The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations Part 15

If no fitting person is found in the monastery itself, the monks are to provide that one be chosen from another monastery. In the abbot's lifetime no other superior may be set over the monastery, except the abbot have committed transgressions punishable by the canons. Against the will of the abbot no monk may be chosen to be set over another monastery or receive holy orders. The bishop may not make an inventory of the goods of the monastery, nor mix himself, even after the abbot's death, in the concerns of the monastery; he may hold no public ma.s.s in the monastery, that there be no meeting of people, or women, there; he may set up no pulpit there, and without the consent of the abbot make no regulation, and employ no monk for any church service.

All the bishops answered: "We rejoice in the liberties of the monks, and confirm what your Holiness has set forth as to this".

As metropolitan of the particular Roman province, Gregory was equally active. The political circ.u.mstances of Italy had exerted the most prejudicial effect on the Church. Ecclesiastical life was impaired. The discipline both of monks and clergy was weakened. Bishops had become negligent in their duties; many churches orphaned or destroyed. But at the end of his pontificate things had so improved that he might well be termed the reformer of Church discipline. He watched with great care over the conduct and administration of the bishops. In this the officers called _defensors_, that is, who administered the patrimony of the Church in the different provinces, helped him greatly in carrying out his commands.

In the war with the Lombards, many episcopal sees had been wasted, and many of their bishops expelled. Gregory provided for them, either in naming them visitors of his own, or in calling in other bishops to their support. He rebuilt many churches which had been destroyed. He carefully maintained the property of churches: he would not allow it to be alienated, except to ransom captives or convert heathens. The Roman Church had then large estates in Africa, Gaul, Sicily, Corsica, Dalmatia, and especially in the various provinces of Italy. These were called the Patrimony of Peter. They consisted in lands, villages, and flocks. In the management of these Gregory's care did not disdain the minutest supervision. His strong sense of justice did not prevent his being a merciful landlord, and especially he cared for the peasantry and cultivators of the soil.

The monastic life which in his own person he had so zealously practised, as Pope he so carefully watched over that he has been called the father of the monks. He encouraged the establishment of monasteries. Many he built and provided for himself out of the Roman Church's property. Many which wanted for maintenance he succoured. He issued a quant.i.ty of orders supporting the religious and moral life of monks and nuns. He invited bishops to keep guard over the discipline of monasteries, and blamed them when transgressions of it came to light. But he also protected monasteries from hard treatment of bishops, and, according to the custom of earlier Popes, exempted some of them from episcopal authority.

In restoring schismatics to unity he was in general successful. He wrought such a union among the bishops of Africa that Donatism lost influence more and more, and finally disappeared. He dealt with the obstinate Milanese schism which had arisen out of the treatment of the Three Chapters. He won back a great part of the Istrians. He had more trouble with the two archbishops of Constantinople, John the Faster and Cyriacus; and his former friend the emperor Mauritius turned against him, so that he welcomed the accession of Phocas, as a deliverance of the Church from unjust domination.

The unquestioning loyalty with which, as a civil subject, he welcomed this accession has been unfairly used against him. As first of all the civil dignitaries of the empire he could only accept what had been done at Constantinople. But in all his fourteen years neither the difficulty of circ.u.mstances nor the consideration of persons withheld him from carrying out his resolutions with a patience and a firmness only equalled by gentleness of manner. From beginning to end he considered himself, and acted, as set by G.o.d to watch over the maintenance of the canons, the discipline enacted by them, and so doing to perfect by his wisdom as well as to temper by his moderation the vast fabric of the Primacy as it had grown itself, and nurtured in its growth the original const.i.tution of the Church during nearly six hundred years.

We may now say a few words upon the Primacy itself as exerted by St. Leo at the Council of Chalcedon, and the Primacy as exerted by St. Gregory in the fourteen years from 590 to 604; also on the interval between them, and the relative position of the bishop of Constantinople to Leo in the person of Anatolius, and to Gregory in the person of John the Faster. We see at once that the intention which Leo discerned in Anatolius, which he sternly reprehended and summarily overthrew, has been fully carried out by John the Faster, who, in doc.u.ments sent to the Pope himself for revision, as superior, terms himself ec.u.menical patriarch. Who had made him first a patriarch and then ec.u.menical? The emperor alone. He is so called in the laws of Justinian. The 140 years from Leo to Gregory are filled with the continued rise of the Bishop of Nova Roma under the absolute power of the emperor. He has succeeded not only in taking precedence of the legitimate patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch; he has more than once stripped of their rights the metropolitans and bishops subject to the great see of the East, and himself consecrated at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch by order of the emperor of the day. This Acacius did, humbly begging the Pope's pardon for such a transgression of the due order and hierarchy, and repeating the offence against the Nicene order and const.i.tution on the first opportunity. In the same way he has interfered with the elections at Alexandria. We learn from the instruction given by Pope Hormisdas to his legates that all the eastern bishops when they came to Constantinople obtained an audience of the emperor only through the bishop of Constantinople. The Pope carefully warns his legates against submitting to this pretension. Pope Gelasius told the bishop in his day that his see had no ecclesiastical rank above that of a simple bishop. We laugh, he said, at the pretension to erect an apostolical throne upon an imperial residence.

But, in the meantime, Constantinople has become the head of all civil power. The emperor of the West has ceased to be. The Roman senate, at the bidding of a Herule commander of mercenaries, has sent back even the symbols of imperial rank to the eastern emperor; and in return Zeno has graciously made Odoacer patricius of Rome, with the power of king, until Theodorick was ready to be rewarded with the possession of Italy for services rendered to the eastern monarch, with the purpose likewise of diverting his attention from Nova Roma. Therefore, in spite of the submission rendered by all the East, the bishops, the court, the emperor, and by Justinian himself; in spite, also, of two bishops successively degraded by an emperor, the bishop of Constantinople ever advances. The law of Justinian, which acknowledges the Pope as first of all bishops in the world, and gives him legal rank as such, makes the bishop of the new capital the second. Presently Justinian becomes by conquest immediate sovereign of Rome. The ancient queen and maker of the empire is humbled in the dust by five captures; is even reduced to a desert for a time; and when a portion of her fugitive citizens comes back to the abandoned city, a Byzantine prefect rules it with absolute power. A Greek garrison, the badge of Rome's degradation, supports his delegated rule. Presently the seat of that rule is for security transferred to Ravenna, and Rome is left, not merely discrowned, but defenceless. All the while the bishop of Constantinople is seated in the pomp of power at the emperor's court; within the walls of the eastern capital his household rivals that of the emperor; in certain respects the public worship gives him a homage greater than that accorded to the absolute lord of the East. He reflects with satisfaction that the one person in the West who can call his ministration to account is exposed to the daily attacks of barbarians: is surrounded with palaces whose masters are ruined, and which are daily dropping into decay. The Pope, behind the crumbling walls of Aurelian, shudders at the cruelties practised on his people: the bishop of Constantinople, by terming himself ec.u.menical, announces ostentatiously that he claims to rule all his brethren in the East--that he is supreme judge over his brother patriarchs.

One only thing he does not do: he claims no power over the Pope himself; he does not attempt to revise his administration in the West. He acknowledges his primacy, seated as it is in a provincial city, pauperised, and decimated with hunger and desertion.

In this interval the Pope has seen seven emperors pa.s.s like shadows on the western throne, and their place taken first by an Arian Herule and then by an Arian Goth. Herule and Goth disappear, the last at the cost of a war which desolates Italy during twenty years, and casts out, indeed, the Gothic invader and confiscator of Italy, but only to supply his place by the grinding exactions of an absent master, followed immediately by the inroad of fresh savages, far worse than the Goth, under whose devastation Italy is utterly ruined. Whatever portion of dignity the old capital of the world lent to Leo is utterly lost to Gregory. It has been one tale of unceasing misery, of terrible downfal to Rome, from Genseric to Agilulf. It may seem to have been suspended during the thirty-three years of Theodorick, but it was the iron force of hostile domination wielded by the gloved hand. When the Goth was summoned to depart, he destroyed ruthlessly.

The rage of Vitiges casts back a light upon the mildness of Theodorick; the slaughters ordered by Teia are a witness to Gothic humanity. No words but those of Gregory himself, in applying the Hebrew prophet, can do justice to the temporal misery of Rome. The Pope felt himself silenced by sorrow in the Church of St. Peter, but he ruled without contradiction the Church in East and West. Not a voice is heard at the time, or has come down to posterity, which accuses Gregory of pa.s.sing the limits of power conceded to him by all, or of exercising it otherwise than with the extremest moderation.

Disaster in the temporal order, continued through five generations, from Leo to Gregory, has clearly brought to light the purely spiritual foundation of the papal power. If the attribution to the Pope of the three great words spoken by our Lord to St. Peter, made to Pope Hormisdas by the eastern bishops and emperor, does not prove that they belong to the Pope and were inherited by him from St. Peter, what proof remains to be offered?

If the attribution is so proved, what is there in the papal power which is not divinely conferred and guaranteed? Neither the first Leo, nor the first Gregory, nor the seventh Gregory, nor the thirteenth Leo, ask for more; nor can they take less.

If St. Gregory exercised this authority in a ruined city, over barbarous populations which had taken possession of the western provinces, over eastern bishops who crouched at the feet of an absolute monarch, over a rival who, with all the imperial power to back him, did not attempt to deny it, how could a greater proof of its divine origin be given?

In this respect boundless disaster offers a proof which the greatest prosperity would have failed to give. Not even a Greek could be found who could attribute St. Gregory's authority in Rome to his being bishop of the royal city. The barbarian inundation had swept away the invention of Anatolius.

But this very time was also that in which the heresy whose leading doctrine was denial of the G.o.dhead of the Church's founder came from a threatening of supremacy to an end. In Theodorick Arianism seemed to be enthroned for predominance in all the West. His civil virtues and powerful government, his family league of all the western rulers,--for he himself had married Andefleda, sister of Clovis, and had given one daughter for wife to the king of the Vandals in Africa, and another to the king of the Visigoths in France,--was a gage of security. In Gregory's time the great enemy has laid down his arms. He is dispossessed from the Teuton race in its Gallic, Spanish, Burgundian, African settlements. Gregory, at the head of the western bishops who in every country have risked life for the faith of Rome, has gained the final victory. One only Arian tribe survives for a time, ever struggling to possess Rome, advancing to its gates, ruining its Campagna, torturing its captured inhabitants, but never gaining possession of those battered walls, which Totila in part threw down and Belisarius in piecemeal restored. And Gregory, too, is chosen to stop the Anglo-Saxon revel of cruelty and destruction, which has turned Britain from a civilised land into a wilderness, and from a province of the Catholic Church to paganism, from the very time of St. Leo. Two tribes were the most savage of the Teuton family, the Saxon and the Frank. The Frank became Catholic, and Gregory besought the rulers of the converted nation to help his missionaries in their perilous adventure to convert the ultramarine neighbours, still savage and pagan. He also ordered their chief bishop to consecrate the chief missionary to be archbishop of the Angles. As there was a Burgundian Clotilda by the side of Clovis, there was a Frankish Bertha by the side of Ethelbert; and these two women have a glorious place in that second great victory of the Church. The Visigoth and Ostrogoth with their great natural gifts could not found a kingdom. Their heresy deprived the Father of the Son, and they were themselves sterile. Those who denied a Divine Redeemer were not likely to convert a world.

But all through Gregory's life the Byzantine spirit of encroachment was one of his chief enemies. The claim of its bishop to be ec.u.menical patriarch stopped short of the Primacy. But one after another the bishops of that see sought by imperial laws to detach the bishops of Eastern Illyria from their subjection to the western patriarchate. Their nearness to Constantinople, their being subjects of the eastern emperor, helped this encroachment.

It would appear also that in Gregory's time--a hundred years after Pope Gelasius had put the bishop of the imperial city in remembrance that he had been a suffragan to Heraclea--the legislation of Justinian had succeeded in inducing the Roman See to acknowledge that bishop as a patriarch. His actual power had gone far beyond. There can be no doubt that, while the Pope had become legally the subject of the eastern emperor, the bishop of Constantinople had become in fact the emperor's ecclesiastical minister in subjugating the eastern episcopate. The Nicene episcopal hierarchy subsisted indeed in name. To the Alexandrian and Antiochene patriarchs two had been added--one at Jerusalem, the other at Constantinople. But the last was so predominant--as the interpreter of the emperor's will--that he stood at the head of the bishops in all the realm ruled from Constantinople over against the Pope as the head of the western bishops in many various lands.

The bishops were in Justinian's legislation everywhere great imperial officers, holding a large civil jurisdiction, especially charged with an inspection of the manner in which civil governors performed their own proper functions; most of all, the patriarchs and the Pope.

But that episcopal autonomy--if we may so call it--under the presidence of the three Petrine patriarchs, which was in full life and vigour at the Nicene Council, which St. Gregory still recognised in his letter to Eulogius, was greatly impaired. While barbaric inundation had swept over the West, the struggles of the Nestorian and Eutychean heresies, especially in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, had disturbed the hierarchy and divided the people which the master at Constantinople could hardly control. That state of the East which St. Basil deplored in burning words--which almost defied every effort of the great Theodosius to restore it to order--had gone on for more than two hundred years. The Greek subtlety was not pervaded by the charity of Christ, and they carried on their disputes over that adorable mystery of His Person in which the secret of redeeming power is seated, with a spirit of party and savage persecution which portended the rise of one who would deny that mystery altogether, and reduce to a terrible servitude those who had so abused their liberty as Christians and offered such a scandal to the religion of unity which they professed.

From St. Sylvester to St. Leo, and, again, from St. Leo to St. Gregory, the effort of the Popes was to maintain in its original force the Nicene const.i.tution of the Church. Well might they struggle for the maintenance of that which was a derivation from their own fountainhead--"the administration of Peter"[217]--during the three centuries of heathen persecution by the empire. It was not they who tightened the exercise of their supreme authority. The altered condition of the times, the tyranny of Constantius and Valens, the dislocation of the eastern hierarchy, the rise of a new bishop in a new capital made use of by an absolute sovereign to control that hierarchy, a resident council at Constantinople which became an "instrument of servitude" in the emperor's hands to degrade any bishop at his pleasure and his own patriarch when he was not sufficiently pliant to the master,--these were among the causes which tended to bring out a further exercise of the power which Christ had deposited in the hands of His Vicar to be used according to the needs of the Church. No one has expressed with greater moderation than St. Gregory the proper power of his see, in the words I have quoted above:[218] "I know not what bishop is not subject to the Apostolical See, if any fault be found in bishops. But when no fault requires it, all are equal according to the estimation of humility." In Rome there is no growth by aid of the civil power from a suffragan bishop to an universal Papacy. The Papacy shows itself already in St. Clement, a disciple of St. Peter's, "whose name is written in the book of life,"[219] and who, involving the Blessed Trinity, affirms that the orders emanating from his see are the words of G.o.d Himself.[220] This is the ground of St. Gregory's moderation; and whatever extension may hereafter be found in the exercise of the same power by his successors is drawn forth by the condition of the times, a condition often opposed to the inmost wishes of the Pope. Those are evil times which require "a thousand bishops rolled into one" to oppose the civil tyranny of a Hohenstaufen, the violence of barbarism in a Rufus, or the corruption of wealth in a Plantagenet.

Between St. Peter and St. Gregory, in 523 years, there succeeded full sixty Popes. If we take any period of like duration in the history of the world's kingdoms, we shall find in their rulers a remarkable contrast of varying policy and temper. Few governments, indeed, last so long. But in the few which have so lasted we find one sovereign bent on war, another on peace, another on acc.u.mulating treasure, another on spending it; one given up to selfish pleasures, here and there a ruler who reigns only for the good of others. But in Gregory's more than sixty predecessors there is but one idea: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of h.e.l.l shall not prevail against it," is the compendious expression of their lives and rule. For this St. Clement, who had heard the words of his master, suffered exile and martyrdom in the Crimea. For this five Popes, in the decade between 250 and 260, laid down their lives. The letter of St. Julius to the Eusebian prelates is full of it. St. Leo saw the empire of Rome falling around him, but he is so possessed with that idea that he does not allude to the ruin of temporal kingdoms. St. Gregory trembles for the lives of his beleaguered people, but he does not know the see which is not subject to the Apostolic See. In weakness and in power, in ages of an ever varying but always persistent adversity, in times of imperial patronage, and, again, under heretical domination, the mind of every Pope is full of this idea. The strength or the weakness of individual character leaves it untouched. In one, and only one, of all these figures his dignity is veiled in sadness. Pope Vigilius at Constantinople, in the grasp of a despot, and with the stain of an irregular election never effaced from his brow, is still conscious of it, still has courage to say, "You may bind me, but you will not bind the Apostle St. Peter". Six hundred years after St. Gregory, when accordingly the succession of Popes had been rather more than doubled, I find the biographer of Innocent III. thus commenting on his election in 1198: "The Church in these times ever had an essential preponderance over worldly kingdoms. Resting on a spiritual foundation, she had in herself the vigour of immaterial power, and maintained in her application of it the superiority over merely material forces. She alone was animated by a clearly recognised idea, which never at any time died out of her. For its maintenance and actuation were not limited to the person of a Pope, who could only be the representative, the bearer, the enactor, for the world of this idea in its fullest meaning. If here and there a particular personality seemed unequal to the carrying out such a charge, the force of the idea did not suffer any defect through him.

Most papal governments were very short in their duration. This itself was a challenge to those whose life was absorbed in that of the Church to place at its head a man whose ability, enlightened and guided by strength of will, afforded a secure a.s.surance for the exercise of an universal charge.

From the clear self-consciousness of the Church in this respect proceeded that firm pursuance of a great purpose distinctly perceived. It met with no persistent or wisely conducted resistance on the part of the temporal power. On one side all rays had their focus in one point. In temporal princes the rays were parted. Few of these showed in their lives a purpose to which all their acts were made consistently subordinate. As circ.u.mstances swayed them, as the desire of the moment led them away, they threw themselves, according to their personal inclinations, with impetuous storm and violence upon the attainment of their wishes. They had to yield in the end to the power of the Church, slower, indeed, but continuous, pursued with superiority of spirit, moreover with the firm conviction of guidance from above, and of the special protection from this inseparable, and so attaining its mark. One only royal race ventured on a contest with the Church for supremacy; for one only, the Hohenstaufen, were conscious of a fixed purpose. They encountered a direct struggle with the Church; but the conflict issued to the honour of the Church. The Popes who led it came out of it with a renown in the world's history, which without that conflict they would never have so gloriously attained. If we look from these events before and afterwards upon the ages, and see how the inst.i.tution of the Papacy outlasts all other inst.i.tutions in Europe, how it has seen all States come and go, how in the endless change of human things it alone remains unchanged, ever with the same spirit, can we then wonder if many look up to it as the Rock unmoved amid the roaring billows of centuries?"

And he adds in a note, "This is not a polemical statement, but the verdict of history".[221]

The time of St. Gregory in history bore the witness of six centuries; the time of Innocent III. of twelve; the time of Leo XIII. bears that of more than eighteen centuries to the consideration of this contrast between the natural fickleness of men and of lives of men, shown from age to age, and the persistence, on the other hand, of one idea in one line of men. The eighteen centuries already past are yet only a part of an unknown future.

But to construct such a Rock amid the sea and the waves roaring in the history of the nations reveals an abiding divine power. It leaves the self-will of man untouched, yet sets up a rampart against it. The explanation attempted three hundred and fifty years ago of an imposture or an usurpation is incompatible with the clearness of an idea which is carried out persistently through so many generations. Usurpations fall rapidly. But in this one case the divine words themselves contain the idea more clearly expressed than any exposition can express it. The King delineates His kingdom as none but G.o.d can; it must also be added that He maintains it as none but G.o.d can maintain.

We may return to St. Gregory's own time, and note the unbroken continuity of the Primacy from St. Peter himself. It is a period of nearly six hundred years from the day of Pentecost. Just in the middle comes the conversion of Constantine. Before it Rome is mainly a heathen city, the government of which bears above all things an everlasting enmity against any violation of the supreme pontificate annexed by the provident Augustus to the imperial power, and jealously maintained by every succeeding emperor. To suffer an infringement of that pontificate would be to lose the grasp over the hundred varieties of worship allowed by the State. Yet when Constantine acknowledged the Christian faith, the names of St. Peter and St. Paul were in full possession of the city, so far as it was Christian. They were its patron-saints. Every Christian memory rested on the tradition of St.

Peter's pontifical acts, his chair, his baptismal font, his dwelling-place, his martyrdom. The impossibility of such a series of facts taking possession of a heathen city during the period antecedent to Constantine's victory over Maxentius, save as arising from St. Peter's personal action at Rome, is apparent.

In the second half of this period, from Constantine to St. Gregory, the civil pre-eminence of Rome is perpetually declining. The consecration of New Rome as the capital of the empire, in 330, by itself alone strikes at it a fatal blow. Presently the very man who had reunited the empire divided it among his sons, and after their death the division became permanent.

Valentinian I., in 364, whether he would or not, was obliged to make two empires. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the condition of the western empire is one long agony. The power of Constantinople continually increases. At the death of Honorius, in 423, the eastern emperor becomes the over-lord of the western. During fifty years Rome lived only by the arm of two semi-barbarian generals, Stilicho and Aetius. Both were a.s.sa.s.sinated for the service; and in the boy Romulus Augustulus a western emperor ceased to be, and the senate declared that one emperor alone was needed. After fifty years of Arian occupation, the Gothic war ruined the city of Rome. In Gregory's time it had ceased to be even the capital of a province. Its lord dwelt at Constantinople; Rome was subject to his exarch at Ravenna.

Yet from Constantine and the Nicene Council the advance of Rome's Primacy is perpetual. In Leo I. it is universally acknowledged. At the fall of the western empire Acacius attempts his schism. He is supported while living by the emperor Zeno, and his memory after his death by the succeeding emperor Anastasius, who reigned for twenty-seven years, longer than any emperor since Augustus had reigned over the whole empire. All the acts of these two princes show that they would have liked to attach the Primacy to their bishop at Constantinople. Anastasius twice enjoyed the luxury of deposing him through the resident council. But Anastasius died, and the result of the Acacian schism was a stronger confession of the Roman Primacy made to Pope Hormisdas, the subject of the Arian Theodorick, by the whole Greek episcopate, than had ever been given before. The sixth century and the reign of Justinian completed the destruction of the civil state of Rome; and the Primacy of its bishop, St. Gregory, was more than ever acknowledged.

Not a shadow of usurpation or of claim to undue power rested upon that unquestioned Primacy which St. Gregory exercised. While he thought the end of the world was at hand, while he watched Rome perishing street by street, he planted unconsciously a western Christendom in what he supposed all the time to be a perishing world. Civil Rome was not even a provincial capital; spiritual Rome was the acknowledged head of the world-wide Church.

I know not where to find so remarkable a contrast and connection of events as here. Temporal losses, secular ambitions, episcopal usurpations, violent party spirit, schism and heresy in the great eastern patriarchates, and amid it all the descent of the Teutons on the fairest lands of the western empire, the establishment of new sovereignties in Spain, Gaul, and Italy, under barbarians who at the time of their descent were Arian heretics, and afterwards became Catholic, with the result that Gregory has to keep watch within the walls of Rome for a whole generation against the Lombard, still in unmitigated savagery and unabated heresy, and that the world-wide Church acknowledges him for her ruler without a dissenting voice. The "Servant of the servants of G.o.d" chides and corrects the would-be "ec.u.menical patriarch," who has risen since Constantine from the suffragan of a Thracian city to be bishop of Nova Roma and right hand of the emperor; who has deposed Alexandria from the second place and Antioch from the third, but cannot take the first place from the See of Peter. The perpetual ambition of the bishops of Nova Roma, the perpetual fostering of that ambition for his own purpose by the emperor, only ill.u.s.trates more vividly the inaccessible dignity which both would fain have transferred to the city of Constantine, but were obliged to leave with the city of Peter. As the forum of Trajan sinks down stone by stone, the kings of the West are preparing to flock in pilgrimage to the shrine of Peter. This was the answer which the captives in the forum made to the deliverer of their race.

There is nothing like this elsewhere in history.

Constantine, Valens, Theodosius, Justinian, and, no less, Alaric and Ataulph, Attila and Genseric, Theodorick and Clovis, Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, as well as St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St.

Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Cyril, and, again, Dioscorus, Acacius, and a mult.i.tude of the most opposing minds and beliefs which these represent, contribute, in their time and degree, for the most part unconsciously, and many against their settled purpose, to acknowledge this Primacy as the Rock of the Church, the source of spiritual jurisdiction, the centre of a divine unity in a warring world. In St. Gregory we see the power which has had antecedents so strange and concomitants so repulsive deposited in the hands of a feeble old man who is constantly mourning over the cares in which that universal government involves him, while the world for evermore shall regard him as the type and standard of the true spiritual ruler, who calls himself, not Ec.u.menical Bishop, but Servant of the servants of G.o.d. It is a t.i.tle which his successors will take from his hand and keep for ever as the badge of the Primacy which it ill.u.s.trates, while it serves as the seal of its acts of power. He calls himself servant just when he is supreme.

In St. Gregory the Great, the whole ancient world, the Church's first discipline and original government, run to their ultimate issue. In him the patriarchal system, as it met the shock of absolute power in the civil sovereign, and the subversion of the western empire by barbarous incursions, accompanied by the establishment of new sovereignties and the foundation of a new Rome, the rival and then the tyrant of the old Rome, receives its consummation. The medieval world has not yet begun. The spurious Mahometan theocracy is waiting to arise. In the midst of a world in confusion, of a dethroned city falling into ruins, the successor of St.

Peter sits on an undisputed spiritual throne upon which a new world will be based in the West, against which the Khalifs of a false religion will exert all their rage in the East and South, and strengthen the rule which they parody. A new power, which utterly denies the Christian faith, which destroys hundreds of its episcopal sees and severs whole countries from its sway, will dash with all its violence against the Rock of Peter, and finally will have the effect of making the bishop who is there enthroned more than ever the symbol, the seat, and the champion of the Kingdom of the Cross.

NOTES:

[173] See Gregorovius, ii. 3, 4.

[174] Gregorovius, ii. 6.

[175] _Ibid._, ii. 5, literal.

[176] Nirschl, iii. 534.

[177] Third letter of Pelagius II.; Mansi ix., p. 889: Nefandissima gens.

[178] Attested by St. Gregory of Tours, who heard it from a deacon of his church then at Rome.

[179] _Ep._ i. 25, p. 514.

[180] _Homily_ xviii. _on Ezechiel_, tom. i. 1374.

[181] Nahum ii, 11.

[182] Micheas i. 16.

[183] End of the _Homilies on Ezechiel_, tom. i. 1430.

[184] Quoted by Reumont, ii. 90.

[185] _Ep._ v. 42, p. 769.

[186] Reumont and Gregorovius.

[187] _Ep._ v. 21, p. 751.

[188] _Ep._ v. 20, tom. ii. 747.