St. Jerome.' By Father Largent. Translated by Hester Daven- port.
(Duckworth and Co. 3s.)—Father Largent has made avery interesting book out of the very ample material which the life of St. Jerome supplies. And he has had the advantage of being precluded by the nature of his subject from the common fault of the biographer. No one can profess an indiscriminate admiration for St. Jerome. We wonder, indeed, what the advocates diaboli was about when he was canonised, though it is true that, for all his faults, he did better service to the Church than hundreds of more blameless saints. Father Largent is not, however, always quite candid in his apologies. St. Jerome did depreciate matrimony in the fervour of his ascetic zeal. It was not only the greater freedom to serve God which he extolled, nor when he spoke of uteri tumentes et infantium vagitue did he take the same view of the " trouble in the flesh " which occurred to St. Paul. The feminine faults and vices which he lashed were not put in the way of amendment by his savage censorship. In another matter our author could hardly help himself, but it is really too barefaced to say that the contention between St. Paul and St. Peter at Antioch ‘• touched only upon a question of conduct," and that both preserved their infallibility. St. Peter's error, as St. Paul regarded it, was the same that he denounced in the Judaising perverters of the Galatian Churches, and which seemed to him "another Gospel." The most notable sentence in the whole volume we find in Father Tyrrell's preface : " Were he
[St. Jerome] among ne now would he regard his past work as final and irrevocable, and view subsequent discoveries with peevish suspicion?"
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