are to be found a multitude of the wise, the noble, and the rich.' . . . The monastic institution offered them a field of battle where the struggles and victories of their ancestors could be renewed and surpassed for a loftier cause, and over enemies more redoubtable. The great men whose memory hovered still over degenerate Rome had con- tended only with men, and subjugated only their bodies ; theu" descendants undertook to strive with devils, and to conquer souls. . . . God called them to be the ancestors of a new people, gave them a new empire to found, and permitted them to bury and transfigui-e the glory of their forefathers in the bosom of the spiritual regeneration of the world." ' Most of these distinguished patrician converts of Jerome were women — such widows as Marcella, Albinia, Furia, Salvi- na, Fabiola, Melania, and the most illustrious of all, Paula, and her family ; or virgins, as Eustochium, Apella, Marcellina, Asella, Felicitas, and Demetrias. He gathered them as a select circle around him ; he expounded to them the Holy Scriptures, in which some of these Roman ladies were very well read ; he answered their questions of conscience ; he incited them to celi- bate life, lavish beneficence, and enthusiastic asceticism ; and flattered their spiritual vanity by extravagant praises. He was the oracle, biogra^jher, admirer, and eulogist of these holy women, who constituted the spiritual nobility of Catholic Rome. Even the senator Pammachius, son-in-law to PauLi * Montalembert, himself the scion of an old noble family in France, 1. c. i. p. SSS sq. Comp. Hieron., Epist. Ixvi. ad Pammachium, de obit. Paulinse (ed. VaUars. i. 391 sqq.). 212 TIIIKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. and lieir to lier fortune, gave his goods to tlie poor, exchanged the purple for the cowl, exposed himself to the mockery of his colleagues, and became, in the flattering language of Jerome, the general in chief of Roman monks, the first of monks in the first of cities,' Jerome considered second marriage incompati- ble with genuine holiness ; even depreciated first marriage, except so far as it was a nursery of brides of Christ ; warned Eustochium against all intercourse with married women ; and hesitated not to call the mother of a bride of Christ, like Paula, a " mother-in-law of God." ° His intimacy with these distinguished women, whom he admired more, perhaps, than they admired him, together with his unsparing attacks upon the immoralities of the Roman clergy and of the liigher classes, drew upon him much unjust censure and groundless calumny, which he met rather with in- dignant scorn and satire than with quiet dignity and Christian meekness. After the death of his patron Damasus, A. d. 384, he left Rome, and in August, 385, with his brother Paulinian, a few monks, Paula, and her daughter Eustochium, made a pilgrimage " from Babylon to Jerusalem, that not ISTebuchad- nezzar, but Jesus, should reign over him." With religious