About fifty miles southeast from Antioch was a barren waste of nature but a paradise for monks—­the Desert of Chalcis.  On its western border were several monasteries.  All about for miles, the dreary solitudes were peopled with shaggy hermits.  They saw visions and dreamed dreams in caves infested by serpents and wild beasts.  They lay upon the sands, scorched in summer by the blazing sun, and chilled in winter by the winds that blew from snowcapped mountains.  For five years, Jerome dwelt among these demon-fighting recluses.  Clad in sackcloth stained by penitential tears, he toiled for his daily bread, and struggled against visions of Roman dancing girls.  He was a most industrious reader of books and a great lover of debate.  Monks from far and near visited him, and together they discussed questions of theology and philosophy.

But we may not follow this varied and eventful life in all its details.  After a year or two spent at Constantinople, and three years at Rome, he returned to the East, visiting the hermits of Egypt on his way, and finally settled at Bethlehem.  His fame soon drew around him a great company of monks.  These he organized into monasteries.  He built a hospital, and established an inn for travelers.  Lacking the necessary funds to carry out his projects, he dispatched his brother to the West with instructions to sell what was left of his property, and the proceeds of this sale he devoted to the cause.  While in Bethlehem he wrote defences of orthodoxy, eulogies of the dead, lives of saints and commentaries on the Bible.  He also completed his translation of the Scriptures, and wrote numerous letters to persons dwelling in various parts of the empire.

Jerome rendered great service to monasticism by his literary labors.  He invested the dullest of lives with a halo of glory; under the magic touch of his rhetoric the wilderness became a gladsome place and the desert blossomed as the rose.  His glowing language transfigured the pale face and sunken eyes of the starved hermit into features positively beautiful, while the rags that hung loosely upon his emaciated frame became garments of lustrous white.  “Oh, that I could behold the desert,” he cries, “lovelier than any city!  Oh, that I could see those lonely spots made into a paradise by the saints that throng them!” Without detracting from the bitterness of the prospect, he glorifies the courage that can face the horrors of the desert, and the heart that can rejoice midst the solitude of the seas.  Hear him describe the home of Bonosus, a hermit on an isle in the Adriatic: 

“Bonosus, your friend, is now climbing the ladder foreshown in Jacob’s dream.  He is bearing his cross, neither taking thought for the morrow, nor looking back at what he has left.  Here you have a youth, educated with us in the refining accomplishments of the world, with abundance of wealth and in rank inferior to none of his associates; yet he forsakes his mother, his sister, and his dearly loved brother,