The Ascetic Ideal

TOWARD the close of the year 381 there came to Rome in company with Paulinus, then Bishop of Antioch, and Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, a Dalmatian monk, whose advent at that time in the golden city was a far more significant and memorable circumstance than that of either of his episcopal superiors. Paulinus, indeed, was in some sort upon his trial. There were rival claimants to the see of Antioch, — that turbulent and fanatical city where the disciples were first called Christians, whose dust the Emperor Julian had shaken so scornfully from his impatient feet less than twenty years before. Both the orthodox and the Arian parties had elected their man, and the council, or rather synod, of 382, which our travelers were hastening to attend, had been convened for the special purpose of adjudicating their claims. Epiphanius went as the powerful friend and ally of Paulinas ; Eusebius Hieronymus, — known to all the world as St. Jerome,— by invitation of the reigning Pope, as a cleric, young indeed, but already renowned both for the sanctity of his life and his profound learning in those questions of doctrine and exegesis which must needs come up for discussion before the assembly.

The Pope was Damasus, one of the few Roman bishops of the fourth century whose personality remains luminously distinct, — the able, the martial, the learned and stately Damasus, who himself had had literally to fight for the headship of the church with an unscrupulous rival, whose very name seems to convey a reminiscence of the grave splendor of living which he affected, and whereby it is certain that he greatly imposed upon the still pagan patriciate of Rome. Damasus was now seventy-seven years old, within three years of the end of his conspicuous and stormy career, but there was no sign of failure in his faculties; and the correspondence which he had previously held with Jerome, who was about forty years his junior, must at least have sufficed to assure him that he would find a loyal mouthpiece in the devout scholar; the fact being that, between the lines of the latter, we may read plainly foreshadowed not merely the doctrine of papal infallibility, but others which are popularly held to be among the latest accretions or corruptions of the early Catholic belief.

Pope Damasus at all events made the young doctor his private secretary for the occasion of the council; and when Ambrose, the great Bishop of Milan, at whose instance it had been convened, was taken severely ill soon after his arrival in Rome, the presidency of the assembly, which would naturally have been his, devolved upon Jerome. He acquitted himself admirably in this office, and remained in Rome for the three succeeding years, highly distinguished by the Head of the Church, employed by him in revising the text of the Gospels and the Psalter, and occupying for the first and only time in his life a brilliant position in the eyes of the world. Jerome was in the years — between thirty-five and forty — when mundane honors have usually their greatest attraction even for the detached and disinterested soul, but this was a man fortified in advance against their spell.

He had seen the whole civilized world of his day and the glory of it, — from Trèves, the far seat of the Western Empire, to Constantinople, the gorgeous home of the Eastern, and from his heart he spurned it all. Freely, unaffectedly, without reservation, he, in common with so many of the more fervid Christians of his epoch, had long since closed his heart to the allurements of sense, and invested the whole treasure of his affection and his hope in the mystical city of God. It was as the well-nigh irresistible champion of the ascetic against the domestic life that he made his deepest mark in Rome, and secured his chief effect upon the history of the church; and it is from this point of view that it is proposed—at, a time when ideas akin to those of St. Jerome are once more beginning, as they periodically do, strongly to work upon generous minds of a certain order — to reconsider his interesting story.

It will be necessary first to pass in brief review the events of Jerome’s earlier years up to the time when his vocation was fully established, and he found in the doomed and decaying but still gorgeous capital of the ancient world, and in the peculiar social conditions of the hour, a fruitful field for its exercise. He was born about the year 343 at Stridon, a little town near the borders of Pannonia, not far from the great city of Aquileia. All the beautiful country between the Illyrian Alps and the head of the Adriatic was like a garden then, — “ citied to the top, crowded with culture.” But it was precisely here, alas! that, in 377, the invading Goths first slaked their thirst for plunder, leaving behind them such a waste of ruin that when the necessity afterwards came upon Jerome literally to “ sell all that he had and give to the poor,” he found only, as he says, a few “ half-burned villas ” to dispose of in his native district. His parents, though not people of rank, were able to send him to Rome for his education, and to provide him with the means of purchasing there what was, for the time, an extensive and valuable classical library. His fondness for the great pagan writers amounted to a passion. Later he fought against it as a deadly sin, but how rarely well he knew them appears not only in the character of his own Latin style, but from the fact that although at one period of his life he abstained for fifteen years from opening either a Cicero or a Virgil, his writings of this time, as always, teem with the aptest quotations from both authors, dropping, as it would seem, unconsciously from his rapid pen. As an old, old man, when his memory of the intervening days was growing dim, Jerome used to renew in dreams his college contests for the oratorical prize, and his habit of haunting the law courts in hopes of catching something of the true forensic manner. Earlier he had been used to review his student life in a deeply penitential spirit, accusing himself of youthful excesses which his unsparing conscience may possibly have exaggerated, and recalling with a repugnance we can hardly understand, unless he means to hint at improprieties which he does not name, a fashion that prevailed among the youth of going the round, on Sundays, of the tombs of the apostles and martyrs.

“And I often,” he says, with a perceptible shudder, “ entered into those crypts which have been hollowed in the depths of the earth, where the walls of the entrance on either hand are lined with bodies of dead men, and all is so dark as almost to fulfill the word of the Psalmist, ‘ They shall go down quick into hell.’ . . . Only at rare intervals is the fearsome gloom in part dispelled by the admission of a little light from above; and when you turn to retrace your steps, and all is blind and black around, you are reminded of Virgil’s expression : —

It may be interesting also to note, in passing, that the brief reign of Julian was comprised within the student years of Jerome. But though he somewhere calls the apostate emperor, in his rhetorical way, “ a traitor to his own soul,舡 he is less vehement upon the subject than might have been expected. “ After Julian had turned to the worship of idols,” he says in his Chronicle or Compendium of the history of his own time, “ there was a species of mild persecution rather inviting than impelling men to sacrifice舡 (to the heathen gods), “ and to this many of our own people voluntarily acceded.”

It is well known that the passionate crusade of Julian was never popular in that most exclusive section of the old pagan society of Rome, with whose wives and daughters, at least, Jerome afterwards came into such close relations, and whom he was destined to influence so mightily. The very zeal of the innovator for the outworn faith was an offense to their well-bred indifferentism.

His course of instruction in the Roman schools ended, Jerome probably returned to Aquileia, but very soon departed again on a journey to Gaul. With him went his friend and foster-brother Bonosus, a youth of fortune and promise, whose ancestral estates adjoined the little property of Jerome’s father. The original purpose of this journey is uncertain, but its most important result was undoubtedly to inoculate Jerome with much of that enthusiasm for the monastic life which had already taken full possession of the soul of his fellow-traveler.

On their return to Dalmatia in 372, Bonosus withdrew definitively from the world to a retreat which, half in horror, as it would seem, and half in envy, but with language already strongly mystical, Jerome thus describes : —

”Thy friend and mine, Bonosus,¹ is already mounting the predestined ladder of Jacob’s dream. He is bearing his cross ; he takes no thought for the morrow ; he casts no look behind. . . . Think of it! A youth trained with us in the liberal arts, in affluent circumstances, preëminent among his companions, he has cast off mother and sisters and a fondly loved brother, and planted himself like a new colonist of paradise upon a perilous island in the roaring sea,— an island of bare stones and rugged cliffs, awful in its isolation. Not a tiller of the soil dwells there, not even the little monk Onesimus, whom you knew, and whom Bonosus loved so tenderly, accompanied him into that waste. Alone — yet not alone, for Christ is with him — he beholds the glory of God as even the apostles never saw it, save in the desert.

. . . Do but think how hard his battle is, and you will be able to gauge his victory ; the mad sea raging all around the isle, bellowing back from the winding chasms of its mountain wall, not a grassblade anywhere, nor slightest shadow of foliage, the steep cliffs inclose him as in a dreadful prison, yet is he intrepid and secure. . . - Why may he not see in his isle some vision like that of John ?舡

The Ruffinus to whom this moved and moving letter was addressed came later to exercise a somewhat sinister influence upon Jerome’s fate ; but they were friends for a long time after this. The letter was written from Antioch, whither Jerome had betaken himself, accompanied by a small band of friends, all restless in spirit like himself, longing, but still delaying, to take the last step which should cut them off from the world of men, and bind them to the contemplative life. One of their number, Heliodorus, decided to return to Aquileia ; and to him Jerome addressed a letter of remonstrance for his defection, and praise of the hermit life, which came afterwards to be used as a kind of manual of asceticism. He himself, with two companions, Innocentius and Hylas, proceeded to Chalcis, a " lesser Thebaid ” on the eastern boundary of Syria, where the monastic life was fully organized after the pattern of the Egyptian desert, and the monks divided, according to the degrees of austerity which they affected, into the three grades, or classes, of cenobites, recluses, and anchorites.

The life of the cenobites was, comparatively speaking, a humane and healthful one. They dwelt in large monasteries, had churches regularly served, ate in common, cultivated the soil, and engaged in several branches of useful industry. They also exercised a generous hospitality, and in one of their houses Jerome and his friends were first received as guests, and here the two latter, succumbing no doubt to the first effect of the burning climate upon frames exhausted by fasting and fatigue, died of fever. Jerome himself, ill in body and prostrated in spirit by the shock of his bereavement, —" I have lost one of my eyes ! ” he exclaimed when Innocentius died, —felt that he had received a call to a more complete self-consecration, and made trial for a time of the life of the recluse. Not under a very severe form, assuredly, for he had always his books with him, and these very books were the occasion of some of his most painful conflicts, and of sundry of the strange and indelible dreams or visions which belong to this crisis of his career.

Let us hear him describe one of these experiences in his own forceful words. The passage occurs in a letter addressed many years later to one of his lady penitents in Rome: —

“ When I left my home and family for the kingdom of heaven’s sake . . . I could not make up my mind to part with the books which I had collected at Rome with so much labor and zeal. And so, miserable being that I was ! I fasted and then I read Tully ; or, after nights of tears and vigil, when my very soul had been rent by the recollection of past sins, I would take up my Plautus,” — some manuscripts say Plato, — “ and then, when I came to myself and began to read the prophets, the rudeness of their style disgusted me; and because, in my blindness, I saw not the light, I thought it was the sun’s fault and not that of my eyes. So was I the sport of the old serpent, and thus it came to pass that in the middle of Lent my exhausted frame was attacked by a fever which preyed upon the very marrow of my bones, and left me no rest, until I was so wasted that my limbs — incredible as it sounds — barely held together. Preparations were even made for my burial. My body became quite cold, and only the faintest flutter of life yet lingered in my languid heart. Then was I suddenly rapt away in spirit, and haled before the tribune of the Judge, where, overcome by the great light and the dazzling splendor of the attendant bands, I fell down and dared not look up. Questioned concerning my state, I announced that I was a Christian ; but He who presided there said, ‘Thou liest. Thou art a Ciceronian, but no Christian, “for where thy treasure is, there shall thy heart be also. ” ’ Then was I stricken dumb, and between the lashes which I received, for He ordered me to be scourged, I was still more tortured by the fires of conscience as I thought upon that verse, ‘ In the grave who shall give Thee thanks.’ Whereupon I began to cry aloud, and moaning to say, ‘ Have mercy upon me, O Lord, have mercy upon me ! ‘ — ejaculating between the strokes of the lash. Then those who stood about fell prostrate at the feet of the Judge, beseeching that, being so young, I might have pardon and a place for repentance, and receive further torture only in case I should again read the books of the Gentiles. But I, who in my extremity would have pledged myself yet more deeply, began to swear by His name, saying, ‘If ever again I hold and read my worldly books, I shall have denied Thee.’ Upon this, my oath, I was let go, and I came back to life.舡

We know that Jerome came in after years to regard this vision as in part, at least, the hallucination of fever; that he did not consider it literally binding, and even instructed in pagan learning some of the devoted followers, women as well as men, who accompanied him on his return to the Holy Land. For the time being, however, the renunciation of his favorite intellectual pursuits was complete and sincere, and the Christian world may rejoice that it was so, since he now first began to employ his active mind in those Hebrew studies, to which his commentaries upon the Old Testament owe their principal value.

He remained in the desert of Chalcis nearly five years, or until the spring of 379, when he returned by way of Antioch to Constantinople, and passed a year there in studying the writings of the Greek fathers, under the guidance of St. Gregory Nazianzen. At Antioch he was consecrated priest by Paulinus, confessedly against his own will, nor did he ever, during a life of nearly a century, overcome his reluctance to performing the most solemn and mysterious of the priestly functions. Finally, in the ensuing year, he went with Paulinus to Rome, as we have seen, and was at once raised by the Head of the Church to an influential position.

The Church of Rome at that time, like that of the European continent at the present time, was mainly a church of priests and women ; but many of the women — again after the fashion of the devotees of every age — were of great personal distinction, and rejoiced in the highest of social traditions. Many things go to show that, under the pagan emperors, there had been a state of things in Roman society somewhat like that which existed in French society in the days of Napoleon III. There was a Faubourg St. Germain in imperial Rome, comprising the descendants of republican heroes and mythical demigods which held haughtily aloof, for the most part, from the vulgar and shameless excesses of the palace. Another standard of manners prevailed among them than that which invited the biting satire of Tacitus or the cynical frankness of Suetonius. A certain, at least theoretic, loyalty lingered in this patrician circle to the fine early Roman ideals of domestic faith, chaste marriage, and personal purity. Its members probably told themselves and one another that they were the true Romans, and that the parvenu emperor of the day, whoever he might be, was — like their majesties of Savoy to the noble Neri of modern Rome — “ not in society.” We shall by and by see Jerome himself pleading with an aristocratic widow named Furia the long tradition of the Camilli — “ generis tui grande privilegium " — as an argument against her second marriage : —

“ There has hardly been a case of remarriage in that family,”are his words, “since the days of Lucius Furius Camillus ; so that,” he sternly adds, “ your perseverance in widowhood would not be so much praiseworthy as your defection would be shameful, from a principle which has been observed by the pagan ladies of your line through so many generations.”

After Constantine had embraced Christianity and founded his new capital in the East, there ensued about fifty years of complete religious toleration, during which the new faith made important conquests in the more refined circles of Roman society. These conquests were largely feminine still, and when, under Gratian and Theodosius, indications began to appear that Christianity was likely to abuse its new political preponderance by persecuting in its turn, a party was formed in the Senate to resist these aggressions, which could boast such names as those of Prætextatus the stainless præfect, and Symmachus, who made so gallant a fight for the Altar of Victory. They waged a hopeless battle, as we know, and not a few of them must have had to contend against the convictions of the home-circle, as well as the growing might of imperial and priestly predominance. Yet the Christian profession of the great ladies of Rome was in many cases a purely formal one, accompanied by an extraordinary freedom of manners and an almost fabulous degree of luxury and self-indulgence in their daily life, until Jerome came to arouse them from their complacent languors and fire their impressible souls with a new ardor for the extremest forms of self-abasement and mortification. A crowd of noble names occurs at once to the memory. We will select a few as typical, and apply to the letters of Jerome for more precise information concerning those who bore them.

First, and in many ways unquestionably the sanest and noblest of all, there was Marcella, in whose great house upon the Aventine Jerome was received as a guest at the time of the council.² She was already a widow, and, after the death of her husband, had refused the suit of a very distinguished old senator named Cerealis, consul in the year 358, who was so enamored of her beauty that he proposed securing to her the reversion of all his immense wealth. Her excellent mother, Albina, was naturally unwilling to let, such an occasion slip, and supported rather warmly the suit of Cerealis. " But,” replied Marcella, “even if I wished to marry, and not, as I do, to embrace a life of perpetual chastity, it is a husband I should desire, and not an inheritance.” Her senile adorer urged that, after all, he might live a good while, whereas a young man might be cut off untimely. “ To which,” says Jerome, “ she made this light and elegant reply (!) : ‘ A young man may die soon, but an old man cannot survive long.' ” And he adds that the experience of Cerealis proved discouraging to her other suitors, and that she soon ceased to be importuned.

She withdrew into a very dignified retirement, affecting no extreme austerity, but occupying herself chiefly with the study of the sacred Scriptures, and with charity on an extensive scale. She seldom went into the world, “least of all to the houses of great ladies, where she might see what she must needs condemn ; . . . she was the first to confound the gentility” (gentilitas was the regular term in the fourth century for the pagan society of Rome) “ by the example in her dress and conversation of a true Christian widowhood. . . . For there are those who touch up their faces with rouge and ceruse, who go clad in garments of glistening silk, who flash with jewels and wear gold necklaces, who hang in their perforated ears the priceless pearls of the Red Sea, and are redolent of perfumes, and, in short, who mourn their husbands as those who exult in having escaped from thralldom, while still they are on the lookout for others.

. . . But the dress of our widow was chosen not for the display of her person, but for its defense against the cold. . . . Her mother was always with her, and though the needs of a great establishment compelled her sometimes to receive monks and clerics, she never saw them alone.舠

These particulars are from a sort of obituary in the form of a letter, addressed long afterward to the nun Principal, when Jerome had lately heard of Marcella’s death in Rome amid the horrors of Alaric’s siege. He goes on to dilate on her extraordinary mental powers and accomplishments ; telling how graciously she overcame his own shamefaced reluctance to instruct her, how docile was the attitude of her mind, and yet how independent, “ for she never accepted what I said at once, and without inquiry. ... If I were to tell all that I found in her of goodness, of talent, of piety and purity, I should fear to go beyond belief ; . . . but this one thing I will say, that all which I had amassed and made my own by long study and daily meditation, she absorbed, she acquired, she possessed, so that after I went away, whenever any discussion arose concerning the testimony of the Scriptures, it was customary to appeal to her. And she, having a great deal of tact, and being perfectly versed in what philosophers call ό πρέποο, — that is to say, the becoming, — used to answer, not as it were in her own words, but in mine, or those of some other person, thus professing herself a learner, even while she taught.舡

Full and generous though this tribute be, there is a certain formality about it, as of one who consciously renders what he knows to be due. The same thing may be said of a short letter addressed to Marcella herself during Jerome’s residence in Rome, concerning the exceptional sanctity of a young sister of hers named Asella, who had been devoted to the religious life by her parents before she was born. There is something almost terrible in his dry catalogue of the austerities practiced by this child from her twelfth year; although it was in speaking of her that he employed one of his most beautiful and frequently quoted images ; averring that the soul of the unborn infant appeared to her father in a dream, 舠 like a crystal vase, clearer than any mirror.”

But in neither of these careful eulogies do we detect that high-wrought fervor, that rapt admiration and quiver of intense personal feeling, which mark all he has to tell us of the ladies of another noble race, over whom his ascendancy became complete, and whose conversion to asceticism, under his influence, agitated and outraged their entire caste.

The father of Paula traced his descent to Agamemnon; her mother to the Gracchi and the Scipios. Her husband, Toxotius, lately deceased, had carried his pedigree back through Julius Cæsar to Æneas and the goddess of Love. Left a widow at thirty-three with four daughters. Blæsilla, Paulina, Julia Eustochium, and Ruffina, beside a little boy who bore his father’s name, Paula always dated her true religious awakening from the time of her great bereavement. She had been a Christian before, but such a worldly Christian as we have already seen portrayed by Jerome’s mordant pen : she had reveled in those appliances of Eastern luxury which her great wealth easily commanded, passing her days upon silken couches, and going abroad, even to divine service at St. Peter’s, in a litter borne by obsequious eunuchs. But though thus pampered, and seemingly confirmed in habits of physical indolence, she had an active and brilliant intelligence, and her fastidious refinement and high-strung sensibilities were in themselves a protection against vulgar vice. Prone to exaltation of mind, and capable only of extremes in action. when she put on her widow’s weeds she had altered her entire manner of life. She had thrown her whole soul into works of practical charity, and soon began, to the conceivable disquiet of her relatives, to disburse, not merely her own wealth, but the patrimony of her children, replying to all remonstrance upon this head, 舠 I shall leave them a larger fortune than I take away ; I shall leave them the mercy of Christ.” Jerome recalls with compunction that he himself at one time tried to impose a check upon Paula’s reckless prodigality; but he was met by the intrepid answer that she had made a vow not to leave a penny to her heirs, but herself to die a mendicant and fill a pauper’s grave. “ My very shroud,” were her words, “shall be the gift of another.” " Her faith was more ardent than mine,” pursues her biographer wistfully. “ She was wholly united to her Saviour, and, in the poverty of her spirit, did but follow her Lord who was himself a pauper ;" and he adds later on with the matchless naïveté of a true child of the kingdom, “ so she obtained what she desired, and even left her daughter burdened with a large debt.”

This one of her children who survived Paula was the third daughter, Eustochium, a girl of grave and collected character, whose religious vocation was early pronounced, and who, without being subject to her mother’s transports of religious emotion, persevered unswervingly, through a long life, in her chosen line of self-sacrifice. Extraordinary attempts were made by her worldly and wealthy relatives to turn her from her purpose, one of which was quaintly described by Jerome long afterwards in a letter to Paula’s daughter-in-law, Læta, who had written him for advice about the education of her own little girl, intended for a nun. After strictly prohibiting the boring of the small maiden’s ears, or the artificial reddening of her hair, and recommending that her pearls be sold for the purchase of the one priceless pearl, he says : —

” A lady of rank named Prætextata ” (she was probably related to the great pagan præfect) “ did once, under orders from her husband Hymettius, who was uncle, on the father’s side, to the nun Eustochium, compel that young lady to change her usual costume ; dressing and braiding her neglected hair after the fashion then prevailing in the world. For she desired intensely to vanquish the maiden’s purpose, and to defeat the wishes of her mother. But, look you, there came to her in her dreams that very night an angel with a terrible face, who, after denouncing her for having dared to deck with sacrilegious hands the head of a virgin of God, threatened her, if she persisted, with the simultaneous loss of her own husband and all her children. . . . All of which came to pass,”adds the unflinching narrator, “ and I have recalled the incident not by way of insulting the unfortunate in their sorrow, but in order to warn you with how great awe and caution you ought to keep watch over that which has been devoted to God.”

But Eustochium, whose ancestral name of Julia had been quietly dropped, as too full of pagan associations to be borne by a handmaid of the Lord, proved impervious to temptation on the side of personal vanity; and the famous twenty-second epistle of Jerome—To the daughter of Paula, on the keeping of her uows — was quite as much a manifesto and a defiance addressed to the more worldly minded party in the Roman Church as a compendium of private instruction. It has always ranked with the letter to Heliodorus, already mentioned, and the whole theory and practice of the celibate life is covered and illustrated by the two compositions. In the earlier letter, which was written from the desert, Jerome had dwelt rather upon general principles ; calmly condemning marriage itself, and all constraint of domestic ties, as mere temporary provisions of the old law. always destined to be superseded in the fullness of time by the freedom of the gospel of Christ. He was forced to admit, when pressed in argument, that there might be such a thing as a blameless marriage ; nay, that the institution had still its lingering utility “ for the generation of saints.” But his views, and those of the entire school whom he so eloquently represented, were nothing less than revolutionary. To them, it seems not to have admitted of the shadow of a doubt that the higher Christian life is precluded by family bonds and obligations.

They felt constrained to take their Master for a pattern here, as well as in his repudiation of private property ; and the thorough radicalism of their revolt from the whole constituted order of society is only to be paralleled in the latest pages of Tolstoï, or of certain of those modern mystics, who see, in some ancient and mysterious perversion of the true relation of the sexes, the very essence of the " aboriginal calamity.”³ It is easy to see how fanatical and pernicious the doctrines of the Pope’s latest protégé must have appeared to the colder and more conventional Christians of Rome: and to that idle section of the well-to-do metropolitan clergy. — so like the perfumed abbés of the grand siècle in France, — on the freedom of whose manners, “ the pest of their love-feasts ” and the like, Jerome reflects with scathing satire in this very letter to Eustochium. Ruffinus reproached his former friend with having furnished a handle to all who hated the faith, by the picture he dared draw of the manners of Christian Rome.

The antagonism between Jerome and the fashionable Christians was yet further embittered by the circumstances attending the death of Paula’s married daughter, Blæsilla, — a decidedly more sympathetic and endearing, if less admirable, figure than that of the austere and resolute Eustochium. Blæsilla had been wedded at eighteen by one of the Camilli, a brother to the husband of Furia before mentioned; and, like Marcella, she had been widowed in seven months. At first she tried to smother her grief in social dissipation ; then she fell ill of a fever, which greatly prostrated her strength; and it was at this point that Jerome interfered to save her from a second marriage and a relapse into worldly ways. He writes a very pious and thankful letter on the subject of his conversion of Blæsilla to Marcella, who was perhaps absent from Rome at one of the many suburban villas which she had converted into houses of refuge and homes for convalescents.

** Our widow, who used to pass whole days inquiring of her mirror what last touch might be added to her toilet, now confidently says : ‘We all, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the like image, from glory to glory.’ Once her handmaids wove glittering gems among the tresses they crowned her fair head withal ; now it is enough for her if that head be veiled. The downiest bed seemed hard to her in those days, and she could scarce lie quiet, how high soe’er they piled her couch. Now she arises betimes to pray. The music of her voice in the Alleluia is heard before all the rest. She kneels upon the bare ground.”

The almost inevitable result followed. Blæsilla’s imperfectly restored health soon gave way again ; she sank in rapid decline, and died before she was twenty. She departed in a mood of rapturous faith, without a request for the life so quickly consumed, nor a shadow on the brightness of her spirit, save that which hovered in her pathetic last words:

“Pray the Lord Jesus to forgive me for not having accomplished all that I desired.”

In the obituary or memorial of her which he addressed to Paula, Jerome wrote of this young convert with what was for him extraordinary emotion. He praises the polished beauty of her address. “ To hear her speaking Greek, you would have thought that she knew no Latin ; yet she expressed herself in the Roman tongue without the faintest suspicion of a foreign idiom,” and also the general aptitude for language, whereby she learned in a few months enough Hebrew to enable her to chant the Psalms with her mother in the Original tongue. Then he touches tenderly upon the last scene of all, and adds : —

舠Have no fear, my Blæsilla ! Your garments are made white forevermore.

. . . Well said I once that conversion is never late. . . . The burden of the flesh is cast aside, the soul hath flown like a bird to its Maker, the wanderer hath entered upon her ancient inheritance.”

Yet he chides Paula with considerable severity for having given the heathen occasion to cavil by the wild and open abandonment of her grief; and he cannot forbear expressing his disapproval of the pomp with which Blæsilla was buried, — more especially of the golden pall which covered her bier. He seemed to hear the sweet voice of his spiritual daughter protesting from heaven against such unseemly display.

The stately funeral of Blæsilla was indeed attended by an immense concourse of people, and was the occasion of something very like a popular tumult. The unbelieving made no doubt that she had been killed by her austerities, and many even among the Christians held her pitiless director responsible for the young widow’s death. An outcry was raised against the whole race of monks, and their subversive and suicidal teaching. Jerome’s own life was perhaps for a moment in danger; and when, about six weeks later, in December, 384, his great patron, Pope Damasus, also passed away, his enemies in the church threw off all disguise, and the whispers against his good name, which had hitherto circulated in private, swelled into a storm of calumny concerning the nature of his relations with the ladies of Paula’s and other noble households.

He repelled these aspersions with the scorn they deserved ; but one may be permitted to wish that he had not also stooped to retort upon his detractors a species of personal abuse hardly less coarse than their own. Marcella, at least, his wise and dignified first hostess in Rome, regretted his course here, and had the courage to tell him so; and a certain coolness appears to have ensued between them in consequence of her frankness.

But Rome could no longer be a congenial place of residence for Jerome, whose temperament and habits of thought had always allied him with the meditative East. He said his last good-by to the mistress of the world in the ensuing August, not without a solemn presentiment of the disasters that were so soon to befall her ; and the fire of unholy gossip was no doubt rekindled for a season when it became generally known that Paula and Eustochium were to follow in a few weeks, and rejoin him at Antioch, making thence, under his guidance, a long-projected pilgrimage to the Holy Places in Palestine, previous to fixing their permanent abode in some Oriental country. The mother and daughter used every argument to induce Marcella to join them, but without success. Jerome’s last letter of farewell was written from shipboard to the cloistered Asella, and he actually omitted her sister’s eminent name from the long list of elect ladies whom he distinguished by some special parting message.

Paula’s two remaining daughters and her only son had, of course, to be left behind ; and the mother had to sustain herself, as best she might, under the pang of a parting which she at least knew to be final, by the abundant promises held out to those who leave houses and lands and kindred for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. Jerome, as usual, can see only one side to what seems to the natural mind a distressing dilemma. He subsequently drew a somewhat sensational picture — imaginary, of course, since we know that he was not present—of the parting on the beach at Ostia, the little ones with outstretched arms calling piteously after the receding ship, —but only to exult in the sublimity of his lady’s triumph over the weakness of her maternal heart.

The three friends met at Antioch, as proposed ; but it was early winter, and the weather already very severe, before preparations were completed for the extensive caravan which the still ample wealth of the Roman matron enabled her to organize for the journey. They were to take what was called the shore-route to Syria, but even this involved a good deal of rough mountain travel ; and Paula’s appearance was at that time so fragile that a serious effort was made by her episcopal host at Antioch to dissuade her from starting before spring. But her zeal and that of Eustochium would brook no delay, and her health seemed positively to improve under the fatigues and hardships of the route.

They halted at every place renowned in Scripture story : at Sarepta, where Elijah had given the widow back her son, and where, one would think, though of course we hear nothing about it, that Paula’s heart must have bled afresh at the thought of the son whom God had not summoned, but whom his mother had forsaken; at Tyre, whence St. Paul had sailed for the fatal city from which they had so lately fled. Their way lay thence over the spurs of Carmel, the mysterious and ever sacred mountain, to Cæsarea, at that time both a consular residence and a noted seat of Christian learning, where they visited the house of Cornelius, transformed into a church, and whence they made an excursion to the already ruined city of Antipatris, built by the Herod of the gospel to the memory of his father. And so on, by the “ fields of Mageddo;

. . . conscious of the death of Josias,” as Jerome says with one of those classic turns of expression so familiar to his pen, to Joppa, whence their reminiscences must have been singularly mingled of sacred and profane. For they passed from the house of Simon the tanner, “now an elegant chapel,” to the scene of Andromeda’s deliverance by Perseus, and were even shown the bony carcass of the dragon, and the marks of chains upon the sea-worn cliff. The roses were not yet in bloom when they crossed the plain of Sharon under the soft skies of early spring, passing Arimathea, and staying long enough at Lydda for Jerome to have a few costly lessons in Hebrew from an eminent rabbi there. Thence, by way of Ajalon, where the sun and moon stood still at Joshua’s command, they moved on to the goal of all their hopes, to earth’s most sacred city, known to the heathen world, since Hadrian rebuilt it after the great destruction, as Ælia Capitolina.

The Gentile name thus arbitrarily imposed was repudiated alike by Jews and Christians, the latter being perhaps more numerous and powerful in Jerusalem at this moment than at any other period either before or since. Cyril had just breathed his last there, and the church was factious and turbulent; but all parties united in extending an impressive welcome to the great Roman lady and her distinguished suite.

The noble ecclesiastical buildings of Constantine were at this time quite intact. They consisted of a chapel, small but very richly adorned, which was believed to mark the site of the Holy Sepulchre, and was connected by a large Open court called the Court of the Garden, or of Golgotha, with the more imposing Church of the Holy Cross. Underneath the latter was the crypt, where the Empress Helena had been guided to her stupendous discovery; and it was here that Paula first fell prostrate in one of those cataleptic trances which were repeated at Bethlehem, and at Olivet, and at the point where she obtained her first glimpse of the Jordan, and which were ever afterward a marked feature of her ecstatic piety.

The two edifices of Constantine, both of which, strange to say, fronted westward, were within the limits of Ælia Capitolina. Mount Zion and the vestiges of the great temple, as well as of Julian’s abortive attempt at its restoration, were outside the city wall ; and Jerome, in whom we constantly observe that feeling for landscape, so rare in his day, which enables the historian of events to vivify their natural surroundings by one poetic touch, is more than usually eloquent in describing the desolation of the spot.

“ ‘ The Lord hath loved the gates of Zion,’ — not these crumbling and firescarred portals which we now see, but the gates against which hell shall not prevail, — whereby so vast a multitude have already gone in to Christ.” One house alone remained standing in all the artificially leveled space on the summit of the Holy Hill, but this might well have been miraculously preserved, for tradition identified it as the scene of the Last Supper.

Upon the Mount of Olives, which Paula was now strong enough to climb on foot, they visited the small but splendid church of the Ascension, erected by the Empress Helena. It was open at the top like the Pantheon in Rome, and successive architects were said to have tried in vain to fill the vacant space with masonry. A prominent feature in the deeply interesting view surveyed by our pilgrims from the porch of this exquisite church was a group of conventual buildings upon a neighboring hill. These had been erected by another rich and pious Roman dame, one Melania, who had set an example to Paula five years before, by forsaking her only surviving child, and coming under the direction of Jerome’s early comrade, the monk Ruffinus, to live the contemplative life upon the sacred soil of Jerusalem. Paula knew, as she looked, that such would be the tenor of her own future days, and those of the maiden beside her ; and a presentiment had already visited her that Bethlehem, where her Lord had been cradled, would be the place of her rest. But before fixing herself in her final earthly abode, she had set her heart upon going over the rest of Palestine, and upon visiting, in Egypt, both the splendid city of Alexander, —long a centre of philosophy, and now a renowned Christian centre, —and Nitria, that oppidum Domini on the borders of the desert, whence five thousand cenobites, presently to be scattered by an Arian persecution, were living their peaceful, absorbed, yet not unjoyous life of toil and praise and prayer.

All these purposes were accomplished ; and nothing could be more interesting, did space permit, than to follow, step by step, the progress of Paula’s caravan. Our authority for the course and incidents of this memorable journey is always Jerome’s own, who reviewed it minutely twenty years afterward, with the aid, perhaps, of notes taken by the way, at a time when every memory must have been quickened and softened by Paula’s recent death. We too may see, under his guidance, if we will, the dark defile, with its guard of Roman soldiers, where the victim of brigands was rescued by the good Samaritan; the sycamore which Zaccheus climbed to see his Lord pass by ; the boughs, laden with exvotos, of the oak (it had been a terebinth in Josephus’s time!) under which Abraham entertained the angel ; the miracle-working tomb of John the Baptist in Samaria; the solemn splendors of sunrise on the Dead Sea, and the beautiful panorama of Palestine from the heights of Tabor. Sweetest of all, perhaps, for the melting suggestion it conveys of

is the visionary first glimpse afforded us of Nitria, with its fruitful fields and gardens, its waving palms and pealing bells, and the long lines of hooded figures passing quietly into the one vast church at the stated hours of prayer.

So great was the fascination of this place for Paula that it seemed to her, at first, as if she could never leave it. But before the week had expired, beyond which not even guests as highly honored as themselves might be entertained in idleness at Nitria, her affections had reverted to Bethlehem, and it was definitely decided to return thither.

The great fatigues of the journey through which the devout enthusiasm of the once invalid lady had carried her so triumphantly were now, however, beginning to tell upon her slender frame, and it was thought better that she and her female suite should go back to Palestine by sea. For there had come with the mother and daughter, all the way from Rome, a few devoted attendants, many of them young unmarried girls of their own class, who had embraced their views with ardor, and were destined to 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 — a rather high average of individual health, serenity, and content.

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 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 ⁴ 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.

Abundant assaults from without had to be met and withstood by Jerome during the fifteen succeeding years, — unworthy 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 correspondents,—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 — 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!'舡

“ I mention it,” Jerome adds, “ not because I approve the rash assumption of burdens beyond one’s strength, but from the desire to illustrate, by this very tenacity of hers, the temper of her spirit, the ardent passion of that faithful one whose song was ever, ‘ My soul thirsteth after Thee.’ ... It is difficult to preserve moderation in all things.”

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 promise 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 : —

“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. . . .

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 band, 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. Yon 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, enduretb 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 appears that the quality which Erasmus misses in Cicero is the essential and distinctive 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:

Harriet Waters Preston. Louise Dodge.