ot allowed to live
take pleasure in the mystical sense of Scripture? How can one whose daily
chalice is bitterness present sweets for others to drink? What remains for
us but while we weep to give thanks for the strokes of the scourge which we
suffer for our iniquities. Our Creator is become our Father by the Spirit
of adoption whom He has given to us: sometimes He feeds His sons with
bread; sometimes He corrects them with the scourge; because He schools us
by sorrows and by gifts for the unending inheritance."[183]

This was the Rome in which Gregory ruled as Pope for fourteen years, since
he saw the archangel's sword sheathed over the castle of St. Angelo, into
which name the pagan mausoleum was baptised. Pestilence in the city, where
the remnant of a people wandered disconsolate by the mighty halls and vast
spaces of the old emperors--swords of pagan or Arian barbarians all round
the patched-up walls of Aurelian. City after city through the hapless Italy
reported as plundered or ruined by the Lombard devastation. Presently the
trials of a sick-bed and frequent attacks of gout were added to his daily
tale of sorrows. In the last years of Gregory it came to pass that the
universal Church was governed from the sick-bed of one worn down, not by
years--for he died at sixty-four--but by sufferings of body and mind. The
prisoner of the Lombards had to struggle perpetually with the spirit of
Byzantine despotism and the aggressive arrogance of a prelate whom
successive eastern sovereigns had nursed from a suffragan of Heraclea to be
the claimant of an ecumenical patriarchate. Yet the eyes of Gregory were
bent likewise on the northern conquerors who had seized the provinces of
the West. Before he was Pope he had observed in the slave-market of Rome
the fair-haired Angles whom he would fain make angels; when Pope he sent
forth from his father's house, which he had given to the great Father
Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle
lost to Christ. In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and
designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the
martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through
the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and
misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from
dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the
broken aqueducts mourn over their interce