upon the public stage, and involved him in all the doc- trinal and ecclesiastical controversies of those controversial times, lie received the ordination of presbyter from the bishop Paulinus in Antioch, without taking charge of a con- gregation. He preferred the itinerant life of a monk and u student to a iixed office, and about 380 journeyed to Constan- tinople, where he heard the anti-Arian sermons of the celebrated Gregory Nazianzen, and translated the Chronicle of Eusebius and the homilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In 382, on account of the Meletian schism, he returned to liome with Paulinus and Epiphanius. Here he came into close connection with the bishop, Damasus, as his theological adviser and eccle- siastical secretary,' and was led by him into new exegetical labors, particularly the revision of tlie Latin version of the Bible, which he comj^leted at a later day in the East. At the same time he labored in Rome with the greatest zeal, by mouth and pen, in the cause of monasticism, which had hitherto gained very little foothold there, and met with vio- lent opposition even among the clergy. He had his eye mainly upon the most wealthy and honorable classes of the decayed Roman society, and tried to induce the descendants of the Scipios, the Gracchi, the Marcelli, the Camilli, the Anicii to turn their sumptuous villas into monastic retreats, and to lead a life of self-sacrifice and charity . He met with great success. ''The old patrician races, which founded Rome, which had governed her during all her period of splendor and liberty, and which overcame and conquered the world, had expiated for four centuries, under the atrocious yoke of the Ceesars, all that was most hard and selfish in the glory of their fathers. Cruelly ' A.S we infer from a remark of Jerome in Ep. cxsiii. c. 10, written a. 409 (ed. Vallars. i. p. 901): "Ante anuos plurimos, quum in cbartis ecclesiasticis " (i. e. prob- ably in ecclesiastical documents ; though Schroekh, viii. p. 122, refers it to the Holy Scriptures, appealing to a work of Bonamici unknown to me), "juvarem Damasuni, Komanse urbis episcopum, et orientis atque occidentis synodicis consultationibus re- sponderem," etc. The latter words, which Schriickh does not quote, favor the com- mon interpretation. § 41. ST. JEEOME AS A MONK. 211 humiliated, disgraced, and decimated during that long servi- tude, bj the masters whom degenerate Eome had given herself, they found at last in Christian life, such as was practised by the monks, the dignity of sacrifice and the emancipation of the soul. These sons of the old Romans threw themselves into it with the magnanimous fire and persevering energy which had gained for their ancestors the empire of the world. ' Formerly," says St. Jerome, ' according to the testimony of the apostles, there were few rich, few noble, few powerful among the Chris- tians. xS^ow it is no longer so. ]^ot only among the Christians, but among the monks