Jerome St

Jerome, St., Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, was born probably about 340 A.D., his parents. being Christians of some wealth. He received a careful education which was completed at Rome, where Pope Liberius baptised him. Returning home with a strong bent towards scholarship, he presently set out on a course of travel. He' came back to Aquileia, and there wrote to Innocehtius his earliest tractate. A long tour in the East brought bim to Antioch, and a severe illness induced him to devote his life henceforth to religion, in pursuance of which object he passed some time as a hermit in the wilds of Chalcis, studying Hebrew and the Scriptures. The Meletian controversy recalled him to Antioch and ultimately to Constantinople as an opponent of Arianism and a champion of Western orthodoxy. In 382 the Pope Damasus invited him to Rome and set him to supervise the Latin version, of the Bible, and he had completed the New Testament, with the Psalterium Romanuin and Psalterium Gallicum, when the death of Damasus in 385started him once more on a wandering career. His advocacy of the celibate life, especially for women, had provoked hostilities, and accompanied by Paula, Eustochium, and other Roman ladies, he roamed over Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine, ultimately settling down at Bethlehem, where four monasteries were built. He now set to work upon the translation of the Old Testament with the help of several Rabbis, and he produced what afterwards served as the basis of the Vulgate. His more peaceful labours included lives of Malchus, Pachomius, and Theodoricus, Eastern recluses; De Viris Illustribusy a biographical history of the Church, and Commentaries on the Prophets, St. Matthew's Gospel, and the Epistles of St. Paul. The Pelagian heresy aroused once more all his polemical ardour, and his Dialogi contra Pelagianos provoked such ill feeling that he had to fly from Bethlehem for two years, returning in broken health and dying in 420.