into the Gospels," the insinuation of course being that the changes were of his own devising. He finds it necessary to utter a vigorous protest against the notion, grateful to the intellectually indolent, and not confined to those times, of a necessary connection between piety and the simplicity of ignorance. He ridicules those" who ostentatiously declare themselves disciples of fishermen, as if to be ignorant was necessarily to be holy." Besides those who in their ignorance thought every alteration of the familiar text a falsification, our scholar had other objectors to think of. There were, e.g. that class of the religious who, though better instructed themselves, feared the effect on the unlearned of seeing alterations made in the Bible they trusted. Those also would be found who, for the sake of the arguments furnished, or for some graver reason, would hold by erroneous readings which told in their favour. Jerome therefore proceeded in his work with the greatest caution, and in so conservative a spirit as to obtain the thanks of men like Augustine, who welcomed a revision, though they subsequently remonstrated with him on hearing of his proposal to translate the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew. Unlike the single-minded student, who sought only how he might most faithfully present God's revelation to the Western world, they were unwilling to shake, too rudely as they thought, popular error. Nay, some of themselves, though men of wide culture in many fields, were not wholly emancipated from the bondage of the errors of the day, and regarded Jerome's later labours with the utmost alarm. Taking in hand first the Gospels, and then probably the Epistles, he contented himself with correcting only the more glaring blunders in them, by the help of the best Greek texts he could then obtain. Nor was the Old Testament wholly overlooked. Circulating in the Roman provinces in its privately revised and re-revised North-African Latin dress, it as greatly needed the hand of the corrector as did the Latin New Testament. The same tentative, conservative spirit characterised Jerome's work upon it. He began with the Book of Psalms, revising it by comparison with the Septuagint, not the Hebrew. This revision did not, however, generally commend itself, possibly not being thorough enough. The old error," Jerome complains, "prevailed over the new correc Jerome's unpopularity in Rome. 41 tion," and was only supplanted by a new and more thorough version, still drawn directly from the Greek. From this version the Psalter in the English Prayer-Book is translatedhence the differences between it and the Authorised Version. At this point our attention is drawn from the Biblical labours of our eager scholar to the course of his personal history. At this stage of his work his good friend and protector, Bishop Damasus, died; and as his successor Siricius was either unable, or unwilling, to extend similar effective patronage to Jerome, the latter found himself exposed to the full consequences of the hostility which, in these few years of his residence in Rome, he had roused against himself. This was not all due to his labours in Biblical revision. These had, indeed, roused against him the prejudice, distrust, dislike of multitudes of conservative and ignorant Christians, both clergy and laity. But the keenness of the hostility with which he was assailed was due, it must be confessed, to the unmeasured vehemence and bitterness of the invective he permitted himself to pour forth, publicly as well as privately, against those who differed from him. Many men, able, honest, good, make their path more difficult, and create many additional obstacles to their work, by an unrestrained passionateness of thought and language toward their opponents, which is due to exaggerated self-esteem. Jerome was never done exposing and satirising the ignorance of the Latin clergy, high and low; with the natural consequence that, instead of accepting the guidance and aid of his undoubtedly great gifts and achievements, they regarded his most necessary and valuable labours as an intentional insult to themselves. Other causes contributed to make him intensely unpopular with a powerful section of the Roman religious community. His rigid personal asceticism condemned the self-indulgence, not to say immorality, of many of the laity, and even clergy. The monastic views he held and preached found enthusiastic disciples. Ladies of rank placed themselves under his spiritual direction. And when it was seen that under his influence they severed themselves from the ties and duties of domestic as well as social life, to devote themselves to religious seclusion, it is not surprising that some in power thought themselves bound to proceed to the utmost lengths, to put an end to this introduction into the West of the unwholesome monastic practices of the East. Jerome found it necessary to leave Rome for more sympathetic and safer regions. The scene now changes again to Palestine, to the old town of Bethlehem on its long grey hill, "its wild bleak hill among hills equally bleak," according to Stanley's description. At their foot lie corn-fields, while vineyards are seen upon their terraced sides. A reaction from the previous utter neglect had long ere this taken place. And the sacred spots of Palestine, so long deserted and profaned, had become the goal of eager pilgrimages, and the haunt of many a hermit. The fashion had been set by Helena; and at Bethlehem her son Constantine had cleared away the Pagan temple and grove of Adonis, which, expressly erected for the purpose, had, from 135 to 315 A.D., desecrated the birthplace of our Lord, and had erected a basilica after the example of his mother at Jerusalem. The attractions of the place were just such as appeal with greatest force to one with Jerome's views and feelings; and beside the birthplace of his Lord he spent, with but brief intervals, the remaining thirty years of his eager, agitated, passionate life. With all the ardour of an ascetic, yet full of the human interest and passion of a man created to stir and widely influence his fellow-men, Jerome struggled to live not only for the universal diffusion of the truth, but for its all-consecrating influence within himself. Here surely, he thought, at a spot so fitted to awaken the liveliest of sacred emotions, and to calm and purify the heart, he should find strength to guide and curb, and fuel to feed, a life's devotion. The "enormous pile of buildings," comprising the Convent of the Nativity, "extending along the ridge of the hill from west to east," contains, next to the grotto, the supposed scene of our Lord's birth, no spot of so deep interest as "the rough chamber hewn out of the rock at the end of a long, winding, subterranean gallery," the scene of Jerome's later, greatest labours. Down the terraced slopes, along winding paths among the corn-fields, we can in fancy see him, in his monk's garb, wandering forth, to rest after hours of exhausting study, to ponder afresh a difficult passage, a new rendering, a conflicting reading; or bending his steps to one or other of the Begins a new translation of Old Testament. 43 convents his friends have established around him, or to Jerusalem to hold converse with his friends Rufinus and Bishop John before the unhappy and irreconcilable differences which broke out between him and them. His life in Bethlehem is photographed for us in his letters, which glow with all the fire, sometimes so strangely mingled, which kindled and consumed him. "Here," says Stanley," he gathered round him his devoted followers in the small communities which formed the beginnings of conventual life in Palestine; here the fiery spirit which he had brought with him from his Dalmatian birthplace, and which had been first roused to fervour on the banks of the Moselle, vented itself in the flood of treatises, letters, commentaries which he poured forth from his retirement, to terrify, exasperate, and enlighten the Western world; here also was composed the famous translation of the Scriptures which is still the 'Biblia Vulgata' of the Latin Church; and here took place that pathetic scene, his last communion and death, at which all the world has been permitted to be present in the wonderful picture of Domenichino, which has represented, in colours never to be surpassed, the attenuated frame of the weak and sinking flesh, the resignation and devotion of the spirit ready for its immediate departure." Jerome's treatment in the metropolis of that Western Church he laboured so earnestly for, did not lessen his ardour in her service. The first-fruits of his retirement to Bethlehem were that second and better Latin version of the Book of Psalms we have already mentioned. Translated, like the first, from the Septuagint, he had on this occasion greater facilities for securing accuracy; his nearness to Cæsarea enabling him to obtain the use of Origen's Hexapla from the library there, with its more accurate Greek and Hebrew texts. This work of revision, as distinct from a new translation, he extended to all, or nearly all, the canonical books of the Old Testament. But he was too accomplished a scholar, and too full of the true scientific spirit, to rest satisfied with these labours. The current Latin version of the Old Testament, even with his revision, was not so accurate as it might be, nor so accurate as he could make it. His increased acquaintance with the Hebrew showed him that more was needed than a faithful rendering of the Septuagint, to present to the Christian Church the Hebrew Bible. The only other direct translation from the Hebrew, and, besides the Septuagint, the only one before his The use of this time, was the Syriac version, the Peshito. was, of course, confined to the Syrian churches. bility of the Septuagint being a translation of an earlier, and therefore at least equally authoritative, text with the one allowed by the Rabbis to remain for sole use, seems not to have occurred to Jerome. And feeling that a translation of a translation must always be less faithful to the first text, unless there be such constant reference to that first text as practically makes the original the basis of the translation, there grew up in his mind the resolution to go to the original itself, and give to the Church that truly great work, a new version, a new translation, of the Hebrew Bible. This, the crowning achievement of Jerome's life, was given to the world in portions at varying intervals. The Pentateuch, instead of being the first, was among the last published. The books he published first were those of Samuel and Kings; and the quaint title of the preface to them, Prologus Galeata, seems to indicate the need he felt he had to be prepared at all points for the storm he was certain to provoke. Three years later the Prophetical books were completed and in the hands of the public, and first copies of others given to various friends for their suggestions. Jerome was justly solicitous that the success of his undertaking should not be marred by the premature publication of any part which had not received final correction. The portion next translated, Ezra and Nehemiah, was determined by the persistent request of private friends. Perhaps he needed this external impulse, for about this period the controversy broke out respecting the orthodoxy of Origen's writings, which affected Jerome deeply, and cost him the friendship of his old companion and ally Rufinus. Origen's influence on Jerome has been already mentioned. limits have been pointed out. Times such as he lived in, however, are not apt to discriminate nicely between orthodoxy and heresy. In the popular view at such times, to agree with a heretic in some points is to agree with him in all. Even in the East there was great divergence of opinion respecting Origen's views, and in the Western Church he was generally regarded as heretical, though upon hearsay, only one or two of his books having been translated into Latin, and these by Jerome himself. At this period, then, in Jerome's labours, Its |