You were idolaters under your kings; you were not faithful to one God only, until after Esdras had restored your books. Then it was that your uninterruptedly true worship began; and by an incomprehensible providence of the Supreme Being, you have been the most unfortunate of all men ever since you became the most faithful—under the kings of Syria, under the kings of Egypt, under Herod the Idumæan, under the Romans, under the Persians, under the Arabs, under the Turks—until now, that you do me the honor of writing to me, and I have the honor of answering you.
SIXTH LETTER.
Beauty of the Land of Promise.
Do not reproach me with not loving you. I love you so much that I wish you were in Hershalaïm, instead of the Turks, who ravage your country; but who, nevertheless, have built a very fine mosque on the foundations of your temple, and on the platform constructed by your Herod.
You would cultivate that miserable desert, as you cultivated it formerly; you would carry earth to the bare tops of your arid mountains; you would not have much corn, but you would have very good vines, a few palms, olive trees, and pastures.
Though Palestine does not equal Provence, though Marseilles alone is superior to all Judæa, which had not one sea-port; though the town of Aix is incomparably better situated than Jerusalem, you might nevertheless make of your territory almost as much as the Provencals have made of theirs. You might execute, to your hearts' content, your own detestable psalmody in your own detestable jargon.
It is true, that you would have no horses; for there are not, nor have there ever been, about Hershalaïm, any but asses. You would often be in want of wheat, but you would obtain it from Egypt or Syria.
You might convey merchandise to Damascus and to Said on your asses—or indeed on camels—which you never knew anything of in the time of your Melchim, and which would be a great assistance to you. In short, assiduous toil, to which man is born, would fertilize this land, which the lords of Constantinople and Asia Minor neglect.
This promised land of yours is very bad. Are you acquainted with St. Jerome? He was a Christian priest, one of those men whose books you do not read. However, he lived a long time in your country; he was a very learned person—not indeed slow to anger, for when contradicted he was prodigal of abuse—but knowing your language better than you do, for he was a good grammarian. Study was his ruling passion; anger was only second to it. He had turned priest, together with his friend Vincent, on condition that they should never say mass nor vespers, lest they should be too much interrupted in their studies; for being directors of women and girls, had they been moreover obliged to labor in the priestly office, they would not have had two hours in the day left for Greek, Chaldee, and the Jewish idiom. At last, in order to have more leisure, Jerome retired altogether, to live among the Jews at Bethlehem, as Huet, bishop of Avranches, retired to the Jesuits, at the house of the professed, Rue St. Antoine, at Paris.
Jerome did, it is true, embroil himself with the bishop of Jerusalem, named John, with the celebrated priest Rufinus, and with several of his friends; for, as I have already said, Jerome was full of choler and self-love, and St. Augustine charges him with levity and fickleness: but he was not the less holy, he was not the less learned, nor is his testimony the less to be received, concerning the nature of the wretched country in which his ardor for study and his melancholy confined him.