We must bear in mind too that even the MSS. which seem to represent most consistently one type of text, show here and there strange vacillations; _e_, African throughout as it seems at first sight, must have been copied from an ordinary European MS. in the last few chapters of St. Luke; the parent MS. of _r_ obviously did not contain the _pericope de adultera_, for that passage has been supplied in a Vulgate text; and other instances might be added. (2) Jerome’s revised Latin Version, commonly called the Vulgate. The extensive variations then existing between different copies of the Old Latin version, and the obvious corruptions which had crept into some of them, prompted Damasus, Bishop of Rome, in A.D. 382, to commit the important task of a formal revision of the New, and probably of the Old Testament, to Jerome, a presbyter born at Stridon on the confines of Dalmatia and Pannonia, probably a little earlier than A.D. 345. He had just returned to Rome, where he had been educated, from his hermitage in Bethlehem, and in the early ripeness of his scholarship undertook a work for which he was specially qualified, and whose delicate nature he well understood(62). Whatever prudence and moderation could do in this case to remove objections or relieve the scruples of the simple, were not neglected by Jerome, who not only made as few changes as possible in the Old Latin when correcting its text by the help of “ancient” Greek manuscripts(63), but left untouched many words and forms of expression, and not a few grammatical irregularities, which in a new translation (as his own subsequent version of the Hebrew Scriptures makes clear) he would most certainly have avoided. The four Gospels, as they stand in the traditional Greek order without Western variation, revised but not re-translated on this wise principle, appeared in A.D. 384, accompanied with his celebrated Preface to Damasus (“summus sacerdos”), who died that same year. Notwithstanding his other literary engagements, it is probable enough that his recension of the whole New Testament for public use was completed A.D. 385, though the proof alleged by Mill (N. T., Proleg., § 862), and by others after his example, hardly meets the case. In the next year (A.D. 386), in his Commentary on Galat., Ephes., Titus, and Philem., he indulges in more freedom of alteration as a translator than he had previously deemed advisable; while his new version of the Old Testament from the Hebrew (completed about A.D. 405) is not founded at all on the Old Latin, which was made from the Greek Septuagint; the Psalter excepted, which he executed at Rome at the same date, and in the same spirit, as the Gospels. The boldness of his attempt in regard to the Old Testament is that portion of his labours which _alone_ Augustine disapproved(64) (August, ad Hieron. Ep. x. tom. ii. p. 18, Lugd. 1586, A.D. 403), and indeed it was never received entire by the Western Church, which long