• St. Jerome, the greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church, and author of the translation of the Scriptures known, as the Vulgate , was born of wealthy parents in Dalmatia, in 342. He studied at Rome under the grammarian Donatus, and became a lawyer in that city. At the age of thirty he visited the Holy Land, and, withdrawing from the world, became an anchorite in the desert of Chalcida, on the borders of Arabia. Here he underwent the bodily privations and temptations, and enjoyed the spiritual triumphs, of the hermit’s life. He was “haunted by demons, and consoled by voices and visions from heaven.” In one of his letters, cited by Butler, Lives of the Saints , IX 362, he writes:⁠— “In the remotest part of a wild and sharp desert, which, being burnt up with the heats of the scorching sun, strikes with horror and terror even the monks that inhabit it, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and assemblies of Rome. I loved solitude, that in the bitterness of my soul I might more freely bewail my miseries, and call upon my Saviour. My hideous emaciated limbs were covered with sackcloth: my skin was parched dry and black, and my flesh was almost wasted away.