violent
passions, his insolent treatment of his adversaries, his utter want of
self-command, his almost unrivalled faculty of awakening hatred, to be
attributed to the sagacious and intuitive wisdom of Rome?" ('History
of Latin Christianity,' Book I., chap. ii.)

33. You may observe, as an almost unexceptional character in the
"sagacious wisdom" of the Protestant clerical mind, that it
instinctively assumes the desire of power and place not only to be
universal in Priesthood, but to be always _purely selfish_ in the ground
of it. The idea that power might possibly be desired for the sake of its
benevolent use, so far as I remember, does not once occur in the pages
of any ecclesiastical historian of recent date. In our own reading of
past ages we will, with the reader's permission, very calmly put out of
court all accounts of "hopes cherished in secret"; and pay very small
attention to the reasons for mediaeval conduct which appear logical to
the rationalist, and probable to the politician.[33] We concern
ourselves only with what these singular and fantastic Christians of the
past really said, and assuredly did.

[Footnote 33: The habit of assuming, for the conduct of men of sense
and feeling, motives intelligible to the foolish, and probable to the
base, gains upon every vulgar historian, partly in the ease of it,
partly in the pride; and it is horrible to contemplate the quantity of
false witness against their neighbours which commonplace writers
commit, in the mere rounding and enforcing of their shallow sentences.
"Jerome admits, indeed, with _specious but doubtful humility_, the
inferiority of the unordained monk to the ordained priest," says Dean
Milman in his eleventh chapter, following up his gratuitous doubt of
Jerome's humility with no less gratuitous asseveration of the ambition
of his opponents. "The clergy, _no doubt_, had the sagacity to foresee
the _dangerous_ rival as to influence and authority, which was rising
up in Christian society."]

34. Jerome's life by no means "began as a monk of Palestine." Dean
Milman has not explained to us how any man's could; but Jerome's
childhood, at any rate, was extremely other than recluse, or
precociously religious. He was born of rich parents living on their
own estate, the name of his native town in North Illyria, Stridon,
perhaps now softened into Strigi, near Aquileia. In Venetian climate,
at all events, and in sight of Alps and sea. He had a brother and
sister