e forward before long as the masters of the country.

This rule of the Pragmatic Sanction was not an isolated instance; at
every point the bishop was placed _en rapport_ with the State, with the
provincials, and with the exarch himself.[6] In jurisdiction, in
advice, from the moment when he assisted at a new governor's
installation, the bishop was at the side of the lay officer, to
complain and even, if need be, to control.

One power still remained to the emperor himself (in the seventh century
it was transferred to the exarch)--that of confirming the election of
the pope. Narses seated Pelagius on the papal throne; but when one as
mighty as the "eunuch general" arose in Gregory the Great, the power of
the exarchate passed, slowly but surely, into the hands of the papacy.
The changes of rulers in Italy, the policies of the falling Goths and
of the rising Roman Empire, found their completion in the effects of
the Lombard invasion. But before this there were thirty years of
growth for the Church, and the growth was due very largely to a new
force, though for a while it remained below the surface. It was the
power of the monastic life, realised anew by the genius and holiness of
S. Benedict of Nursia. {35} [Sidenote: The work of S. Benedict.] Born
about 480, of noble parentage, he gave himself from early years to
serve God "in the desert." At about the age of fifteen he is spoken of
by his biographer, the great S. Gregory, in words which might form the
motto of his life, as "sapienter indoctus." First, a solitary at
Subiaco; then the unwilling abbat of a neighbouring monastery, whose
monks endeavoured to kill him; then again living "by himself in the
sight of Him who seeth all things"; at last, in 529, he founded in
Campania the monastery of Monte Cassino, the mother of all the revived
monasticism of the Middle Age.

[Sidenote: His rule.]

The monastery of Monte Cassino became a pattern of the religious life.
S. Benedict was a wise and statesmanlike ruler, to whom men came with
confidence from every rank and every race, to be his disciples, or to
place their boys under him for instruction. The rule which he drew up
was as potent in the ecclesiastical world as was the code of Justinian
in the civil. It had its bases in the root ideas of obedience,
simplicity, and labour. "Never to depart from the governance of God"
was his primary maxim to his monks; and a monastery was to be a "school
of the Lord's service"