form the nucleus of the Bethlehem convent.

They were all poorly lodged in the little Syrian town, and suffered infinite hardship during the three years which had still to elapse before Paula's extensive building operations were completed, and there had arisen upon the hallowed site of the Saviour's birth, beside a nunnery and a monastery, each with its own chapel, for it was only on Sundays and high festivals that the brothers and sisters even worshiped in common, several extensive houses of entertainment for the Western pilgrims now flocking in annually greater numbers to the Holy Land. The expenses of the vast establishment continued to be met by the revenue from these hospitia long after Paula's great private resources, eked out for a moment by Jerome's humble patrimony, were as thoroughly exhausted as the enthusiastic heiress had ever desired.

Their life henceforth was that life of the cloister and the chapel, which is essentially the same in all times and countries. It is a mode of existence of which the stern monotony is intensely forbidding to the imagination of many; yet it will usually be found, upon candid inquiry, to afford quite apart from all transcendental joys and heavenly compensations in the present or future rather high average of individual health, serenity, and content.

a

In the case of Paula and Eustochium there was, at least, no mental stagnation. They kept up and became remarkably proficient in those Hebrew studies which they had commenced in Rome beside their lost Blaæsilla. They seem indeed to have enjoyed a steady reflex from the extraordinary literary activity which soon began to prevail in the neighboring monastery. There many scribes were constantly employed; the celebrated Rabbi

1 We find no allusion in Jerome's own writings to the grateful beast with whom his name is associated in medieval story, whom he healed VOL. LXVIII. NO. 408. 31

Bar - Anina came and gave lessons by night, for fear of being mobbed by the Jewish populace if he attempted it by day; and Jerome himself, in addition to those immense labors of translation and annotation whose lasting monument is the Vulgate, opened a free school for the education of the youth of Bethlehem both in sacred and profane letters.

He had attained the high table-land of his middle life, his time of most fruitful and memorable production. The sacred artists of a later day loved best to picture him as he was at this period: Dürer, in a cell like the wainscoted chamber of some old Nuremberg dwelling, bending above his manuscript, the legendary lion at his feet, the light falling upon his reverend hair through tiny, leaded window-panes; Ghirlandajo, on the wall of Ognissanti in the sunnier seclusion of an Italian convent. These images, and many more, lead the imagination of the believer gladly on to that last earthly Communion which confronts and almost outshines the Transfiguration in the Vatican chamber; and to the buoyant figure with strong arm flung across the lion's mane, pressing "upward toward the point of bliss," amid the company of the redeemed, upon Tintoretto's great canvas in the hall of the Gran Consiglio at Venice.

un

Abundant assaults from without had to be met and withstood by Jerome during the fifteen succeeding years, worthy jealousy and bitter detraction of the new-comers on the part of Ruffinus and Melania; an obstinately hostile disposition, and even grave accusations of heresy from John the Bishop of Jerusalem. But this kind of opposition rather increased than impaired the fame and efficacy of the great ascetic's work during the last years of the fourth century. New penitents, with noble names, begin to figure in the long list of his correspon

of a cruel wound, and who ever after followed and guarded his footsteps.

dents, Principia, Fabiola, Theodora, Sabina; while from far-away Gaul come the letters of ladies with less familiar patronymics, Hebidia, Algasia, Artemia, requesting instruction about the regulation of their lives, which Jerome, amid all his manifold cares and occupations, finds time to give them minutely.

Recruits of more or less distinction to Paula's community arrived so fast from Rome that her houses overflowed and multiplied; and as the first generation of little ones, orphaned by the maternal exodus, grew up to manhood and womanhood, and their earthly fates were determined, the result, so far as we are informed of it, did certainly seem to justify, in many cases, the hardy faith which had abandoned them thus literally to the protection of their heavenly Father.

Both the daughters whom Paula had left behind died early, it is true, but the elder, Paulina, had first been married to Pammachius, a senator and a Christian, whom the loss of his young wife impressed so deeply that he distributed vast sums to the poor on the occasion of her funeral, and ever afterward wore, even when sitting in the Senate, the dress of a religieux. Toxotius, the boy, was early married to Læta, of whom we have already heard. She was the child of a pagan pontiff and a Christian mother, and that first-born daughter of hers, consecrated to virginity at her birth, whose education we have seen Jerome directing so carefully from Palestine, was no other than the little Paula who fulfilled her destiny in the convent at Bethlehem, and who tended the father in his suffering last days, after both her sainted grandmother and her aunt Eustochium had passed

away.

The story of the granddaughter and namesake of Melania is more sensational, and illustrates very curiously indeed another side of the unique social conditions of this time of dissolution, but it is far too long and too complicated to be told in this place.

In the year 403, when the gathering horror of barbarian invasion was beginning to darken the whole civilized world, the health of Paula seemed visibly declining, and it soon became evident that her malady was mortal. The rule of separation which the two devoted friends had observed so faithfully, though living side by side, was relaxed at last, and Jerome was often at the bedside of the sufferer. She declined to modify in the least her habits of rigid self-denial, and the obstinacy the obstinacy-playful in form, indeed, and veiled by the innate and inalienable grace of the woman of society — with which she refused even the indulgences and alleviations commanded by her physicians seems finally to have dismayed her uncompromising director himself.

"Why should I speak of her tender assiduities toward the sick,” he says, "and tell how marvelously she ministered to them, and surrounded them with every comfort, since when she too was stricken she refused to receive the like, and unjustly - as I must think - turned her mercy to others into cruelty toward herself? In July, owing to the intense heat, she had terrible access of fever, which, by the goodness of God, she overcame. Her doctors then recommended her to take a little wine in order to build up her strength, for they thought it would induce dropsy if she persisted in drinking water. Then I myself went privately to Bishop Epiphanius, and besought him to advise, nay command, her to try the wine. But she, who was so clever and quick in her perceptions, at once detected the stratagem and let it be seen by a slight smile that she knew it was my doing. What would you have? When that blessed prelate, after earnestly expostulating with her, came out of her room, I asked him what success he had had, and his answer was, 'I prevailed so far that she very nearly persuaded an old man like me to take no more wine!'

"I mention it," Jerome adds, "not

Paula died on the 26th of January, 404, in the fifty-seventh year of her age, and the twenty-first of her residence in Bethlehem. Though the end had been so many months foreseen, Jerome was at first utterly prostrated by his loss. His very life-work became distasteful to him, and it was to rouse him from the torpid melancholy into which he seemed likely to fall that Eustochium urged upon him the preparation of that memoir of her mother from which the above and other extracts have been taken. He subsequently resumed and completed his work upon the Vulgate, and many of his commentaries upon the Old Testament books were written after this. In his preface to the book of Daniel there is an allusion to Paula, "who now sees the face of God," which reminds one of the rapt last phrases of the Vita Nuova.

Eustochium succeeded her mother in the headship of the nunnery, and the burden thus assumed was a heavy one indeed, for the darkest days of the Bethlehem colony were at hand. Irruptions of Isaurian mountaineers and of Bedouins from across the Syrian border created a famine in the district, and most of the convent buildings were, at one time or another, sacked and partially destroyed. The new abbess had no private resources, or rather, as we have already been told, less than none, and the work of restoration was a slow and difficult one. Despite her calm courage and great practical resources, Eustochium had painful need in these days of all the moral and spiritual support that Jerome could afford her. Such as he had he gave without stint, but there is

a sober tone about his latest counsels which would certainly have seemed lukewarm and suspect in another, to the headlong reformer of a generation before.

“It is not alone," he wrote her about this time, "the shedding of blood in confession that avails. The spotless service of a devout mind may also be a daily martyrdom. The one crown is woven of roses and violets, the other of lilies." Eustochium died in 419. Jerome lived until the 30th of September, 420.

It is difficult to preserve moderation in all things. There are not wanting indications that the common law was exemplified in the case of this great father of the early church, and that the dying saint felt, as the youthful agitator could not do, the everlasting beauty of moderation. It has fallen in with our purpose to illustrate one aspect only, and that perhaps the most extravagant and questionable, of a master mind which exercised a powerful influence over the Christian life, if not the Christian doctrine, of many subsequent ages; one to whose learned and untiring labors upon the sacred books of our religion every student of the Bible is still greatly indebted. Let us make room for one more quotation from the private correspondence of St. Jerome, for a passage which may not merely serve, even in the dull medium of translation, to afford some faint idea of the frequent magic of his eloquence, but which shows its author in another and a broader light than many of the preceding extracts; for here at last we find him breaking the bonds of that intense and morbid individualism which is the snare of all monastic piety, and showing himself capable of sinking the pain of private woes and perils in a sense of the dumb passion of the whole human race.

In the year 394 an amiable and brilliant young Roman nobleman named Nepotianus embraced the religious life under Jerome's influence, and gave pro

mise to the latter of setting a bright example of sanctity to others of his class; but he died in a few years, and it is thus, in a letter of condolence addressed to his uncle Heliodorus who was then Bishop of Altium, that Jerome pictures the state of the world from which, in a good hour for himself, the beloved youth had been called away:

66

"My soul shrinks from surveying the ruins of this time of ours. Between Constantinople and the Julian Alps not a day has passed for more than twenty years without the shedding of Roman blood. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dardania, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Dalmatia, and all Pannonia, are devastated, ravaged, betrayed, by Quadi and Macromani, by the Goth, the Sarmatian, the Alan, the Vandal, and the Hun. Think of the matrons, think of the godly maids, whose fair and innocent bodies have fed the lust of these savage beasts! Bishops have been seized, presbyters and all manner of holy ministers have been slaughtered, churches destroyed, and horses stabled at the very altars of Christ. The whole Roman world is plunging to its fall. .

'Non, mihi si linguæ centum sint, oraque centum,

Ferrea vox,. . .

Omnia pœnarum percurrerem nomina possim.' I am not writing history. I have but dropped a passing tear over the woes of this generation. Another must tell the tale in full, and let Thucydides and Sallust be dumb! . . .

"Happy Nepotianus, far removed from sights and sounds like these! And yet, we who must either suffer thus ourselves or see our brethren suffer have the heart to live, nor do we count those blest, but rather subject for our tears, who suffer not! For we are conscious of old offenses to be expiated before our God. The barbarians prevail through our crimes, the Roman army is vanquished by our vices. A strange

mode of offering consolation, is it not?

to bewail the deaths of a world, while we dissuade from sorrow for one! It is said that Xerxes, that mighty king who leveled the mountains and bridged the sea, once wept on beholding from a commanding height the infinite hosts of his innumerable army, at the thought that, in a hundred years from that time, not one of all those men and women would survive. Would that we too might ascend to a point whence we could see, as in a mirror, the whole world outspread below! Then would ruin be discerned on every hand, nation clashing with nation, kingdom against kingdom: some tortured, some slain, some swallowed in the deep, some dragged into slavery; here wedding and there woe; here birth and there death; here wealth and there beggary; and not the mere army of Xerxes, but the whole mass of living men, — how soon to be no more! Speech itself is baffled by the immensity of this thought, and all I have said is as nothing. . . . Let us then descend from heaven, and come back for a moment to ourselves and our own destinies. You have experienced in your proper person, is it not so? the successive stages of infancy, boyhood, youth, manhood, and age. Daily we die, daily we are consumed, and still we believe that we are immortal. All that I myself dictate, write, read, or emend takes somewhat from my life. Every stroke of the pen is a fatal stroke. We write and write again; our letters cross the sea in rushing ships, while every wave as it passes helps to undermine our being here. One boon alone we firmly hold, our union in the love of Christ. Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth. Through this, which lives forever in our hearts, our dear Nepotianus, though absent, is present with us yet, and widely as you and I are sundered he can clasp a hand of each. He whom now we know not after the flesh we hold in loyal remembrance, nor need

we ever deny ourselves speech concerning him with whom we may speak no

more."

It is to have studied Cicero to some purpose, after all, to be able to write such Latin as we find in the original of the foregoing passages. All is not here

of exquisite polish, of stately rhythm and carefully prepared effect, which we find in Jerome's great literary model, nevertheless there is a something here which is not there. That excellent critic and admirable modern Latinist, Erasmus, once wrote concerning the style of Jerome: "How much of antiquity there is in him, of historic lore and the grace of Grecian letters! What phrases, what fine turns of speech, such as not merely leave all Christian writers far behind, but are fit to be compared with Cicero's own! Nay, I myself, when it comes to such a comparison, do seem, unless my love of the great saint misleads me, to discover I know not what lack in the

prince of orators himself." To us it ap

pears that the quality which Erasmus misses in Cicero is the essential and dis

tinctive quality of all early Christian eloquence. It is the same that gives their enthralling charm to the rugged pages of St. Augustine, a strain unheard in the world before the dawning of the new day. Its effect upon the ear is like that of a plaintive melody upborne upon some vast organ-swell; or the thrilling monotony of a voice which, if it alter, must break in tears. It seems ever to suggest by the mere artless collocation of its syllables, indeed one knows not how, the idea of soft wave-motion, steadily propagated across a level deep of unsounded feeling toward the clearness of some far horizon beyond the wrecks of time. It is a massive living flood, no longer bound and led through artificial channels, however nobly constructed, until it breaks at the determined moment, like the Anio at Tivoli, in the scenic splendor of calculated cascades:

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the bound-
less deep
Turns again home."

Harriet Waters Preston.
Louise Dodge.