Let her not, when her lord is deceased, ever pronounce the name of
another man. A widow who slights her deceased lord by marrying again
brings disgrace on herself here below, and shall be excluded from the
seat of her lord."
A similar feeling permeated the early Church. "The argument used against
the unions," says Professor Donaldson, "was that God made husband and
wife one flesh, and one flesh they remained even after the death of one
of them. If they were one flesh, how could a second woman be added to
them?" He alludes, of course, to the re-marriage of the husband, but the
argument, whatever it may be worth, applies equally to both parties. An
ancient example of renunciation is afforded by Judith, of whom it is
recorded: "She was a widow now three years and six months, and she made
herself a private chamber in the upper part of the house, in which she
abode shut up with her maids and she wore hair-cloth upon her loins, and
fasted all the days of her life, except the Sabbaths and new moons, and
the feasts of the house of Israel; and on festival days she came forth
in great glory, and she abode in her husband's house a hundred and five
years."
An order of widows is said to have been founded or confirmed by St.
Paul, who fixed the age of admission at sixty. This assertion, one
suspects, grew out of a passage in the First Epistle to Timothy, in
which the apostle employs language that would, at least, be consonant
with such a proceeding: "Honour widows that are widows indeed.
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