devotion and inquiring mind he wandered through the holy places of Palestine, s^^ent some time in Alexandria, where he heard the lectm'es of the celebrated Didymus ; visited the cells of the Nitrian mountain ; and finally, with his two female friends, in 386, settled in the birthplace of the Redeemer, to lament there, as he says, the sins of his youth, and to secure himself against others. In Bethlehem he presided over a monastery till his death, built a hospital for all strangers except heretics, prosecuted his literary studies without cessation, wrote several commentaries, and finished his improved Latin version of the Bible — the noblest monument of his life — but entangled himself in violent ' In one of his Epist. ad Pammach. : " Primus inter mouachos in prima urbc . . . archistrategos monachorum." * Ep. xxii. ad Eustochium, " de custodia virginitatis." Even Rufinus was shocked at the profane, nay, almost blasphemous expression, socrus Dei, and asked him from what heathen poet he had stolen it. § 41. ST. JEROME AS A MONK. 213 Kteraiy controversies, not only with opponents of the church orthodoxy like Helvidius (against whom lie had appeared be- fore, in 38-i), Jovinian, Yigilantius, and Pelagius, but also with his long-tried friend Kufinus, and even with Augustine.' Palladius says, his jealousy could tolerate no saint beside him- self, and drove many pious monks away from Bethlehem. He complained of the crowds of monks whom his fame attracted to Bethlehem." The remains of the Roman nobility, too, ruined by the sack of Rome, fled to him for food and shelter. At the last his repose was disturbed by incursions of the barbarian Huns and the heretical Pelagians. He died in 419 or 420, of fever, at a great age. His remains were afterward brought to the Roman basilica of Maria Maggiore, but were exhibited also and suj)erstitiously venerated in several copies in Florence, Prague, Clugny, Paris, and the Escurial.^ The Roman church has long since assigned him one of the first places among her standard teachers and canonical saints. Yet even some impartial Catholic historians venture to admit and disapprove his glaring inconsistencies and violent passions. The Protestant love of truth inclines to the judgment, that Jerome was indeed an accomplished and most serviceable scholar and a zealous enthusiast for all which his age counted holy, but lacking in calm self-control and proper depth of mind and character, and that he reflected, with the virtues, '- His controversy with Augustine on the interpretation of Gal. ii. 14 is not un- important as an index of the moral character of the two most illustrous Latin fathers of the church. Jerome saw in the account of the collision between Paul and Peter, in Antioch, an artifice of pastoral prudence, and supposed that Paul did not there reprove the senior apostle in earnest, but only for effect, to reclaim the Jews from their wrong notions respecting the validity of the ceremonial law. Augustine's deli- cate sense