§ 4:1. ST. JEROME AS A MONK. 211
humiliated, disgraced, and decimated during tliat long scrvi tude, by the masters whom degenerate Kome liad given herself, they found at last in Christian life, such as was practised bj the monks, the dignity of sacrifice and the emancipation of the Boul. These sons of the old Eomans threw themselves into it with the magnanimous fire and persevering energy which had gained for their ancestors the empire of the world. ' Formerly,' Bays St. Jerome, ' according to the testimony of the apostles, there were few rich, few noble, few powerful among the Christians. Now it is no longer so. N'ot only among the Christians, but among the monks are to be found a multitude of the wise, the noble, and the rich.' . . . The monastic institution ofiered them a field of battle where the struggles and victories of their ancestors could be renewed and surpassed for a loftier cause, and over enemies more redoubtable. The great men whose memory hovered still over degenerate Rome had contended only with men, and subjugated only their bodies ; their descendants undertook to strive with devils, and to conquer souls. . . . God called them to be the ancestors of a new people, gave them a new empire to found, and permitted them to bury and transfigure the glory of their foi-efathers in the bosom of the spiritual regeneration of the world." *
Most of these distinguished patrician converts of Jerome were women — such widows as Marcella, Albinia, Furia, Salvina, Fabiola, Melania, and tlie most illustrious of all, Paula, and her family ; or virgins, as Eustochium, Apella, Marcellina, Asella, Felicitas, and Demetrias. He gathered them as a select circle around him ; he expounded to them tlie Holy Scriptures, in which some of these Roman ladies were very well read ; h(: answered their questions of conscience ; he incited them to celibate life, lavish beneficence, and enthusiastic asceticism ; and flattered their spiritual vanity by extravagant praises. He was the oracle, biogra})her, admirer, and eulogist of these holy women, who constituted the spiritual nobility of Catholic Rome. Even the senator Pammachius, son in-law to Paula
' Moutaleinbert, himself the scion of an old noble family in France, 1. c. i. p. 388 si{. Doaxp. Hieron., Epist. Ixvi. ad Pammachium, de obit Paulinas (ed. Yallarj. I 891 sqq.).
212 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
and lieir to lier fortune, gave liis goods to the poor, exchanged the purple for the ojwl, exposed himself to the mockery of his colleagues, and became, in the flattering language of Jerome, the general in chief of Roman monks, the first of monks in the Urst of cities.' Jerome considered second marriage incompati ble with genuine holiness ; even depreciated iirst marriage, except so far as it was a imrsery of brides of Christ ; warned Eustochium against all intercourse with married women ; and hesitated not to call the mother of a bride of Chiist, like Paula, a " mother-in-law of God." "
His intimacy wuth these distinguished women, whom he admired more, perhaps, than they admired him, together with his unsparing attacks upon the immoralities of the Roman clergy and of the higher classes, drew upon him much unjust censure and groundless calumny, which he met rather with iii' dignant scorn and satire than with quiet dignity and Christian meekness. After the death of his patron Damasus, a. d. 384, he left Rome, and in August, 385, with his brother Paulinian, a few monks, Paula, and her daughter Eustochium, made a pilgrimage " from Babylon to Jerusalem, that not Nebuchadnezzar, but Jesus, should reign over him.'' With religious devotion and inquiring mind he wandered through the holy places of Palestine, spent some time in Alexandria, where ho heard the lectures of tlie celebrated Didymus ; visited tho cells of the Nitrian mountain ; and finally, with his two female friends, in 386, settled in the birthplace of the Redeemer, to lament there, as he says, the sins of his youth, and to secure himself against others.
In Bethlehem he presided over a monastery till his death, built a hospital for all strangers except heretics, prosecuted hiu literary studies without cessation, wrote several commentarie>, and finished his improved Latin version of the Bible — the uoblest monument of his life — but entangled himself in violeni
' In one of his Epist. ad Fammach. : " Primus inter monachos in prima urbe . . archlstrategos mo iiachorum."
• Ep. xxii. ad Eustocliium, " dc custodia virginitatis." Even Rufiuua was shocke<J at the profane, nay, almost blaspheu lous expression, soa-iis Dei, and asked him froni what hentJun poet he had stolen it.