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[Illustration: title page]




                             VIRGIN SAINTS
                              AND MARTYRS


                           By S. BARING-GOULD
                 Author of “_The Lives of the Saints_”




                         WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE
                       ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. ANGER




                  New York      THOMAS Y. CROWELL & Co.
                  Publishers              1901




                                CONTENTS

                                                   PAGE

                    I. BLANDINA THE SLAVE             1
                   II. S. CÆCILIA                    19
                  III. S. AGNES                      39
                   IV. FEBRONIA OF SIBAPTE           53
                    V. THE DAUGHTER OF CONSTANTINE   75
                   VI. THE SISTER OF S. BASIL        93
                  VII. GENEVIÈVE OF PARIS           111
                 VIII. THE SISTER OF S. BENEDICT    129
                   IX. S. BRIDGET                   149
                    X. THE DAUGHTERS OF BRIDGET     179
                   XI. S. ITHA                      197
                  XII. S. HILDA                     217
                 XIII. S. ELFLEDA                   231
                  XIV. S. WERBURGA                  253
                   XV. A PROPHETESS                 275
                  XVI. S. CLARA                     295
                 XVII. S. THERESA                   315
                XVIII. SISTER DORA                  349




[Illustration: BLANDINA THE SLAVE.]




                                   I

                          _BLANDINA THE SLAVE_


In the second century Lyons was the Rome of Gaul as it is now the second
Paris of France. It was crowded with temples and public monuments. It
was moreover the Athens of the West, a resort of scholars. Seated at the
confluence of two great rivers, the Rhône and the Sâone, it was a centre
of trade. It is a stately city now. It was more so in the second century
when it did not bristle with the chimneys of factories pouring forth
their volumes of black smoke, which the atmosphere, moist from the
mountains, carries down so as to envelop everything in soot.

In the great palace, now represented by the hospital, the imbecile
Claudius and the madman Caligula were born. To the east and south far
away stand Mont Blanc and the snowy range on the Dauphiné Alps.

Lyons is a city that has at all times summed in it the finest as well as
the worst characteristic of the Gallic people. The rabble of Lyons were
ferocious in 177, and ferocious again in 1793; but at each epoch, during
the Pagan terror and the Democratic terror, it produced heroes of faith
and endurance.

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher full of good intentions,
and a sentimental lover of virtue. But he fondly conceived that virtue
could only be found in philosophy, and that Christianity, which was a
doctrine and not a speculation, must be wrong; and as its chief
adherents belonged to the slave and needy classes, that therefore it was
beneath his dignity to inquire into it. He was a stickler for the
keeping up of old Roman institutions, and the maintenance of such rites
as were sanctioned by antiquity; and because the Christians refused to
give homage to the gods and to swear by the genius of the emperor, he
ordered that they should be persecuted to the death.

He had been a pretty, curly-haired boy, and a good-looking young man. He
had kept himself respectable, and looked on himself with smug
self-satisfaction accordingly. Had he stooped to inquire what were the
tenets, and what the lives, of those whom he condemned to death, he
would have shrunk with horror from the guilt of proclaiming a general
persecution.

In Lyons, as elsewhere, when his edict arrived the magistrates were
bound to seek out and sentence such as believed in Christ.

A touching letter exists, addressed by the Church of Lyons to those of
Asia and Phrygia giving an account of what it suffered; and as the
historian Eusebius embodied it in his history, it happily has been
preserved from the fingering, and rewriting, and heightening with
impossible marvels which fell to the lot of so many of the Acts of the
Martyrs, when the public taste no longer relished the simple food of the
unadorned narratives that were extant.

“The grace of God,” said the writers, “contended for us, rescuing the
weak, and strengthening the strong. These latter endured every species
of reproach and torture. First they sustained bravely all the insults
heaped on them by the rabble—blows and abuse, plundering of their goods,
stoning and imprisonment. Afterwards they were led into the forum and
were questioned by the tribune and by the town authorities before all
the people, and then sent to prison to await the coming of the governor.
Vetius Epagathus, one of the brethren