Jerome was born at Stridon, near the town of Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic, in the year 346, but though his father and mother were Christians, they did not have him baptised till he was twenty years old. Eusebius and his wife had quite enough money to make them comfortable, though they were not considered very rich, and Jerome had plenty of slaves to do his bidding. He had besides, what was much more important to him, a play-fellow called Bonosus, with whom he was brought up, and who went with him to Rome, when the two boys were about seventeen. All through his life Jerome showed strong affections, and gained many friends, and it was a bitter grief to him when he lost any of them, especially as it was often his own fault. Unluckily he had a hot temper and a quick tongue, which led to his saying things he did not mean, and thus making enemies; but a word of regret from anyone who, he thought, had done him an injury softened his heart at once, and he never bore malice. And in spite of his being rather easily offended, he was so lively and amusing, so prompt to notice anything that was odd, and so clever in telling it, that his company was always welcome wherever he went.

Such he was as a boy, and such he was to a great extent as an old man.

From his earliest childhood Jerome was very fond of reading, though he liked to choose his own books, and frequently neglected the lessons set him by his tutors for talk with the slaves, or play with Bonosus. But perhaps this did not do him as much harm as his teachers thought, for all kinds of learned men used to meet at the house of his father Eusebius, and Jerome picked up a great deal from them without knowing it; so that when he and Bonosus entered the Grammar School at Rome at the age of seventeen, Jerome was declared, much to the surprise of himself and Bonosus, to be quite as advanced as the rest.

For three years he stayed in Rome, living in the same house as his friend, but though he began well, very soon the reports of his conduct, sent home by the man who had charge of the foreign students and was bound to watch over their behaviour, were not so good as they had been at first. He went too much to theatres, said the inspector, and was too often seen at the chariot races. In fact he was carried away by the excitements and pleasures of a great city and of being, to a certain degree, his own master. But idle though he certainly was, continued the inspector, he was invariably to be seen at the law courts, listening to any celebrated case that was going on, following the pleaders eagerly with his eyes, and trying to make out for himself which were the weak points.

After a while matters improved, and the inspector's letters became more cheerful. Jerome had seemingly grown accustomed to the amusements of Rome, and went less and less to the theatres. Besides, he was older now, and had discovered that the companions he had thought so clever in the beginning were really only silly and vulgar, and their jokes tired and annoyed him. He was in this frame of mind when chance threw him into the society of a very different set of young men, who considered the pleasures of this world to be snares of the Evil One; and his mother rejoiced, when he wrote home to Stridon, that most of his Sundays were spent in exploring with his newly-found companions the hidden passages and tombs cut out of the solid rock underneath Rome, where the Christian martyrs were buried.

After this he received baptism, while Liberius was pope.

By the Roman law, no foreigner was allowed to remain as a student in Rome after his twentieth birthday, and Jerome and Bonosus wended their way back to Aquileia, Jerome carrying with him the precious library he had already begun to collect, and from which he never parted. Of course the books were very different from ours, and did not take up so much room. They were copies in ink from other manuscripts, which took a long time to make, and were sometimes very costly to buy, and in those days, and for eleven hundred years after, men earned their living by copying, as they now do by printing.

But the two young men were too restless to settle down quietly in Stridon. At least Jerome was too restless, and Bonosus seems usually to have followed his lead. Therefore together they set out for Gaul, where they became acquainted with Rufinus, the man whom Jerome loved with devotion and whose after-treatment caused him such deep sorrow. It was the influence of Rufinus that fixed his mind on the study of the Scriptures, which henceforward was the work of his life.

When after their journey through Gaul, which lasted several months, the two travellers returned to Stridon they found that many changes had taken place during their absence. In Aquileia a society had been formed especially to study the Scriptures, the members giving up all kinds of pleasures, and seeking only the good of their souls. Very soon their fame became noised abroad, and others arrived to join them, and among these were the noble Roman lady Melania, and, to the intense joy of Jerome, his friend Rufinus. As the members of the society cared about the same things and most of them had been carefully educated, their constant meetings were a great pleasure to them; and with the arrival of Evagrius from Antioch shortly after, and his lectures on the holy places in Palestine, a fresh interest was awakened. Unhappily something happened—what we do not know—to put an end to these pleasant gatherings, and the friends parted and went different ways. Bonosus sailed across the Adriatic to a little island, where he became a hermit; Melania, Rufinus, and some of the others went to the East; and Jerome determined to follow Evagrius to Antioch, travelling through Greece and Asia Minor. He left behind him his parents and a small brother and sister, but he carried with him his beloved books, from which he never parted. At Antioch he was ordained priest, though it seems doubtful whether he ever performed even a single service, and after resting for a few months in the groves on the banks of the Orontes, he went alone into the desert that stretches between the mountains of Lebanon and the river Euphrates. This was a very foolish step for him to take, for his health was always bad, and the fatigues of his journey from Italy had brought on a severe illness from which he had hardly recovered. However, he remained in the desert for nearly five years, seeing none that were not hermits like himself, for the country was dotted over with their cells, and scorpions and wild beasts were, as he says himself, his daily companions.

Still it was fortunately not in Jerome's nature to sit idle and spend his time in trying to think about his religion, which often ends in really thinking of nothing at all. From morning till night he was working at something or other: either tending a little garden, where with great trouble he had managed to grow a few vegetables in the dry soil, or weaving baskets from the rushes that grew on the banks of a small stream some distance off, to sell to travelling merchants, or writing letters to his friends, or learning Hebrew from a converted Jew who came over from a monastery to teach him.

It was probably with the help of this man that he was able to get the manuscript of St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, which he first copied for himself, and then translated into Greek and into Latin, which was of course his own language.

Quarrels with the hermits about the doctrines and discipline of the Church drove Jerome from the desert, first to Antioch, next to Constantinople, and then to Rome. Here he found himself much sought after, for his fame for learning had gone before him, and some even expected him to be chosen pope on the death of Damasus. But ambition was not one of Jerome's faults. The magnificence of Rome, which as a boy had proved so attractive to him, now filled him with disgust, and he longed to get away into solitude, and give himself up to his books.

In spite of all the business thrust on him by the pope, and the disputes in which he eagerly took part, he contrived to find some time for his own special work, and devoted himself to making a Latin version of the translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, known as the Septuagint. This name, meaning Seventy, was derived from the fact that seventy men were engaged in it, and it had been done by some Jews about 500 years before, for the benefit of their fellow-countrymen who were living in Egypt, under the rule of the Greek kings. Jerome's translation was thought so good that it was universally used in the churches for twelve hundred years.

Amongst the friends made by Jerome in Rome, at this time, were a number of noble ladies who, like himself, were interested in the study of the Bible, and listened eagerly to all he could tell them about it. Greek they had long ago been taught, and now they learned Hebrew, the better to understand the history of their religion. Jerome always thought highly of women, for the few he knew well were clever as well as good; and on one occasion, when he was reproached by his enemies with dedicating to ladies some of his books, he remarked in scorn, as if women were not better judges than most men.

Of all the little group of ladies who met in the house on the Aventine hill, perhaps the most remarkable was the widowed Paula, who sprang from the family of the Scipios, one of the noblest in Rome. She had three daughters and a large number of friends, all of whom had withdrawn themselves from the world, and who passed their time in study and in looking after the poor. Fired with the wish to see the places of which the Bible had told her so much, Paula took her second daughter with her and followed Jerome to Antioch when, in 385, he quitted Rome, leaving the youngest girl and a little boy behind her. It was winter when they arrived, and Paula at once began to make plans for her journey through Palestine. It was in vain that Jerome urged on her the difficulties and dangers which would beset her, and entreated her to wait for the spring. Paula would listen to nothing, and all Jerome could do was to persuade her to take the easier road by the coast, instead of the one over the mountains of Lebanon.

By this time some of the other ladies had landed from Rome, and were ready to join the travellers. Most of them were carried in litters, but Paula preferred riding one of the beautiful tall donkeys of which we read so often in the Bible, and insisted on stopping at every place that had been the scene of some great event in the days of long ago—every place, that is, which was Christian, for no heathen legends had any charms for her whatever they may have had for Jerome, with his thirst for knowledge of all sorts.

All along this route which had already been trodden by so many pilgrims, he was constantly at hand, to tell them everything that had happened there. At Mount Carmel, Zarepta, and Joppa, the caravan halted in turn; and at last arrived at the goal, Jerusalem itself, hardly to be recognised under its Roman name of Ælia Capitolina. Here the governor or pro-consul received the noble Paula with a guard of honour, and wished her and the rest of the ladies to take up their abode in his palace. But it seemed to Paula unfitting to live in splendour in the city where her Lord had been scourged and crucified, and she begged the pro-consul to find a humble lodging for herself and her friends.

After visiting the holy places in Jerusalem itself, and those near it, whose story they knew so well—Bethhoron, where Joshua fought his great battle and the sun stood still; Bethel, where Jacob slept and dreamed of the angels going up and down the ladder; Mamre, the burial-place of Abraham and Sarah; Bethany, the home of Lazarus; and above all, Bethlehem—they set out for Egypt, happy to think that they were treading in the steps of the two Josephs who had gone that road in the space of seventeen hundred years. Crossing the Nile by the numerous branches into which the river spreads out towards its mouth, they paused for three days at Alexandria, where Jerome was able to see the famous library and to talk with some of the celebrated teachers and orators who lived in Alexander the Great's city. From Alexandria they journeyed to the district known as Nitria, at that date filled with monasteries and also with scattered hermits. Now the ladies could indulge themselves in mortifying their bodies to their hearts content. They lay upon hard beds in a long room, and ate—as seldom as possible—the coarse food which was the monks' fare. Indeed, so much did they admire this mode of living that they seriously thought of remaining in Nitria for ever.

It was during this visit to Nitria that the lady Melania had a very unpleasant adventure. Tired of being carried in a litter or of riding on a camel, she wandered away one evening from the encampment towards a small lake covered with the blossoms of the lotus. She was fond of flowers, and here was one quite new to her. Hastening down hill to the edge of the sunken lake, she was just about to stoop and pick the nearest bud, when a loud cry made her stop and look round. To her surprise she beheld a man climbing down a rock, waving his arms wildly. She hesitated, and instinctively drew back; then her eyes fell upon a great scaly creature with a soft yellow throat and long teeth, which had stolen towards her from its lair in the reeds. Fascinated with terror, she watched it approach, and it would certainly have seized her leg in its jaws and drawn her into the water had it not been for Macarius. Even his shouts did not make the crocodile give up its prey, but it continued to move over the ground with astonishing swiftness, till its advance was checked by a stunning blow from an iron bar held by the hermit, who by this time had reached the frightened woman.

But the desert of Nitria held other dangers besides the prospect of being eaten by crocodiles, or of being taken captive by a tribe of Bedouins. The ground was in many parts covered with sharp stones which pierced the hoofs of the horses and the sandals of the guides, while there was always the risk of sticking in the marshes of half-dried lakes or of falling a victim to low fever from the poisonous vapours. However, all these perils were braved successfully, and in the end the pilgrims bade farewell to their Egyptian friends and sailed from Alexandria to the old Philistine port of Gaza, for ever bound up with the memory of Samson.