The impetuosity and vigour that made him a born leader he also employed to express his intolerance of those who disagreed with him. When some Christians in Milan burned a Jewish synagogue and the Emperor Theodosius ordered them to rebuild it, St. Ambrose advised them not to do so. ‘I myself,’ he said, ‘would have burned the synagogue.... What has been done is but a trifling retaliation for acts of plunder and destruction committed by Jews and heretics against the Catholics.’ This was not the spirit of the Founder of Christianity: it was too often the spirit of the mediaeval Church. A man of even greater influence than St. Ambrose of Milan was St. Jerome, a monk of the fifth century, who is chiefly remembered to-day because of his Latin translation of the Bible, ‘the Vulgate’ as it is called, that is still the recognized edition of the Roman Catholic Church. St. Jerome was born in Italy, but in his extreme asceticism he followed the practices of the Eastern rather than the Western Church. As a youth he had led a wild life, but, suddenly repenting, he disappeared to live as a hermit in the desert, starving and mortifying himself. So strongly did he believe that this was the only road to Heaven that when he went to Rome he preached continually in favour of celibacy, urging men and women not to marry, as if marriage had been a sin. He was afraid that if they became happy and contented in their home life they would forget God. Many of the leading families, and especially their women, came under St. Jerome’s influence, but such exaggerated views could never be really popular and, instead of being chosen Bishop of Rome as he had expected, he was forced, by the many enemies he had aroused, to leave the town, and returned once more to the desert. Of his sincerity there can be little doubt, but his outlook on life was warped because, like so many good and earnest contemporary Christians, he believed that human nature and this earth were entirely bad and that only by the suppression of any enjoyment in them could the soul obtain salvation. Several centuries were to pass before St. Francis of Assisi taught his fellow men the beauty and value of what is human. * * * * * [Sidenote: Foundation of Constantinople] Constantinople (the _Polis_ or city of Constantine) had been a Greek colony under the name of Byzantium long before Rome existed. Built on the headland of the Golden Horn, its walls were lapped by an inland sea whose depth and smoothness made a splendid harbour from the rougher waters of the Mediterranean. Almost impregnable in its fortifications, it frowned on Asia across the narrow straits of the Hellespont and completely commanded the entrance to the Black Sea, with its rich ports, markets then as now for the corn and grain of southern Russia.