ror as
soon as his health was re-established. We learn from another letter,
which he wrote some years after to the bishops of the empire, that, on
this occasion, he exhorted the bishops to comply with the first part,
and as to the second, not to suffer persons engaged in the army to be
admitted among the clergy or to the monastic habit, unless their
vocation had been thoroughly tried for the space of three years, that it
might be evident they were converted from the world, and sought not to
change one kind of secular life for another. He made to Mauritius the
strongest remonstrances against this edict, saying, "It is not agreeable
to God, seeing by it the way to heaven was shut to several; for many
cannot be saved unless they forsake all things." He, therefore,
entreated the emperor to mitigate this law, approving the first article
as most just, unless the monastery made itself answerable for the debts
of such a person received in it. As to the second, he allows that the
motives and sincerity of the conversion of such soldiers are to be
narrowly examined before they ought to be admitted to the monastic
habit. Mauritius, who had before conceived certain prejudices against
St. Gregory, was offended at his remonstrances, and showed his
resentment against him for some years, but at length agreed to the
mitigations of each article proposed by St. Gregory: which the holy
pope, with great pleasure, notified by a letter addressed to the bishops
of the empire.[47]

The emperor Mauritius, having broken his league with the Avari, a
Scythian {578} nation, then settled on the banks of the Danube,[48] was
defeated, and obliged to purchase an ignominious peace. He also refused
to ransom the prisoners they had taken, though they asked at first only
a golden penny a head, and at last only a sixth part, or four farthings;
which refusal so enraged the barbarians, that they put them all to the
sword. Mauritius began then to be stung with remorse, gave large alms,
and prayed that God would rather punish him in this life than in the
next. His prayer was heard. His avarice and extortions had rendered him
odious to all his subjects; and, in 602, he ordered the army to take
winter quarters in the enemy's country, and to subsist on freebooting,
without pay. The soldiers, exasperated at this treatment, chose one
Phocas, a daring ambitious man, to be their leader, and marched to
Constantinople, where he was crowned emperor. Mauritius had made his