SOURCE: An excerpt from History of Latin Christianity; Including That of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V, Vol. 1, Sheldon and Company, 1860, pp. 117-18.

In this excerpt, Milman briefly discusses the importance of the Vulgate to incorporating Eastern religious thought into the development of Christianity in the West.

… [Of both] the extension of monasticism, and the promulgation of the Vulgate Bible, Jerome was the author; of the former principally, of the latter exclusively. This was his great and indefeasible title to the appellation of a Father of the Latin Church. Whatever it may owe to the older and fragmentary versions of the sacred writings, Jerome's Bible is a wonderful work, still more as achieved by one man, and that a Western Christian, even with all the advantage of study and of residence in the East. It almost created a new language. The inflexible Latin became pliant and...