racter, even his repulsive and hideous person, might be unknown in Rome; and Gregory might suppose that in such an exigency the choice of the army would not fall upon a man without courage, energy, or ability. It was no uncommon event in the annals of the empire to transfer the diadem to some bold military adventurer: Rome and Constantinople owed some of their best rulers to such revolutions. But the common usage of such revolutions could not. vindicate to a Christian prelate the barbarities with which Maurice and his infant family were put to death; and the high-wrought resignation of Maurice, it might have been supposed, would awaken ardent admiration in a mind like Gregory's. "If he is a coward, he will be a murderer!" such was the prophetic language of Maurice concerning the successful usurper. Maurice had taken refuge in a sanctuary; but when Phocas appeared as Emperor at the gates, when, in discharge of the first imperial duty at Constantinople, he interfered between the blue and the green factions in the Circus, which still excited fiercer animosities than those of the state, the Blues, against whom the usurper took part, broke out into menacing and significant shouts, "Maurice is not dead!" Phocas immediately ordered the fallen emperor to be dragged from his sanctuary. His five sons were butchered before his face. The unmoved and tearless father, as each received the fatal blow, exclaimed, "Just art thou, O Lord, and righteous are thy judgments!" With a sterner feeling of self-sacrifice, if it were not, indeed, despair, which took the form of frenzy, he betrayed the pious fraud of a nurse, who had substituted her own child for the youngest of the Emperor. Maurice was beheaded the last; the heads were cast before the. throne of Phocas, who would not allow them, till compelled by their offensiveness, to be buried. The intelligence of these events, with most, at least, of According to the biographer, Maurice owed profound obligations to Gregory, which might overbalance his merciless rejoicings at his worldly fate. He owed his eternal salvation to the prayer of Gregory. "Et quia oratio Gregorii, quâ illum petierat in terribili Dei judicio liberum ab omnibus delictis inveniri, vacua esse non potuit: idem Mauricius id recepit quod meruit et in cunctis suis incommodis Deum benedicens, a sempiterno supplicio meruit liberari." Joann. Diac, iii. 19. their revolting circumstances, must have arrived at Rome at the same time with that of the fall of Maurice and the elevation of Phocas. It is astonishing that even common prudence did not temper the language of the triumphant Pontiff, who launches out into a panegyric on the mercy and benignity of the usurper, calls on earth and heaven to rejoice at his accession, augurs peace and prosperity to the empire from his pious acts, and even seems to anticipate the return of the old republican freedom under the rule of the devout and gentle Phocas.TM June, 603. The sad truth is, that Gregory was blinded by the one great absorbing object, the interest of the Church, which to him involved the interest of religion, of mankind, and of God. Loyalty, justice, candour, even humanity, yielded to the dominant feeling. Maurice was not above suspicion of heresy; the unscrupulous hostility, no doubt, of political enemies taunted him as a Marcionist. At all events, he had countenanced the usurpation of the Bishop of Constantinople. John of Constantinople, with his sanction, called himself Universal Bishop. The new emperor, out of enmity to the old, would probably espouse the opposite side. Already Phocas seems to have invited in some way the adulation of Gregory; and reverence for the see of Rome, obedience to legitimate ecclesiastical authority, were in themselves, or gave the promise of, such transcendant virtues, that rebellion, murder, brutal barbarity, were overlooked, as the accidental result of circumstances, the inevitable evils of a beneficial revolution. So completely, by this time, had the sacerdotal Phocas obtained the superiority over the moral influence of Christianity, that even a man of Gregory's unquestioned Christian gentleness and natural humanity could not escape the predominant passion. Emperor. Gregory was spared the pain and shame of witnessing the utter falsehood of his pious vaticinations as to the glorious and holy reign of Phocas. m" Lætentur cœli et exultet terra; et de benignis vestris actibus universæ reipublica populus, nunc usque vehementer afflictus hilarescat. . . Hoc namque inter reges gentium et reipublicæ Im In the second year of the peratores distat, quod reges gentium domini servorum sunt; Imperatores vero reipublicæ domini liberorum."Epist. xi. 38. Death of tyrant's reign he closed the thirteen important years of his pontificate. The ungrateful Romans paid but tardy honours to his memory. His death was followed by a famine, which the starving multitude attributed to his wasteful dilapidation of the patrimony of the Church-that patrimony which had been so carefully administered, and so religiously devoted to their use. Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions. They proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the library of Gregory, and were only deterred from their barbarous ravages by the interposition of Peter, the faithful archdeacon. Peter had been interlocutor of Gregory in the wild legends contained in the Dialogues. The archdeacon now assured the populace of Rome that he had often seen the Holy Ghost, in the visible shape of a dove, hovering over the head of Gregory as he wrote. Gregory's successor therefore hesitated, and demanded that Peter should confirm his pious fiction or fancy by an oath. He ascended the pulpit, but before he had concluded his solemn oath he fell dead. That which to an hostile audience might have been a manifest judgment against perjury, was received as a divine testimony to his truth." The Roman Church has constantly permitted Gregory to be represented with the Holy Ghost, as a dove, floating over his head." The historian of Christianity is arrested by certain characters and certain epochs, which stand as landmarks between the close of one age of religion and the commencement of another. Such a character is Gregory the Great; such an epoch his pontificate, the termination of the sixth century. Gregory, not from his station alone, but by the acknow n Joann. Diacon. Vit. iv. 69. 。 I am disposed to insert the epitaph on Gregory as an example of the poetry and of the religious sentiment of the times : Suscipe, terra, tuo corpus de corpore sumptum, Spiritus alta petit, leti nil jura nocebunt, Cui vitæ alterius mors magis illa via est. Pontificis summi hoc clauduntur membra se pulcro, Qui innumeris semper vivit ubique bonis. Esuriem dapibus superavit, frigora veste, Atque animas monitis texit ab hoste suis. Esset ut exemplum mystica verba loquens. Ut Domini offerres plurima lucra greges. Nam mercedem operum jam sine fine tenes. Remark the old Roman image in the last line but one. ledgment of the admiring world, was intellectually, as well as spiritually, the great model of his age. He was proficient in all the arts and sciences cultivated at that time; the vast volumes of his writings show his indefatigable powers; their popularity and their authority his ability to clothe those thoughts and those reasonings in language which would awaken and command the general mind. His epoch was that of the final Christianisation of the world, not in outward worship alone, not in its establishment as the imperial religion, the rise of the church upon the ruin of the temple, and the recognition of the hierarchy as an indispensable rank in the social system, but in its full possession of the whole mind of man, in letters, arts, as far as arts were cultivated, habits, usages, modes of thought, and in popular superstition. Not only was heathenism, but, excepting in the laws and municipal institutions, Romanity itself, absolutely extinct. The reign of Theodoric had been an attempt to fuse together Roman, Teutonic, and Christian usages. Cassiodorus, though half a monk, aspired to be a Roman statesman, Boetius to be a heathen philosopher. The influence of the Roman schools of rhetoric is betrayed even in the writers of Gaul, such as Sidonius Apollinaris ; there is an attempt to preserve some lingering cadence of Roman poetry in the Christian versifiers of that age. At the close of the sixth century all this has expired; ecclesiastical Latin is the only language of letters, or rather, letters themselves are become purely ecclesiastical. The fable of Gregory's destruction of the Palatine Library is now rejected, as injurious to his fame; but probably the Palatine Library, if it existed, would have been so utterly neglected that Gregory would hardly have condescended to fear its influence. His aversion to such studies is not that of dread or hatred, but of religious contempt; profane letters are a disgrace to a Christian bishop; the truly religious spirit would loathe them of itself.a See the pious wonder with which he reproves a bishop of Gaul. "Post hæc pervenit ad nos, quod sine verecundiâ memorare non possumus, fraternitatem tuam grammaticam quibusdam exponere. Quam grave nefandumque sit episcopos canere, quod nec laico religioso conveniat, ipse considera.". Epist. ix. 48. What, then, was this Christianity by which Gregory ruled the world? Not merely the speculative and dogmatic theology, but the popular, vital, active Christianity, which was working in the heart of man; the dominant motive of his actions, as far as they were affected by religion; the principal element of his hopes and fears as regards the invisible world and that future life which had now become part of his conscious belief. Christian The The history of Christianity cannot be understood without pausing at stated periods to survey the progress and development of this Christian mythology, which, gradually growing up and springing as it did from natural and universal instincts, took a more perfect and systematic form, and at length, at the height of the Middle Ages, was as much a part of Latin Christianity as the primal truths of the Gospel. This growth, which had long before begun, had reached a kind of adolescence in the age of Gregory, to expand into full maturity during succeeding ages. Already the creeds of the Church formed but a small portion of Christian belief. highest and most speculative questions of theology, especially in Alexandria and Constantinople, had become watchwords of strife and faction, had stirred the passions of the lowest orders; the two Natures, or the single or double Will in Christ, had agitated the workshop of the artisan and the seats in the Circus. But when these great questions had sunk into quiescence, or, as in Latin Christianity, had never so fully occupied the general mind; when either the triumph of one party, or the general weariness, had worn out their absorbing interest, the religious mind subsided into its more ordinary occupations, and these bore but remote relation to the sublime truths of the Divine Unity and the revelation of God in Christ. As God the Father had receded, as it were, from the sight of man into a vague and unapproachable sanctity; as the human soul had been entirely centred on the more immediate divine presence in the Saviour; so the Saviour himself might seem to withdraw from the actual, at least the exclusive, devotion of the human heart, which was busied with intermediate objects of worship. Christ assumed |