what these singular and fantastic Christians of the past really said, and assuredly did.
34. Jerome's life by no means "began as a monk of Palestine." Dean Milman has not explained to us how any man's could; but Jerome's childhood, at any rate, was extremely other than recluse, or precociously religious. He was born of rich parents living on their own estate, the name of his native town in North Illyria, Stridon, perhaps now softened into Strigi, near Aquileia. In Venetian climate, at all events, and in sight of Alps and sea. He had a brother and sister, a kind grandfather, and a disagreeable private tutor, and was a youth still studying grammar at Julian's death in 363.
35. A youth of eighteen, and well begun in all institutes of the classic schools; but, so far from being a monk, not yet a Christian;—nor at all disposed towards the severer offices even of Roman life! or contemplating with aversion the splendours, either worldly or sacred, which shone on him in the college days spent in its Capital city.
neighbours which commonplace writers commit, in the mere rounding and enforcing of their shallow sentences. "Jerome admits, indeed, with specious but doubtful humility, the inferiority of the unordained monk to the ordained priest," says Dean Milman in his eleventh chapter, following up his gratuitous doubt of Jerome's humility with no less gratuitous asseveration of the ambition of his opponents. " The clergy, no doubt, had the sagacity to foresee the dangerous rival as to influence and authority, which was rising up in Christian society."
