CHAPTER VII.

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.

GREGORY could not possibly be mistaken in looking upon this incident as a providential direction to him; and he accordingly determined, from that day forward, to give neither " sleep to his eyes, nor slumber to his eyelids," till he had made his words good by preaching the Gospel, or causing it to be preached, in Pagan England. Full of this purpose, he repaired to the feet of Pope Benedict I., and implored that a mission to England might be forthwith set on foot.' When no one seemed ready to undertake it, Gregory himself volunteered to go, should the holy Father see fit to appoint him. No sooner was it rumoured throughout Rome, that Gregory had surrendered himself to the Pope for this foreign service, than multitudes, both of clergy and laity, came forward to implore that his valuable presence might be preserved to them. However, after a time, the entreaties of Gregory prevailed against the voice of the people; the Pope reluctantly gave his consent, and dismissed the monk with a special prayer for the prosperity of his undertaking.

1 This chronology is adopted from Paul the Deacon, who is followed by William of Malmesbury and Mr. Alban Butler. Cressy puts the meeting of St. Gregory with the English slaves after his return from Constantinople, and in the reign of Pelagius II. John the Deacon, the other ancient biographer of St. Gregory, omits the whole story. In illustration of it, see St. Greg. Ep. lib. vi. c. 7. Malmesbury de Reg. lib. 1. c. 3. Gerald. Camb. in Hebr. exp. lib. 1. c. 18. Ina, king of the West Saxons, made a law against this hateful commerce.

Gregory then set out, with some brethren of the Monastery, but in the strictest possible privacy. The fact of his departure, however, by some means got abroad, and all Rome was speedily in commotion. The populace, with whom Gregory was an especial favourite, shared the consternation of his friends at his sudden disappearance, and, having met in an immense body, agreed to separate into three parties, so as to waylay the Pope on his progress to St. Peter's. When his Holiness appeared, the vehemence of the multitude exceeded all bounds. Forgetting every customary form of respect, the people rushed towards him in a body, and pressed him with words such as these:-" You have displeased St. Peter. You have ruined Rome. Why did you let Gregory go?" The Pope, it seems, had been, from the first, exceedingly unwilling to grant Gregory's prayer; and this unanimous expression of public opinion furnished him with a pretext for revoking his consent. Messengers were accordingly despatched to recal Gregory. The zealous little troop of missionaries had proceeded three days' journey on their way, and happened to be resting themselves in a field, Gregory, with a book in his hand, and his companions sitting or lying still around him. It is said that, while they were thus reposing, a locust had perched upon Gregory's book, and suggested to his active fancy the idea of some check to the mission. Accordingly, calling to his companions, he proposed to them to start at once; when, on a sudden, the messengers of the Pope came up, and Gregory was reluctantly compelled to retrace his steps, and, on his arrival at Rome, once more took up his abode in St. Andrew's Monastery.

2" Locusta, quasi loco sta."

This abrupt, and, for all that appeared, final, termination to his hopes must have been a grievous disappointment to him; but he had the comfort of knowing that he had done his best, made no false step, and acted from first to last in deference to authority. And he had been long enough a monk to find more pleasure in sacrificing his own will at the command of a superior, than in pursuing fond schemes of his own even in lines along which God's blessing might have seemed likely to go with him. For he knew that nothing short of a voice from Heaven can dispense with the obligation of implicit obedience to the clear voice of authority in matters not plainly sinful. Behold Gregory, then, with wishes crossed and hopes frustrated; from the leader in a glorious enterprise, become once more the pupil in a school of discipline; recalled from the pursuit of daring aims, and the indulgence of transporting visions, to the exercises of penance and the even routine of monastic life.

Not long after his return, Gregory was consecrated one of the seven deacons, whose office it was to assist the Pope. The duties of this ministry he discharged, says one of his biographers, with almost angelical diligence and fidelity. He was next sent by Pope Pelagius II., the successor of Benedict, in the capacity of Nuncio, to Constantinople, where, for several years, he represented the Apostolic See at the court of the pious emperor Theodosius. During his stay at Constantinople, where he was compelled to live more in the world than suited his tastes and habits, he was very careful not to break in upon those self-denying courses through which alone he could be rendered proof against the dangers of his new position. He even redeemed time enough from his public avocations, to write, at the

suggestion of Leander, Bishop of Seville, who happened to be then at Constantinople, his "Morals," or Commentary on the Book of Job; a work which St. Thomas Aquinas is said to have highly prized as a repository of the soundest principles of Christian ethics. During the same period, St. Gregory was involved in a distressing controversy with Eutychius, the patriarch of Constantinople, who broached some heretical views upon the resurrection of the just. St. Gregory calmly remonstrated with him, and, in the end, the good patriarch was led to retract this error, and, during a fit of illness, made a public avowal, in the emperor's presence, of his submission to the Church in the article of which he had doubted. The error was never afterwards revived. St. Gregory ever stood high in the estimation of the emperor and of the whole imperial family; as a mark of which he was selected to stand godfather to the eldest son of Mauritius, the emperor's son-in-law and successor.

In the year 584, St. Gregory was recalled from Constantinople by Pope Pelagius II., and on his return to Rome again betook himself to his beloved retreat, the Monastery of St. Andrew, of which he was soon after chosen Abbot. At the beginning of the year 590, Rome was visited by a tremendous epidemic, which was the occasion of bringing out St. Gregory's character in a new light. Having assembled the people, he delivered to them a powerful and touching address, and ended by appointing a solemn procession through the streets of the city in seven companies, which were to move, each headed by a priest, from the different churches, chanting Kyrie eleeison as they walked, and to fall in with one another at St. Mary Major's. So furiously did the disease rage at this time, that no less than eighty of the persons

who assisted in this solemnity died in a single hour during the progress of the procession. St. Gregory, meanwhile, was indefatigable in his labours of charity, and continued to assemble and exhort the people as long as the plague lasted.

4

During all this time St. Gregory had a great trial hanging over him, which, had he allowed himself to dwell upon it, would have been a subject of most painful anxiety. The mention of this will also serve as the explanation of a circumstance which, looking to the known humility and backwardness of the Saint's disposition, may have already occasioned surprise to the reader his seeming assumption, during the pestilence at Rome, of almost episcopal authority. The fact is, that, among the earliest victims of the disease was Pope Pelagius himself; and the unanimous voice of the clergy, senate, and people, of Rome, had fixed upon Gregory as his successor. It was under no eagerness on Gregory's part to respond to this call, that he came forward as he did at the time of the plague, but merely because there was no other ecclesiastical person who was obviously called to take the lead in a season of great national distress. St. Gregory was thus enabled, vacante sede, to gratify, without impropriety, his zealous and charitable inclinations. And perhaps he was not sorry for the opportunity of escaping from a great private care, by making others' feelings his own, and occupying all his time in works of mercy and brotherly kindness. What, then, was this care? In such measure as the reader has learned to sympathize with St. Gregory, he will probably have anticipated it. The Saint himself did not take the same view with persons around him of his own fitness to undertake the government of the Church . He shrank, in fact, from the prospect of the Pontifical