
and patient attention forbids me from exposing in detail 
the silent, humble and unknown heroism of that vast 
multitude of Catholic women who in every station of 
life are unconsciously and almost unnoted working for 
the glory of God and His Church. It would be pleasant 
if time permitted to tell of the high positions held by 
woman till the Reformation in Universities, in the .evan-
gelical works of the Church, in society and in the home, 
to dwell lovingly on her influence in medieval times, 
which softened and refined and elevated the manners and 
moderated the effervescence of wild barbaric blood cours-
ing through the veins of knight and soldier. Has woman 
ever won a triumph comparable to the creation of me-
dieval chivalry? The word is yet found in our vocabu-



24 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

laries, but "the age of chivalry is gone." It vanished 
when the reformation of religion began in Germany 
with the degradation of a woman consecrated to God 
and in England by the degradation of a wife. To quote 
Burke again but with a qualification: 

Never, never more [until the Catholic Church 
with its reverence for the Virgin Mother of God 
shall govern men's thoughts] shall we behold the 
generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud sub-
mission, that dignified obedience,-that subordina-
tion of the heart, which kept alive, even in servi-
tude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The 
unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of na-
tion, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic 
enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of 
principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a 
stain like a wound, which inspired courage, 
whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled all it 
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its 
evil by losing all its grossness. 

T H E SOURCE OF P O W E R 

To what shall we attribute this power of woman, 
where shall we find the secret of her influence? 

A question this of some importance today, when 
woman with false ideals is publicly clamoring—a most 
unwomanly thing—for broader opportunities and wider 
spheres; and mayhap in her quest for these, is neglecting 
the opportunities that are hers exclusively and is endeav-
oring to escape the sphere that she alone can fill, which 
if unfilled tells the extinction of womanhood and an-
nounces the specter of a new paganism for humanity. 
If we can discover the hidden springs of the power 



25 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

wielded by the noblest exemplars of womanhood, we in-
ferentially determine the sphere in which she may attain 
her proper and therefore her highest development. 

Nor need we institute an elaborate psychological 
analysis or a lengthened historical investigation to solve 
the question. Reverting to our text, we shall find in it 
an answer to our query more) profound than that afforded 
by the theories of any philosophy. Two things the Son 
of Sirach intimates will give stability and endurance and 
perpetuity to the race's well-being: The heart of woman 
and the commandments of God. Love and sanctity, these 
two, when conjoined have been and are the upbuilders 
of humanity. 

Mr. Marion Crawford has said: "Men have stronger 
arms and heads for harder work, but they have no such 
hearts as women." "And the world has been led by 
the heart in all the ages." It is very true. Mind dis-
covers the goal of the world's endeavor, discovers too 
the means to attain it. But truth never appealed to any 
one unless invested with something that touched the 
heart. The cold, absolutely demonstrated truths of 
mathematics have never impelled men to action. Truth 
to be inspiring must stir those finer emotions which we 
attribute to the heart. The mind lights the way, but 
the heart is the motive power. Truth is the central sun 
around which the planets revolve, but love is the moral 
gravitation, the strong invisible bond that keeps them 
in their predestined orbs and prevents them from wan-
dering darkly, and to their mutual harm through the 
immeasurable reaches of space. Bare truth of itself has 
never roused an emotion, never inspired an heroic pur-
pose, never created an enthusiasm. Unless clothed with 



26 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

beauty—which, to use Plato's definition, is "the resplend-
ence of truth"—it is as powerless to move the composite 
beings that constitute humanity to great deeds, nay, even 
to little deeds, as a proposition of geometry. Nor is 
there any need of dwelling on the fact that love is the 
motive power of the world, for even those who would 
use men for selfish or unholy purposes take care to dis-
cover what will secure their hearts. 

But a great motive power is capable of great harm 
unless directed and controlled. It may be abused, de-
graded and perverted. How vast may be its agency for 
evil paganism witnesses. Mankind driven by this funda-
mental power of nature was like some great ocean racer 
possessing powerful propellers but wanting a pilot. With-
out a guiding and controlling force the human race by 
the very strength of this fundamental power was driven 
into the soul sea of paganism; and thereupon— 

On that hard pagan world disgust 
And secret loathing fell; 

Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell. . 

Love is the motive power by which humanity is 
driven across the ocean of time towards the shores of 
final perfection: but to reach those shores it must have 
a pilot that reads in the commandments of God the bear-
ings of its course. That pilot is holiness. Holiness and 
all that it implies, how gracefully it becomes a woman. 
It seems to be her especial dowry. How pervasive the 
influence of her faith, her hope and her charity. How 
silently and unobtrusively do the counsel and wisdom 
of a holy woman work; how effectively the courage, the 



27 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" 
/ 

kindliness, the self-restraint, the patient endurance, the 
modesty, the truthfulness and purity of intention pro-
duce their lasting results! How incongruous, grotesque 
and disastrous the relations existing between a mother 
wanting in holiness and the innocence of childhood! How 
full of malign results for a son or daughter, are the 
years they have spent in an atmosphere of love that 
had worldliness, vanity and unholiness for its pilot; 
whose young minds never felt the fertilizing warmth of 
the saintliness of a holy mother. We so easily forget 
that the children of today, who float like butterflies with 
cheerful joyousness along the current of time, will be, 
when we shall have finished our course, the struggling 
humanity of tomorrow. Will their future activity cause 
this republic to decay and crumble, to cease to be the 
last realization of men's hopes, the pride of good men's 
hearts and the ideal of just men's thoughts? Go ask her 
to whose care has been committed the formation of those 
future citizens. Let those women ask themselves who 
are fostering by their apathy or by their false views of 
life two evils which strike at the root of society, which 
frustrate the essential functions of society, they who 
tolerate the divorce courts, they who laud as an ideal a 
schoolhouse, college or university which they have 
dubbed non-sectarian, in order if possible to hide behind 
a hazy word of fact that they know to be an evil. 

The newspapers tell us daily sad tales of children 
being carried to divorce courts in order to bear witness 
to the unexemplary marital relations of those whom 
nature intended to be the guides of their inexperienced 
footsteps, the guardians of their unsoiled souls, the 
models of their young activity. Then poor human jus-



28 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

tice commits to the care of one or other of those, who 
could not take care of themselves, the care of formation 
of the most delicate thing that God has created—the 
soul of a child. And sometimes the actors in this drama 
of successive polygamy lose, it seems, neither social 
standing nor repute in what, by a curious figure of 
speech, is called good society; and yet good society is 
ruled by those whose hearts were made to be everlasting 
foundations for the commandments of God. 

Again, a Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Educa-
tion reveals to us the fact that those institutions for the 
higher education of young men and young women are 
best patronized, which do not pretend to exercise more 
than a perfunctory supervision over the religious and 
moral development of their wards ; which either give no 
formal teaching in these fundamental requisites of edu-
cation ; or make them elective studies, which the records 
of some of these institutions show, by another curious 
figure of speech, to be a term synonymous with "ne-
glected studies." Now the Presidents of these institu-
tions are primarily business men, whose purpose is to 
cater to the taste of the public. How long therefore 
would this condition of affairs last, if the mothers who 
had guarded their boys and girls in righteousness while 
at home, should refuse to patronize such institutions? 
These conditions could never have obtained, if she to 
whom the virtue of her daughter and the true manliness 
of her son were dearer than all else, had kept unshaken 
the everlasting foundations of God's commandments, if 
her heart had been wise, unworldly, and virtuous. 

In conclusion therefore, we must recognize that the 
power of woman is nearly illimitable, and that her re-



29 "The Heart of a Holy Woman" / 

sponsibility is fearful. It is no mere masculine prejudice 
that places on Eve such large responsibility for our ruin. 
She the helper, not fashioned from the slime of the earth, 
had a power for unknown good which she turned to evil. 
Boundless therefore is woman's power for good or evil, 
irresistible is her influence, appalling is her responsibility. 
Whether the women of this Republic and the Catholic 
women of this country are aware of this, I leave to you 
to decide, contenting myself with remarking that no 
people ever truly progressed without morals; that morals 
are the work of woman; and that "as everlasting founda-
tions upon a solid rock so the commandments of God in 
the heart of a holy woman." 





The Life and Times of 
John England 

By Rev. PETER GUILDAY 

SECOND PRINTING 

"Scholarship, Catholic as well as Protestant, that is interested in 
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day a great debt for the collecting, collating and judicious presenta-
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Herald Tribune. 

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contribution not only, with regard to the Catholic Church in the 
United States, but as to the religious and social and educational his-
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John England interested himself in the politics of the day and in the 
general development of the country."—Boston Evening Transcript. 

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its shelves."—Messenger of the Sacred Heart. 

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history of America can overlook this painstaking story."—London 
Tablet. 

"The documental material makes a splendid background where 
the student will find it easy now to trace the policy of our first bish-
ops during the period of formation. This is the great merit of Doctor 
Guilday's work. . . . The problems, the difficulties, the prejudices, the 
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