When parents objected to his monastic views, Jerome quoted the saying of Jesus respecting the renunciation of father and mother, and then said:  “Though thy mother with flowing hair and rent garments, should show thee the breasts which have nourished thee; though thy father should lie upon the threshold; yet depart thou, treading over thy father, and fly with dry eyes to the standard of the cross.  The love of God and the fear of hell easily rend the bonds of the household asunder.  The Holy Scripture indeed enjoins obedience, but he who loves them more than Christ loses his soul.”

Jerome vividly portrays his own spiritual conflicts.  The deserts were crowded with saintly soldiers battling against similar temptations, the nature of which is suggested by the following excerpt from Jerome’s writings:  “How often,” he says, “when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome!  I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness.  Sack-cloth disfigured my unshapely limbs and my skin from long neglect had become black as an Ethiopian’s.  Tears and groans were every day my portion; and if drowsiness chanced to overcome my struggles against it, my bare bones, which hardly held together, clashed against the ground.  Now although in my fear of hell I had consigned myself to this prison where I had no companions but scorpions and wild beasts, I often found myself amid bevies of girls.  Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears, and I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinence.  I remember how I often cried aloud all night till the break of day.  I used to dread my cell as if it knew my thoughts, and stern and angry with myself, I used to make my way alone into the desert.  Wherever I saw hollow valleys, craggy mountains, steep cliffs, there I made my oratory; there the house of correction for my unhappy flesh.  There, also, when I had shed copious tears and had strained my eyes to heaven, I sometimes felt myself among angelic hosts and sang for joy and gladness.”

No doubt these men were warring against nature.  Their yielding to the temptation to obtain spiritual dominance by self-flagellation and fasting may be criticized in the light of modern Christianity.  “Fanaticism defies nature,” says F.W.  Robertson, “Christianity refines it and respects it.  Christianity does not denaturalize, but only sanctifies and refines according to the laws of nature.  Christianity does not destroy our natural instincts, but gives them a higher and nobler direction.”  To all this I must assent, but, at the same time, I cannot but reverence that pure passion for holiness which led men, despairing of acquiring virtue in a degenerate age, to flee from the world and undergo such torments to attain their soul’s ideal.  The form, the method of their conflict was transient, the spirit and purpose eternal.  All honor to them for their magnificent and terrible struggle, which has forever exalted the spiritual ideal, and commanded men everywhere to seek first “the Kingdom of God and its righteousness.”