"The heaven of heavens is the Lord's,
but the earth He has given to the children of men," and to woman He
seems to have assigned the borderland between the two, to fit the one
for the other and weld the links. Hers are the first steps in training
the souls of children, the nurseries of the kingdom of heaven (the
mothers of saints would fill a portrait gallery of their own); hers the
special missions of peace and reconciliation and encouragement, the
hidden germs of such great enterprises as the Propagation of the Faith,
and the trust of such great devotions as that of the Blessed Sacrament
and the Sacred Heart to be brought within the reach of the faithful. The
names of Matilda of Tuscany, of St. Catherine of Siena, of Blessed Joan
of Arc, of Isabella the Catholic, of St. Theresa are representative,
amongst others, of women who have fulfilled public missions for the
service of the Church, and of Christian people, and for the realization
of religious ideals: true queens of the borderland between both worlds.
Others have reigned in their own spheres, in families or solitudes, or
cloistered enclosures--as the two Saints Elizabeth, Paula and Eustochium
and all their group of friends, the great Abbesses Hildegarde, Hilda,
Gertrude and others, and the chosen line of foundresses of religious
orders--these too have ruled the borderland, and their influence, direct
or indirect, has all been in the same direction, for pacification and
not for strife, for high aspiration and heavenly-mindedness, for faith
and hope and love and self-devotion, and all those things for want of
which the world is sick to death.
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