When you are giving alms, let God alone see you. When you are fasting, keep a cheerful face. Let your dress be neither elegant nor slovenly, and let it not be noticeable by any strangeness that might attract the notice of passers-by and make people point their fingers at you. If a brother dies or the body of a beloved sister has to be carried to burial, take care that you do not attend such funerals too often, or you may die yourself.
Do not try to seem very devout nor more humble than is necessary. It is possible to seek glory by avoiding it. Many men who screen from view their poverty, charity, and fasting, reveal their desire for admiration by the very fact that they spurn it and, strangely enough, seek praise while avoiding it. From the other perturbations of the mind, from exultation, despondency, hope and fear I find many free; but desire for praise is a fault which few escape, and that man is best whose character, like a fair skin, is disfigured by the fewest blemishes.
Jerome, in a letter to Eustochium, dated AD 384. (Letter XXII, Section 27) Jerome (345-420) was one of the early church fathers, and is best known for having made the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible. Does the last sentence of the first paragraph demonstrate that Jerome was superstitious?
From: Select Letters of St. Jerome, translated from the Latin and edited by F. A. Wright; the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 115.
