donians. Let all Christian hearts reject the blasphemous name. It was once applied, by the Council of Chalcedon, in honour of St. Peter, to the Bishop of Rome; but the more humble pontiffs of Rome would not assume a title injurious to the rest of the priesthood. I am but the servant of those priests who live as becomes their order. But pride goes before a fall;' and God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.'"

To the Empress (for on all religious questions the Empress is usually addressed as well as the Emperor), Gregory brands the presumption of John as a sign of the coming of Antichrist; and compares it to that of Satan, who aspired to be higher than all the angels.d

Among the exhortations to humility addressed to John himself, he urges this awful example:-"No one in the Church has yet sacrilegiously dared to usurp the name of Universal Bishop. Whoever calls himself Universal Bishop is Antichrist." e Gregory appeals also to the Bishops of Antioch and Alexandria to unite with him in asserting the superior dignity of St. Peter, in which they have a common interest; and it is remarkable with what address he endeavours to enlist those prelates in his cause, without distinctly admitting their equal claim to the inheritance of St. Peter, to which Antioch at least might adduce a plausible title.'

temporal

III. In the person of Gregory the Bishop of Rome first Gregory as became, in act and in influence, if not in avowed sovereign. authority, a temporal sovereign. Nor were his acts the ambitious encroachments of ecclesiastical usurpation on the civil power. They were forced upon him by the purest motives, if not by absolute necessity. The virtual sovereignty fell to him as abdicated by the neglect or powerlessness of its rightful owners: he must assume it, or leave the city and the people to anarchy. He alone

32.

33.

C

Epist. Maurit. Augusto. Epist. iv. d Ad Constant. Imperatric., Epist. iv.

⚫ Joanni Constant. Epist. iv. 38.

"Itaque cum multi sunt apostoli, pro ipso tamen principatu sola apostolorum principis sedes in auctoritate con

valuit quæ in tribus locis unius est. . Cum ergo unius atque una sit sedes, cui ex auctoritate divinâ his nunc episcopi præsident, quicquid ego de vobis boni audio, hoc mihi imputo, quod de me boni creditis hoc vestris meritis imputate."-Epist. vi. 37.

could protect Rome and the remnant of her citizens from barbaric servitude; his authority rested on the universal feeling of its beneficence; his title was the security afforded by his government.

Nothing could appear more forlorn and hopeless than the state of Rome on the accession of Gregory to the pontificate-continual wars, repeated sieges, the capture and recapture of the city by barbarian Goths and Vandals, and no less barbarous Greeks. Fires, tempests, inundations had raged with indiscriminating fury. If the heathen buildings of the city had suffered most, it was because, from their magnitude and splendour, they were more exposed to plunder and devastation. The Christian city was indebted for its comparative security, if partially to its sanctity, in a great degree to its humility. Epidemic plagues, the offspring of these calamities, had been constantly completing the work of barbarian enemies and of the destructive elements.

After the pestilence which raged at the accession of Gregory had been arrested (an event attributed no doubt to the solemn religious ceremonies of the Bishop), his first care was that of a prefect of the city-to supply food for the famishing people. This, as has been shown, was chiefly furnished from Sicily and from the estates of the Church. During this whole period the city was saved from the horrors of famine only by the wise and provident regulations of the Pope."

But it was the Lombard invasion which compelled the Pope to take a more active part in the affairs of The LomItaly. For seven and twenty years, says Gre- bards, gory, we have lived in this city in terror of the sword of the Lombards. If during the few later years of Gregory's pontificate of thirteen years Rome enjoyed a precarious peace, that peace it owed to the intervention of her Bishop. In their first invasion of Italy, under Alboin,' the Lom

Denina thinks that greater misery was inflicted upon Italy by the Grecian reconquest than by any other invasion. -Revoluz. d' Italia, t. i. 1. v. p. 247. h Gregory, in a letter to one of his agents in Sicily, writes thus:-" Quia

si quid minus huc transmittetur, non unus quilibet homo, sed cunctus simul populus trucidatur."-Epist. i. 2.

i A.D. 567, twenty-three years before the popedom of Gregory, A.D. 590.

bards extended their conquests as far as Tuscany and Umbria. Rome, Ravenna, and a few cities on the seacoast, alone escaped their devastations, and remained under the jurisdiction of the Exarch of Ravenna, the representative of the Byzantine empire. The tragedy of Alboin's death, and that of his adulterous Queen, Rosmunda; the cup made out of her father's skull, with which Alboin pledged her in a public banquet, her revenge, her own murder by her guilty paramour, though in the latter event the Exarch of Ravenna had taken part, belong, nevertheless, to the unmitigated ferocity of the barbarian. The Lombard host comprehended wild hordes of Teutonic or Sclavonian tribes. They occupied all the cities of northern Italy, to which they gave the name of Lombardy; civilisation retreated as they advanced; the bishop, at their approach, fled from Milan. Nothing withheld them from the immediate and total subjugation of Italy but their wars with the Franks-wars excited by the intrigues of the Byzantine court, who by these means alone averted for a time the loss of their Italian territories. After the short reign of Cleph, the elected successor of Alboin, the kingdom was divided into dukedoms, and these martial independent princes continued to extend their ravages over the still retiring limits of the Roman dominion. They compelled the cultivators of the soil to pay a third part of their produce; they plundered churches and monasteries without scruple; massacred the clergy, destroyed the cities, and mowed down the people like corn.m

A.D. 573.

A.D. 584.

The perpetual wars with the Franks, who still poured over the Alps, demanded from the Lombards a firmer government. Autharis was raised by acclamation to the Lombard throne. Within his own dominions the reign of Autharis was that of prosperity and peace. So only can any truth be assigned to the poetic description of his rule by the Latin historian the Deacon Paul, in whose glowing words the savage and desolating Lombards almost "Unde usque hodie eorum in qui- lamus."-Paul. Dial. de Gestis Longobus habitant vicos, Gepidos, Bulgares, bard., ii. 26. Sarmatas, Pannonios, Suavos, Noricos, sive aliis hujuscemodi nominibus appel

m De Gestis Longobard., ii. 82.

n

suddenly became an orderly, peaceful, Christian people. "Wonderful was the state of the Lombard kingdom: violence and treachery were alike unknown; no one oppressed, no one plundered another; thefts and robberies were unheard of; the traveller went wherever he would in perfect security." How strange a contrast with the bitter and unceasing complaints in the works of Gregory of the savage manners, remorseless cruelties, and sacrilegious impieties, of these most wicked Lombards, these heathen or Arian enemies of Rome and of true religion! During a period of cessation in his wars with the Franks, King Autharis swept unresisted over the whole of Southern Italy. At Reggio, the extreme point, the conqueror rode his horse into the sea, and with his spear struck a column, which had been erected there, exclaiming, "This is the boundary of the Lombard kingdom." During this or former expeditions Lombard dukedoms had been founded in the south, of which the most formidable were those of Spoleto and Benevento. These half-independent chieftains waged war upon the Romans; the latter especially carried his ravages to the gates of Rome.

The Italians sent earnest supplications, and the Pope pressing message after message for succour, to the successive Emperors, Tiberius and Maurice. The Byzantine government was too feeble, or too much occupied by nearer enemies, to render effectual aid to this remote province: their allies, the Franks, were the only safeguards of Italy.

in

It was towards the close of the reign of Autharis that Gregory became bishop of the plague-stricken Gregory comcity. In the second year of his pontificate, Agi- In temporal lulf became the husband of Theodelinda, the affairs. widow of Autharis, and King of the Lombards." The Exarch, who had not the power to avert, had the folly to provoke the Lombards to new invasions. He surprised

Perugia and some other cities, and, to protect them, withdrew great part of the insufficient garrison of Rome. Agilulf poured his unresisted swarms into Southern Italy."

Already had Gregory made peace with one formidable enemy, Ariulf, the Duke of Spoleto." The predatory bands of the Lombard had threatened the city, where the walls were scarcely manned by a diminished and unpaid garrison. Agilulf, with his army, appeared at the gates of Rome. Gregory suddenly brought to an end his exposition of the Temple of Ezekiel, on which he was preaching to the people. His work closes with these words:"If I must now break off my discourse, ye are my witnesses for what reason, ye who share in my tribulations. On all sides we are girt with war; everywhere is the imminent peril of death. Some return to us with their hands chopped off, some are reported as captives, others as slain. I am constrained to cease from my exposition, for I am weary of life. Who can expect me now to devote myself to sacred eloquence, now that my harp is turned to mourning, and my speech to the voice of them that weep ?"t

fends Rome.

At least, by encouraging the commanders of the garGregory de- rison, who seem to have done their duty, Gregory contributed to avert the impending capture of the city. While all the Romans, even those of the highest rank and family, without the city were dragged like dogs into captivity," at least those within were in safety, and owed their safety to the Pope; and the pacific influence which Gregory obtained in this momentous crisis led, after some years, to a definitive treaty of peace.*