The blood of the martyrs and early Christians had not been shed in vain. It was just at this epoch in the history of Christianity that Providence gave being to a child destined by her holiness to be one of the marvels of the age.
We have sufficient data to know what her education was and under what influences she grew up to womanhood. The old Roman spirit and the Christian spirit were both fitted to form a character of the highest order. Austere honor, severe self-respect, noble traditions of ancient customs, were early inculcated in the mind of Paula. She came of a race of whom St. Jerome said: "Remember that in your family a woman very rarely, if ever, contracts a second marriage." Besides the holy books which were her first studies, her reading was vast and extended, embracing both the literature of Greece and Rome. We shall see how in after-life this early culture developed in her the rich gifts of nature, establishing equilibrium between her intellect and her character.
Paula was brought up by her mother with that ardent love for the practice of her religion, which in all its perfection belonged especially to the days when persecution made these observances most precious to the early Christians. She followed Blesilla to the basilicas and to all feasts of the church, and also to visit the tombs of the martyrs and to the Catacombs. This last devotion was peculiarly dear to the Christians of the fourth century. They sought to glorify those victorious soldiers. "See," cried St. Chrysostom, "the tomb of the martyrs! The emperor himself lays down his crown there, and bends the knee."
There was not, perhaps, a family of Christians in Rome, which did not have some loved member among the glorious dead lying in the long galleries of the Catacombs. Saint Jerome speaks of the pious attraction of these sanctified asylums in the great city of the martyrs.
In this atmosphere of love for the church, and of faith in Christ and in the divine origin of Christianity, young Paula grew up. It was in those days the custom for the daughters of noble houses in Rome to marry young; and when Paula was fifteen years of age, her parents gave her in marriage to a young Greek whose name was Toxotius.
He belonged, on his mother's side, to the ancient family of the Julians, which boasted, as we know, of going back to the time of AEneas:
"Julius, à magno dimissum nomen Iülo."
Virgil's AEneid.
Toxotius did not have the faith of his bride. These mixed marriages were not rare in those days; witness Monica and Patricius, the parents of St. Augustine.
Christianity had tolerated such marriages from the beginning, in the hope that the infidel husband might be won by the wife to her belief. When, robed in a white tunic of the finest wool, according to custom, her brow covered with the flammcum, Paula laid her trembling hand in that of Toxotius, who can tell with what holy emotion, what elevation of thought, what purity of feeling and of hope, her soul was filled! On the other hand, Toxotius does not seem to have been unworthy of his Christian bride, and the uncommon affection Paula bore him ever afterward, her inconsolable grief for his loss, all proves that their marriage was among those which the world calls happy. God blessed this union. Four daughters were successively born to them.