JEROME, St, commonly accounted the most learned of the Latin fathers, was born at Stridon, a city of Pannonia, about, as it appears, A.D. 342. His father's name was Eusebius, that of his mother is unknown; he had a sister, who gave herself up to a religious life; and a brother, Paulinian, much younger than himself. When about twenty-five years old he came to Rome in the Episcopate of Damasus, and studied under the celebrated grammarian Donatus. He here received baptism; after which he went into Gaul, and spent a considerable time at the city of Treves, where he made himself familiar with the writings of the great St Hilary, transcribing more than one of them with his own hand. He then passed a short time at Aquillia, where he became acquainted with many eminent men, amongst whom were Rufinus and Heliodorus; with the latter of these, Evagrius, a priest of Antioch, and some others, he travelled through Thracia, Pontus, Bithynia, Galatia, and Cappadocia. From thence he passed into the East, and staid some time at Jerusalem; from which city he came to Antioch, where he made acquaintance with Apollinaris, who had not then openly taught his heresy. In 372 he retired to a desert lying between the countries of Syria and Arabia, where he employed himself in the study of the Hebrew language, and began his commentaries on the books of Scripture. After studying four years in these wilds, and seeing one of his companions leave him, two others sink under the hardships and privations of their desert life, and being himself much enfeebled by sickness, he abandoned for the present the life of a solitary, and came to Antioch. The church of this city was at that time divided by the factions of Paulinus, Meletius, and Vitalis, each of whom claimed to be its bishop. St Jerome, by the direction of Damasus, acknowledged Paulinus; and, about the year 375, was ordained priest by him, but upon condition that he should not be compelled to abandon the eremitical life, nor to perform any of the duties of his office. At the time of his ordination, or probably a little before, he had been assailed by the opposite factions of the Arians and Sabellians as to the sense in which he understood the word Hypostasis; a term which had formerly been used to express equally the Divine Nature and the Persons of the Holy Trinity; but which, since a council held at Alexandria in the year 362 at which the great St Athanasius presided, had been chiefly confined to the latter sense. St Jerome, when it was demanded of him, whether, with the Arians, he acknowledged three Hypostases; or, with the Sabellians, only one, replied, with great exactness and propriety, "If Nature be understood by this term, there is only one; but if Person, there are three." On account of these divisions he left Antioch, and fixed his abode at Bethlehem. In 380 he went to Constantinople, and became the pupil of Gregory of Nazianzum, the bishop of that city. In the Jerome, st. following year Gregory resigned his see, and Jerome returned to Syria. Soon afterwards, with Paulinus of Antioch and St Epiphanius, he revisited Rome, and was made his secretary by Damasus, taking at the same time the spiritual care of several eminent Romans of both sexes. In 385, the year following the death of Damasus, he returned to the East, saw St Epiphanius as he passed through Cyprus, went to Antioch and Jerusalem, spent a month with the blind Didymus, then one of the most celebrated teachers at Alexandria, visited some of the Egyptian monasteries, and thence returned to Bethlehem, where he spent the remainder of his life as head of a monastic institution, and where he composed the greater number of his works. Towards the close of his life Palestine suffered much from an inroad of barbarians; and in 416, after the Council of Diospolis, the Pelagians, supported by John the heretical bishop of Jerusalem, sent bands of armed men to destroy the monastery of their opponent, St Jerome, and disperse the religious of both sexes who lived under his direction. A deacon was killed, and St Jerome himself escaped with difficulty by flight. After this he continued his literary labours for four years; and on the 30th September, A.D. 420, he died. His most valuable work is his Latin version of the Old and New Testaments, commonly called the Vulgate; of which, however, the Psalter is not his, it having been made from the Septuagint, and not from the Hebrew, which St Jerome always followed. The books of the Apocrypha, except Tobit and Judith, he also omitted, as not being contained in the Hebrew canon. St Jerome enjoyed very singular advantages for the performance of this great undertaking, not only from his intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew, his long abode in Syria, and his knowledge of the places, local traditions, and customs of the country, but also from the fact of the existence in his time of the Hexapla of Origen, by the Greek version of which (the most accurate of any extant) he was enabled to correct both the commonly received Greek and the ancient Italic texts. The Council of Trent declared the Vulgate to be an authentic version, and corrected editions of it were published by the popes Sixtus V. and Clement VIII., A.D. 1590, 1592, 1593. We are also indebted to St Jerome for the best commentary extant on the prophets, for one on Ecclesiastes, on St Matthew, and the Epistles of St Paul to the Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, and Philemon. He was besides one of the chief polemical writers of his age, opposing vigorously the Montanists, Helvidius, Jovinian, Rufinus and the Origenists, the Luciferians, Vigilantius, and Pelagius. He translated a work of Didymus on the Holy Ghost, composed a biographical account of the lives and writers of those ecclesiastical authors who had flourished before his time, and made several additions to the Chronicon of Eusebius, which he continued to the year 378—it is contained in the eighth volume of the edition of Villarsius. He also left behind him more than 150 letters on different subjects connected with theology and the Scriptures. St Jerome, in his very valuable commentary on the prophets, opposes the literal and semi-Judaic ideas of Theodore, "the interpreter," as he is called, who was bishop of Mopsuestia in the time of St Jerome, and one of the chief doctors and representatives of the school of Syria and Antioch (See Theodore of Mopsuestia.) He had attacked St Jerome, as it appears, under the name of Aram, for teaching the doctrines of original sin, and the remission of sins by the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper. Theodore, wherever it is possible, gives to the prophecies meanings exclusively literal and temporal, the result of which is, of course, to deprive us of that evidence of our religion which prophecy supplies, to divest the typical writings of the Old Testament of great part of their meaning, and, by confining the promised blessings to a particular locality, to do away with all idea of a church Christian and universal. Thus the very remarkable words of Hosea vii, 2, 3—"After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth,"—are explained by Theodore, merely of the restoration of the chosen people to their temporal prosperity after the Assyrian captivity; but St Jerome, as might be expected, explains them of the resurrection of Christ, and the regeneration of the human race through it. The words of chap. xiii. 14, of the same prophet—"I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction,"—Theodore treats in the same manner, and refers for their fulfillment to the same period, but St Jerome applies them in their most perfect meaning to the death of Christ. The commencement of the 2d chap. of Joel,—"The day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand: a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness,"—Theodore supposes to describe a merely physical obscurity, which, he says generally, and without allusion to any specific event, was fulfilled in the days of Hezekiah and Sennacherib; and "the day of the Lord," he thinks to be a period of intolerable calamity caused by the Assyrians. St Jerome gives to both a spiritual and Christian meaning, extending them from the narrow and partial one of Theodore, to the end of all things, and the final day of judgment. Lastly, notwithstanding the apostolic declaration of the fulfillment in our Lord's betrayal, of the words of Zechariah xi. 12, 13,—"They weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said unto me, cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord,"—Theodore maintains that the number "thirty" there mentioned, is not to be taken to signify any fixed sum, "but merely to show the great benevolence of the people to the prophet, and their honourableness;" whilst the casting of the thirty pieces to the potter, means, according to him, merely the trial of the people through the furnace of their sufferings. St Jerome pointedly opposes both ideas, as he does Theodore's assertion, that "the rising of the sun of righteousness" in Malachi, means only the victories of the Maccabees. We conclude St Jerome to be opposing Theodore, not only from the internal evidence afforded by a comparison of their respective works, but because the former more than once makes allusion to some living person of note whose name he will not mention, and who, from his method of dealing with prophecy, should rather, he says, be termed a Jew than a Christian. It is clear that there was no one of those times but Theodore who answers to St Jerome's description. The style of St Jerome varies according to the nature of his subject. In his controversial works he is exceedingly pointed and cutting, and proves himself a considerable master of rhetoric and logic; and shows, moreover, his acquaintance with the writings of the ancient philosophers and poets, by introducing frequent citations from their works. Simplicity and earnestness are the chief characteristics of his commentaries. In those on the prophetic writings, his intimate knowledge of Jewish habits and antiquities, has enabled him to do more perhaps than any other commentator to elucidate that portion of the sacred text. The best edition of his works is that of Villarsius, 11 vols. folio, Verona, 1734-40.

(J. F. D.)

JEROME, the friend and disciple of John Huss, and, like him, a martyr to the truth. His family name was Faufisch, but he is generally called "of Prague," from the Bohemian capital in which he was born and brought up. After completing his studies in his native city, he visited the universities of Cologne, Heidelberg, Oxford, and Paris. It is said that he first understood and learned to value the doctrines of Wycliffe while copying the works of that reformer during his stay in England. Certain it is that before he returned to Bohemia from his wanderings over Europe he had signalized himself by a strong opposition to the Church of Rome, and had defended brilliant theses at Paris against Gerson, the famous chancellor of that university. His reputation for learning and practical sagacity was so great, that he was employed by Ladislaus II. of Poland to organise the University of Cracow, and similar compliments were paid him by other crowned heads of that era. Everywhere he proclaimed himself the disciple of Wycliffe, and though such a profession was becoming daily more dangerous, scorning to curb his impetuous temper, he often allowed himself, in his denunciations of Popery, to be hurried away beyond the limits of prudence, and sometimes even of decency. In a short time he observed no measures towards the pope and the cardinals, and among other problems, proposed the following:—Whether the pope possessed more power than another priest? and whether the bread in the Eucharist or the body of Christ possessed more virtue in the mass of the Roman pontiff than in that of any other officiating ecclesiastic? One day, along with some of his friends, he drew a sketch of Christ's disciples on one side following, with naked feet, their master mounted on an ass; whilst on the other they represented the pope and the cardinals, in great state, on superb horses, and preceded as usual with drums and trumpets. These pictures were exposed in public; and it is easy to conceive the effect they were calculated to produce on an excitable and enthusiastic multitude. On another occasion Jerome, when arguing with a monk, lost his temper at being sharply opposed, and carried his violence so far as to fling his adversary into the Moldan. The monk reached the bank, but, as the chronicler of this incident natively observes, "he found when he touched the land that he had lost the thread of his argument, and was unable to pursue the discussion." These outbursts of temper soon involved Jerome in troubles from which a politic prudence would have saved him. At Vienna he was thrown into prison as a heretic, and was only released by the urgent intercession of his countrymen at Prague. Obtaining his freedom, he hastened to join his friend Huss in that city, and made himself conspicuous by the fiery zeal with which he inveighed against the abuses of the hierarchy, and the dissolute lives of the clergy. In 1415, when he heard that Huss had been thrown into prison by the Council of Constance, there to abide his trial, he set out for that city without a safe conduct, determined to plead his friend's cause. He arrived at Constance on the 4th April, and was there dismayed to learn that Huss was to be judged and condemned in secret, and would only leave his prison to die. A panic seized him, and he fled from the town as rapidly as he had come to it. Had he been arrested, he would undoubtedly have shared his master's fate in his master's company. Though without a safe-conduct he reached Überlingen undisturbed, and he might easily have reached Prague had he only held his tongue. But so many crosses and dangers had not increased his prudence. Wherever he went he declaimed openly and vehemently against the council. One day, at the table of a curé, who had invited him to his house as he was journeying through the Black Forest, he forgot himself so far as to call it "a school of the devil, a synagogue of iniquity." Some priests of the company, deeply offended, laid the matter before the governor of the nearest town, and Jerome was arrested and thrown into prison. Other accounts state simply that Jerome was seized at Hirschau by John of Bavaria, prince of Saltzbach, and kept in confinement by him till the council made known its wishes. Certain it is that he was carried in chains to Constance, and when in prison there, learned the terrible tidings of his friend's martyrdom. More than once he was brought to trial, but his eloquence, learning, and logic, were more than a match for the most subtle accuser that could be suborned against him. Meanwhile, his confinement and the cruel indignities which he suffered, undermined his health, and when his energies of mind and body were totally worn out, he was induced on the 11th September 1415, to recant the heresies with which he was charged. A less rigorous imprisonment was the only reward of this apostacy. After languishing in the darkness of his dungeon for several months longer, he was once more brought before the council on the 26th May 1416. Triumphing over all his weaknesses he defended himself with a boldness, vehement energy, and learning, that filled even his accusers with wonder and admiration. He solemnly retracted his recantation: "Of all the sins," he said, "that I have committed since my youth, none weigh so heavily on my mind and cause me such poignant remorse, as that which I committed in this fatal place, when I approved of the iniquitous sentence rendered against Wycliffe and against the holy martyr John Huss, my master and friend." His defence had inclined his judges to mercy; but with these words he sealed his own death-warrant. Four days later (May 30th, 1416) he was publicly burnt at the stake, and his ashes, like those of Huss, were collected and thrown into the Rhine.

Historians, Catholic and Protestant alike, vie with each other in paying homage to the heroic courage and apostolic resignation with which Jerome met his doom. Posterity has confirmed their verdict, and reveres him as a martyr to the truth, who, unweared in life, and noble in death, has acquired an immortal renown for his share in the Reformation. In many respects far beyond his age, Jerome was identified with it in the weaknesses of his character. With a mind more variously endowed than Huss, he wanted the moral weight which gave his master so great an ascendancy over the minds of men. Bold, even to rashness, his courage was shown rather in bursts of furious vehemence than in the equable tenor of his life, and more than once failed him in critical moments. In this weakness he only reflected the turbulent and unruly spirit of the age he lived in, and gave a colour to the charge of his adversaries, that he always allowed his prejudices and passions to outrun his better judgment. This, without being absolutely true, is so to some extent. To no one was it more disastrous than to Jerome himself. For it not only led him to the stake, but it also undid much of the effect which might have been looked for from his labours and his martyrdom.