expressing several times a distinct antipattiy to this church father, and charging him with knowing not how to write at all of Christ, but only of fasts, virginity, and useless monkish exercises. Le Clei'C exposed his defects with thorough ability, but unfairly, in his " Qusstiones Hieronymiana " (Amstel. 1700, over 500 pages). Mosheim and Schrockh are more mild, but the latter considers it doubtful whether Jerome did Christianity more good than harm. Among later Protestant historians opinion has become somewhat more favorable, though rather to his learn- ing than to his moral character, which betrays in his letters and controversial writings too many unquestionable weaknesses. I § 42. ST. PATJLA. 215 acciTstomcd extravagance, he opens his enlogy after her death, in 404, with tliese words : " If all the members of my body \s'ere turned into tongues, and all my joints were to utter human voices, I should be imable to say anything worthy of the holy and venerable Paula." She was born in 347, of the renowned stock of the Scipios and Gracchi and Paulus iEmilius,' and was already a widow of six and thirty years, and the mother of five children, when, under the influence of Jerome, she renounced all the wealth and honors of the world, and betook herself to the most rigorous ascetic life. Rumor circulated suspicion, which her spiritual guide, however, in a letter to Asella, answered with indignant rhetoric : " Was there, then, no other matron in Rome, who could have conquered my heart, but that one, who was always mourning and fasting, who abounded in dirt,^ who had become almost blind with weeping, who spent whole nights in prayer, whose song was the Psalms, whose conversa- tion was the gospel, whose joy was abstemiousness, whose life was fasting ? Could no other have pleased me, but that one, whom I have never seen eat ? Nay, verily, after I had begun to revere her as her chastity deserved, should all virtues have at once forsaken me ? " He afterward boasts of her, that she knew the Scriptures almost entirely by memory ; she even learned Hebrew, that she might sing the psalter with him in the original ; and continually addressed exegetical questions to him, which he himself could answer only in part. Repressing the sacred feelings of a mother, she left her daughter Rulfina and her little son Toxotius, in spite of their prayers and tears, in the city of Rome,^ met Jerome in Antioch, and made a pilgrimage to Palestine and Egypt. With glowing devotion, she knelt before the rediscovered cross, as if the Lord were still hanging upon it ; she kissed the * Her father professed to trace his genealogy to Agamemnon, and her husband to JEneas. ^ This want of cleanliness, the inseparable companion of ancient ascetic holiness, is bad enough in monks, but still more intolerable and revolting in hims. ^ " Nesciebat se matrem," says Jerome, " ut €hristi probaret ancillam." Keveal-