ardor ille, quam admirabilis divini pectoris afflatus ? ut una et plurimum delectet eloquentia, et doceat eruditione, et rapiat sanctimonia." ^ Hence called Stridoyiensis ; also in distinction from the contemporary but little known Greek Jerome, who was probably a presbyter in Jerusalem. ' Martianay, Stilting, Cave, Schrockh, Hagenbach, and others, place his birtli, according to Prosper, Chron. ad ann. 331, in the year 331 ; Baronius, Du Pin, and Tillemont, with greater probability, in the year 342. The last infers from various circumstances, that Jerome lived, not ninety-one years, as Prosper states, but only seventy-eight. Vallarsi (t. xi. 8) places his birth still later, in the year 346. His death is placed in the year 419 or 420. i I § 41. ST. JEROME AS A MONK. 207 library. On Sundays he visited, with Bonosus and other young friends, the subterranean graves of the martyrs, which made an indelible impression upon him. Yet he was not ex- empt from the temptations of a great and corrupt city, and he lost his chastity, as he himself afterward repeatedly acknowl- edged with pain. About the year 370, whether before or after his literary tour to Treves and Aquileia is uncertain, but at all events in his later youth, he received baptism at Rome, and resolved thence- forth to devote himself wholly, in rigid abstinence, to the service of the Lord. In the first zeal of his conversion he renounced his love for the classics, and applied himself to the study of the hither- to distasteful Bible. In a morbid ascetic frame, he had, a few years later, that celebrated dream, in which he was summoned before the judgment seat of Christ, and as a heathen Ciceroni- an,' so severely repriTnanded and scourged, that even the angels interceded for him from sympathy with his youth, and he him- self solemnly vowed never again to take worldly books into his hands. When he woke, he still felt the stripes, which, as he thought, not his heated fancy, but the Lord himself had in- . flicted upon him. Hence he warns his female friend Eusto- chium, to whom several years afterward (a. d. 384) he recount- ed this experience, to avoid all profane reading : " What have light and darkness, Christ and Belial (2 Cor. vi. 14), the Psalms and Horace, the Gospels and Virgil, the Apostles and Cicero, to do with one another ? . . . We cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the demons at the same time." ^ But proper as this warning may be against overrating classical scholarship, Jerome himself, in his version of the Bible and his commentaries, affords the best evidence of the inesti- mable value of linguistic and antiquarian knowledge, when devoted to the service of religion. That oath, also, at least in ' "Mentiris," said the Lord to him, when Jerome called himself a Christian, " Ciceronianus es, non Christianus, ubi enim thesaurus tuus ibi et cor tuum." Ep.