and wonders contained in it, will be discussed at a later point in
this book. Meanwhile there is a stranger story still connected with
the life of St. Antony. It professes to have been told by him
himself to his monks; and whatever groundwork of fact there may be
in it is doubtless his. The form in which we have it was given it
by the famous St. Jerome, who sends the tale as a letter to Asella,
one of the many noble Roman ladies whom he persuaded to embrace the
monastic life. The style is as well worth preserving as the matter.
Its ruggedness and awkwardness, its ambition and affectation,
contrasted with the graceful simplicity of Athanasius's "Life of
Antony," mark well the difference between the cultivated Greek and
the ungraceful and half-barbarous Roman of the later Empire. I
have, therefore, given it as literally as possible, that readers may
judge for themselves how some of the Great Fathers of the fifth
century wrote, and what they believed.



THE LIFE OF SAINT PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT



BY THE DIVINE HIERONYMUS THE PRIEST. (ST. JEROME.)


PROLOGUE


Many have often doubted by which of the monks the desert was first
inhabited. For some, looking for the beginnings of Monachism in