ame to all succeeding times
an image of the great sacerdotal life in his own person, so all ages
studied in his words the pastoral care, joining him with St. Gregory of
Nazianzum and St. Chrysostom. The man who closed his life at sixty-four,
worn out not with age, but with labour and bodily pains, stands, beside the
learning of St. Jerome, the perfect episcopal life and statesmanship of St.
Ambrose, the overpowering genius of St. Augustine, as the fourth doctor of
the western Church, while he surpasses them all in that his doctorship was
seated on St. Peter's throne. If he closes the line of Fathers, he begins
the period when the Church, failing to preserve a rotten empire in
political existence, creates new nations; nay, his own hand has laid for
them their foundation-stones, and their nascent polity bears his manual
inscription, as the great campanile of St. Mark wears on its brow the
words, _Et Verbum caro factum est_. These were the words which St. Gregory
wrote as the bond of their internal cohesion, as the source of their
greatness, permanence, and liberty upon the future monarchies of Europe.

What mortal could venture to decide which of the two great victories
allowed by Gibbon to the Church is the greater? But we at least are the
children of the second. It was wrought in secrecy and unconsciousness, as
the greatest works of nature and of grace are wrought, but we know just so
much as this, that St. Gregory was one of its greatest artificers. The
Anglo-Saxon race in particular, for more than a thousand years, has
celebrated the Mass of St. Gregory as that of the Apostle of England. Down
to the disruption of the sixteenth century, the double line of its bishops
in Canterbury and York, with their suffragans, regarded him as their
founder, as much as the royal line deemed itself to descend from William
the Conqueror. If Canterbury was Primate of all England and York Primate of
England, it was by the appointment of Gregory. And the very civil
constitution of England, like the original constitutions of the western
kingdoms in general, is the work in no small part of that Church which St.
Augustine carried to Ethelbert, and whose similar work in Spain Gibbon has
acknowledged. Under the Norman oppression it was to the laws of St. Edward
that the people looked back. The laws of St. Edward were made by the
bishops of St. Gregory.

How deeply St. Gregory was impressed with the conviction of his own
vocation to be the head