36. Here, Jerome must have heard of what by all the Christian sects was held the judgment of God, between them and their chief enemy--the death of the Emperor Julian. But I have no means of tracing, and will not conjecture, the course of his own thoughts, until the tenor of all his life was changed at his baptism. The candour which lies at the basis of his character has given us one sentence of his own, respecting that change, which is worth some volumes of ordinary confessions. "I left, not only parents and kindred, but _the accustomed luxuries of delicate life_." The words throw full light on what, to our less courageous temper, seems the exaggerated reading by the early converts of Christ's words to them--"He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me." We are content to leave, for much lower interests, either father or mother, and do not see the necessity of any farther sacrifice: we should know more of ourselves and of Christianity if we oftener sustained what St. Jerome found the more searching trial. I find scattered indications of contempt among his biographers, because he could not resign one indulgence--that of scholarship; and the usual sneers at monkish ignorance and indolence are in his case transferred to the weakness of a pilgrim who carried his library in his wallet. It is a singular question (putting, as it is the modern fashion to do, the idea of Providence wholly aside), whether, but for the literary enthusiasm, which was partly a weakness, of this old man's character, the Bible would ever have become the library of Europe. 37. For that, observe, is the real meaning, in its first power, of the word _Bible_. Not book, merely; but 'Bibliotheca,' Treasury of Books: and it is, I repeat, a singular question, how far, if Jerome, at the very moment when Rome, his tutress, ceased from her material power, had not made her language the oracle of Hebrew prophecy, a literature of their own, and a religion unshadowed by the terrors of the Mosaic law, might have developed itself in the hearts of the Goth, the Frank, and the Saxon, under Theodoric, Clovis, and Alfred.