these newly formed monarchies. Amid the universal
overthrow which the invaders had wrought she alone stood unmoved. The
heresy which had so threatened her disappeared. On Goths, and Franks, and
Saxons, and Alemans, she was free to exercise her divine power.[214] It is
in that sixth century of tremendous revolutions that she laid the
foundation of the future European society. Byzantium was descending to
Mahomet while Rome was forecasting the Christian commonwealth of Charles
the Great. In the Rome of Constantine, while the old civilisation had
accepted her name, the old pagan principles had continually impeded her
action. The civil rulers especially had harked back after the power of the
heathen Pontifex Maximus; but in these new peoples who were not yet
peoples, but only the unformed matter (_materia prima_) out of which
peoples might be made, the Church was free to put her own ideal as a _form_
within them. They had the rudiments of institutions, which they trusted her
to organise. They placed her bishops in their courts of justice, in their
halls of legislation. The greatest of their conquerors in the hour of his
supreme exaltation, which also was received from the Pope, was proud to be
vested by her in the dalmatic of a deacon.

Of this new world St. Gregory, in his desolated Rome, stood at the head.

There is yet another aspect of this wonderful man which we have to
consider. We possess about 850 of his letters. If we did but possess the
letters of his sixty predecessors in the same relative proportion as his,
the history of the Church for the five centuries preceding him, instead of
being often a blank, would present to us the full lineaments of truth. The
range of his letters is so great, their detail so minute, that they
illuminate his time and enable us to form a mental picture, and follow
faithfully that pontificate of fourteen years, incessantly interrupted by
cares and anxieties for the preservation of his city, yet watching the
beginnings and strengthening the polity of the western nations, and
counterworking the advances of the eastern despotism. The divine order of
greatness is, we know, to do and to teach. Few, indeed, have carried it out
on so great a scale as St. Gregory. The mass of his writing preserved to us
exceeds the mass preserved to us from all his predecessors together, even
including St. Leo, who with him shares the name of Great, and whose sphere
of action the mind compares with his. If he bec