om of the Church Spain, now
renouncing her Arianism; sent out missionaries to Britain, and converted
the pagans of that country; extirpated heathenism from Sardinia;
resisted John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had dared to take
the title of universal bishop; exposed to the emperor the ruin
occasioned by the pride, ambition, and wickedness of the clergy, and
withstood him on the question of the law prohibiting soldiers from
becoming monks. It was not in the nature of such a man to decline the
regulation of political affairs; he nominated tribunes, and directed the
operations of troops.

[Sidenote: His superstition.]

[Sidenote: He materializes religion.]

[Sidenote: His hatred of learning,]

[Sidenote: and expulsion of classical authors.]

No one can shake off the system that has given him power; no one can
free himself from the tincture of the times of which he is the
representative. Though in so many respects Gregory was far in advance of
his age, he was at once insincere and profoundly superstitious. With
more than Byzantine hatred he detested human knowledge. His
oft-expressed belief that the end of the world was at hand was
perpetually contradicted by his acts, which were ceaselessly directed to
the foundation of a future papal empire. Under him was sanctified that
mythologic Christianity destined to become the religion of Europe for
many subsequent centuries, and which adopted the adoration of the Virgin
by images and pictures; the efficacy of the remains of martyrs and
relics; stupendous miracles wrought at the shrines of saints; the
perpetual interventions of angels and devils in sublunary affairs; the
truth of legends far surpassing in romantic improbability the stories of
Greek mythology; the localization of heaven a few miles above the air,
and of hell in the bowels of the earth, with its portal in the crater of
Lipari. Gregory himself was a sincere believer in miracles, ghosts, and
the resurrection of many persons from the grave, but who, alas! had
brought no tidings of the secret wonders of that land of deepest shade.
He made these wild fancies the actual, the daily, the practical religion
of Europe. Participating in the ecclesiastical hatred of human learning,
and insisting on the maxim that "Ignorance is the mother of devotion,"
he expelled from Rome all mathematical studies, and burned the Palatine
library founded by Augustus Caesar. It was valuable for the many rare
manuscripts it contained