to account for a dream, and explains his later and maturer theory plausibly. He has also the great advantage of being thoroughly in earnest and unreserved: he rides on the top of the wave, whereas Rufinus was soon reduced to evasion, not to say tergiversation. The one point in controversy which to the last he asserts to be perfectly open is the pre-existence of souls upon everything else he is forced to condemn, or seem to condemn, whatever had been imputed to Origen as heresy, only reserving the question whether it was to be found in his authentic writings. Rufinus's style is decidedly heavy and clumsy, and it is therefore the more noticeable that he is in his way a purist, and that St. Jerome, who writes a corrupt language admirably without contributing to its corruption, rallies him upon his periphrases.

Rufinus escaped better than most other adversaries of St. Jerome: he lived tranquilly at Aquileia under the protection of his bishop, occupying himself with translations' from the Greek, a text-book on the Apostles' Creed, and mildly mystical interpretations of Scripture, till he was frightened away by the barbarians to Sicily, where he died in peace, leaving few, if any, to share St. Jerome's exultation that "Grunnius," as he called him, was buried under Ætna like a new Enceladus.

The controversy led to another without literary interest. Pelagius, a rather self-complacent British monk, who was strongly impressed by Origen's doctrine of responsibility, blundered into heresy, having presumed to criticise a famous saying of St. Augustin," Da quod jubes et jube quod vis." Like other Origenists, he made his last stand in Palestine, and some

The most important of these were the Clementine recognitions, an Ebionite work on the missionary journeys of St. Peter and the adventures of St. Clement (which only survives in the expurgated translation of Rufinus, who seems to have thought the original a very edifying work, which in some passages was perplexing and perhaps unintelligible), and the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius, which he carried down from A.D. 324 to 395. There is the same tendency to omit what might shock contemporary orthodoxy, and compared with Eusebius he is uncritical. He omits documents and inserts miracles, and in the two later books, which are entirely his own, he sacrifices the connection and proportion of events, which Eusebius preserves very well considering his materials.

of his adherents were bold enough to sack St. Jerome's monasteries, and therefore St. Jerome wrote against Pelagianism with a sense of personal injury. His dialogue on the subject. is tame: his preface to the prophet Jeremiah is eloquent and passionate in its exposition of human dependence, and has much of the tumultuous dignity which belongs to some of the best works of vigorous old age.

The preface to the "Lamentations" is remarkable for a splendid and unexpected expression of awe-struck sympathy with Rome, which had just been taken by Alaric. St. Jerome had never shown any loyalty to the empire or the emperors (because he was born on the frontier which was most weakly held?), but the first humiliating blow, felt so much more keenly than the heavier blows which were to fall, made him tremble as if the world were coming to an end with Rome.

His commentaries in general are tantalizing to a modern reader; they are very hurried; they date from the time when he was physically unable to write, and had to employ an amanuensis. He was ashamed of the necessity, which he thought fatal to concentration of style, and, when he could not defend a statement, fell back upon the fact that he told the amanuensis to put down the first thing that came into his head rather than let him come to a standstill. He is most at ease in the region of exhortation, though the antiquarian and historical interest is more prominent than in any other ancient Latin writer, and such notes as he gives are intended to be real explanations, not merely to enable the reader to get over what would otherwise be puzzling. It is true that erudition is pressed into the service of mysticism: the meaning of the Hebrew proper names is valued for its own sake, and no little pains are taken to give the different interpretations correctly, but every variant is equally good to be spiritualized.

Many of the letters turn upon the same kind of topics. Side by side with a letter to Ageruchia on the raiment of the high-priest, we have one to Fabiola, the learned lady who knew the letter to Heliodorus by heart, on the forty-two stations of Israel in the wilderness, each being allegorized as a station of the pilgrim wandering in the wilderness of this

world. Another letter to the same lady is more personal: she had divorced her husband on tolerably good grounds and married her intendant, knowing apparently that what the law sanctioned and society condoned was rather at variance with ecclesiastical discipline, but hoping that St. Jerome would rule that the second marriage, if irregular, was valid. She made a feint of consulting him on account of a friend, but the feint was detected, and she received an emphatic though not unsympathetic rebuke for her constructive apostasy, for it was clearly heathenish in such a matter to appeal to the secular law. But there is hardly more ethical indignation and a good deal less sarcasm than in a letter to another widow who required to be deterred from a second marriage. Here the writer throws all his strength into the contention that a widow who marries again only does so for one reason, whatever she may say or try to believe-that her servants will not obey her without a master; that her estates require a manager; that she cannot transact business with the government or in the law courts without a husband to stand by her; or, most ridiculous of all, that her children require a father; or, if she is childless, she cannot leave her heritage to strangers.

The fact is that human prudence always repels him except in one direction: he is aware that austerities can be carried so far as to affect the mind; he had carried his own austerities so far that for the last years of his life he could not kneel without raising himself by a cord; but Rufinus thought it possible to taunt him with not being strict enough in life to please Melania, and he warned Nepotianus against the melancholy which requires medical rather than spiritual skill for its cure. But there runs through all his writing a contempt for economy, and he praises Paula for leaving nothing but heavy debts when she died; the one provision for the future which he contemplates is to feed the poor and teach the young; and in this he seems to have no sense of paradox: the alternative to alms-giving is simply selfish dissipation, or an equally selfish scramble for the largest share of a total of enjoyment which appeared to be rapidly vanishing. Recklessness was general; even consecrated virgins were invited

to enjoy themselves by their gossips, on the ground that they had no children to save for.

One of the most interesting departments of St. Jerome's work was his panegyrical letters on departed friends, and naturally that on St. Paula, the most intimate, is the best. The letter is full of tender contrasts between her rank and her humility, her blessedness and his loss, her false glory in the world, her true glory in Egypt and Bethlehem, for he has a naïve pride in the readiness of the most celebrated ascetics to admit a lady who had made greater sacrifices than most of them to the intimacy of their cells. No such stupid story is told of her as Rufinus tells of Melania, who presented a magnificent service of plate to a famous monk, and, when he sent it away to be sold for the poor, had the bad taste to tell him the weight. The letter on the death of St. Eustochium is less impressive; her character was less impulsive, and her biographer was older: he could not rally from the shock, and tells us little except the firmness with which she adhered to her vocation, her implicit obedience to her mother, and her gentle strictness with her nuns, whom she never hesitated to starve into a safe and peaceable frame of mind.

Of the formal biographies, the longest and most entertaining is that of St. Hilarion, who fled from his admirers from Palestine to Sicily and Cyprus, and was tracked everywhere by his miracles; it is a curious illustration of the difference between the real life of ascetics and the impression they made in the world. Another pretty story is that of Malchus, a monk who was carried away by the Saracens and compelled to accept a wife; he persuaded her to live with him as a sister, and at last was able to return with her to the Roman dominions, where they died in peace.

His historical works are not very characteristic. As Rufinus translated and continued the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius, St. Jerome translated, enlarged, and continued his chronicle from the twentieth year of Constantine to the death of Valentinian. Of the two it may be thought that St. Jerome's work is the more meagre and capricious:' except that

For instance, the entry for one year is that a particular grammarian

the notes upon Roman writers are taken from Suetonius its sources have not yet been ascertained. More interesting is the imitation of Suetonius, a series of biographical notes on all the writers of whom an instructed Christian did not like to be quite ignorant, composed in A.D. 392 at the request of a certain Dexter, the prætorian prefect, who frankly explained he wanted something very short. Even for this work he is very dependent on Eusebius, who, at the end of each period. in his Church history, enumerates the principal writers, and St. Jerome complains he very often had to copy him because. he could find no historical or biographical materials elsewhere. Out of 135 authors named, from St. Peter to himself, only one, Juvencus (who turned the Bible history into rough and sounding hexameters), is a writer in verse. Commodian, an earlier and more original, if also a more incompetent, writer, is not mentioned, nor is Athenagoras, the most eloquent of the Apologists. Again, it seems very much an accident whether St. Jerome gives a list of any author's writings or not, though as he approaches his own time we get an occasional critical hint he tells us that he had never seen a work on the Canticles attributed to St. Hilary. Oddly enough, St. Anthony appears after his biographer St. Athanasius, and his appearance at all proves that the general title " De Viris Illustribus is more accurate than the special one "De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis." Philo and Seneca come in, because Philo's work (if it be Philo's) on the "Therapeuta " was taken for a description of the early Christians, and the apocryphal correspondence between St. Paul and Seneca was fully accredited when St. Jerome wrote. Neither insertion is particularly uncritical, for the Essenes have been identified with the Christians as a matter of deliberate theory, and the first expression of a recognition that Seneca had a good deal in common with St. Paul would be a tradition that St. Paul had converted Seneca.

But, after all, the most characteristic work of St. Jerome are had a high reputation at Rome; for another, that the clergy of Aquileia were regarded as a choir of angels, for the chronicle was written before the quarrel with Rufinus.

II.-18*