[In this excerpt, Milman briefly discusses the importance of the Vulgate to incorporating Eastern religious thought into the development of Christianity in the West.]

… [Of both] the extension of monasticism, and the promulgation of the Vulgate Bible, Jerome was the author; of the former principally, of the latter exclusively. This was his great and indefeasible title to the appellation of a Father of the Latin Church. Whatever it may owe to the older and fragmentary versions of the sacred writings, Jerome's Bible is a wonderful work, still more as achieved by one man, and that a Western Christian, even with all the advantage of study and of residence in the East. It almost created a new language. The inflexible Latin became pliant and expansive, naturalizing foreign Eastern imagery, Eastern modes of expression and of thought, and Eastern religious notions, most uncongenial to its own genius and character; and yet retaining much of its own peculiar strength, solidity, and majesty. If the Northern, the Teutonic languages, coalesce with greater facility with the Orientalism of the Scriptures, it is the triumph of Jerome to have brought the more dissonant Latin into harmony with the Eastern tongues. The Vulgate was even more, perhaps, than the Papal power the foundation of Latin Christianity.…