Hours With St Jerome

Extract

Though perhaps most people who are at all familiar with them appreciate the writings of St Augustine, comparatively few feel any attraction for those of St Jerome who, unlike St Augustine, has left us no sermons or devotional treatises, his work consisting for the most part of technical Commentaries and minute disquisitions on difficult passages of Holy Scripture.

Both Saints have left us a vast correspondence. But how their letters differ! If we except Augustine’s earlier ones, his philosophical discussions during his first days as a Christian, the remainder are for the most part the outpourings of a shepherd of souls; the same is true of his sermons which lend themselves to quotation at every turn and wherein the devout can always find food for their souls. St Jerome, too, has left us many spiritual letters. But we get the impression that such letters were not his life’s work; he writes them almost under protest as though feeling that they are stealing time from the real work to which God has called him, that of translating and commenting on the Bible.