[In the essay that follows, Hughes contends that Jerome's writings express the unique character of medieval Christianity.]

Dean Fremantle in his "Prolegomena to Jerome" says (p. xxxiii.) truly enough:

His writings contain the whole spirit of the Church of the Middle Ages, its Monasticism, its contrast of sacred things with profane, its credulity and superstition, its value for relics, its subjection to hierarchical authority, its dread of heresy, its passion for pilgrimages.

But after all it is the Vulgate which was his crowning achievement and his greatest contribution to the Church of Christ. In it his varied gifts are seen to most advantage, for, as a translator of the Bible, he shows a capacity, a caution, a patience, an independence of judgment, a diligence and a critical acumen which he nowhere else displays. For evidence of some of these qualities the famous "Prologus Galeatus" is sufficient where he defies the "mad dogs who bark and rave" at his work; so also is his firm and clear discrimination between the Old Testament and the Apocrypha and his unflinching resolve in spite of the Council of Nicaea, to class the book of Judith in the latter. The Vulgate is indeed his masterpiece, between which and his epistles there is a great gulf fixed as regards literary and spiritual worth. It is impossible to read even a few pages of his correspondence without realising its highly rhetorical character and that the writer is allowing to run riot that forensic training which he, like so many other fathers of the Church, had received.

An artist in words must be necessarily scrutinised with strictness and suspicion, and his sonorous sentences must be critically sifted and compared with other trust-worthy testimony before they can be accepted at their face value. Jerome's love of literary effect, his brusque Johnsonian dogmatism, his unscrupulous invective (e.g. against Vigilantius or Onasus of Segeste (xl. 3)), his credulity and superstition (e.g. 1 "de muliere septies percussa"), all impress the reader with the need of caution and reserve. He has the nervous sensitiveness and irritability of the scholar-recluse, and the monk's tendency to flights of imagination.

There can be little doubt, e.g., that his account of the fall of Rome is much exaggerated: "Urbs inclyta et Romani imperii caput uno hausta est incendio … in cineres ac favillas sacrae quondam ecclesiae conciderunt" (exxviii. 4); whereas we know from Orosius' History vii. and other sources, that Alaric refrained from destroying churches. As Sir S. Dill conjectures (p. 307): "The warm imagination and vehement rhetoric of St. Jerome have probably deepened the colours of the tragic tales of massacre and sacrilege which reached him." Yet he has bequeathed, to later generations, portraits of contemporary life both pagan and Christian, but especially Christian, which no student of the period can presume to ignore. His vivid pictures of the fashionable clerical fop with his lusts and his legacy hunts, of the real and nominal monks and virgins, are evidently drawn from life; his description of the learned ladies on the Aventine immortalises a unique chapter in the history of the Church, while his sketches of the ascetic movement are essential to any record of the fourth and fifth centuries. Jerome, in fact, shows in their beginnings three institutions on which the Christianity of the Middle Ages took its stand, viz. the Vulgate, the Monastery, the Papacy, a triumvirate which reigned and ruled for more than a millennium; he shows, too, a Church which, outwardly victorious over heathenism and heresy, was still sowing the seeds of internal corruption and needing continually to pray: "In all time of our wealth, good Lord deliver us."