But this teaching was in vain. Going on pilgrimage served too many ends, and gratified too many desires. Piety, no doubt, in greater or less degree, had always something to do with a resolve to undertake a long and painful journey. But there were other motives. The curious man, by becoming a pilgrim, was enabled to see the world; the lazy man to escape work; the adventurous man to find adventures; the credulous and imaginative man to fill his mind with stories; the vain man to gratify his vanity, and procure life-long honour at the cost of some peril and fatigue; the sincere to wipe off his sins; and all alike believed that they were doing an act meritorious in itself and pleasing in the sight of heaven.
The doctors of the Church protested, but in vain. Indeed, they often went themselves. St. Porphyry, afterwards Bishop of Gaza, was one of those who went. He had betaken himself to the Thebaid at the age of twenty, to become a hermit. There, after five years of austerities, he became seized with an irresistible desire to see Jerusalem. Afflicted with a painful disorder, and hardly able to hold himself upright, he managed to crawl across the deserts to the city; as soon as he arrived there, he sent his companion back to Thessalonica, his native place, with injunctions to sell all that he had and distribute the proceeds among the faithful. And then he laid himself down to die. Mark departed; what was his astonishment, on returning, his mission accomplished, to find his friend restored to health? Porphyry went no more to the Thebaid, probably but a dull place at best, even for a hermit, and betaking himself to a handicraft, he preached the Gospel and became a bishop. St. Jerome himself, in spite of his protests, went to Palestine, accompanied by Eusebius of Cremona. The voice of calumny had attacked Jerome in revenge for his exposure of the sins and follies of the day, and he was pleased to leave Rome. The two future saints landed at Antioch, and after seeing Jerusalem went on to Bethlehem, and thence to the Thebaid, where they solaced themselves with admiring the austerities of the self-tormentors, the hermits there. Returning thence to Bethlehem, they resolved on selling their property and forming a monastery in that town. This they accomplished by the assistance of Paula and Eudoxia, two noble ladies, mother and daughter, who followed them to Palestine, and passed their lives like Jerome himself, under a rigid rule of prayer and labour. Paula died in Bethlehem. Her daughter and Jerome, less happy, were turned out of their peaceful retreat by a band of Arabs, bribed, we are told, by the heretics in Jerusalem, who burned and pillaged the monastic houses, dispersed the monks and nuns, and drove the venerable Jerome, then past the age of seventy years, to a bed from which he never rose again.