barbarians: is surrounded
with palaces whose masters are ruined, and which are daily dropping into
decay. The Pope, behind the crumbling walls of Aurelian, shudders at the
cruelties practised on his people: the bishop of Constantinople, by terming
himself ecumenical, announces ostentatiously that he claims to rule all his
brethren in the East--that he is supreme judge over his brother patriarchs.
One only thing he does not do: he claims no power over the Pope himself; he
does not attempt to revise his administration in the West. He acknowledges
his primacy, seated as it is in a provincial city, pauperised, and
decimated with hunger and desertion.

In this interval the Pope has seen seven emperors pass like shadows on the
western throne, and their place taken first by an Arian Herule and then by
an Arian Goth. Herule and Goth disappear, the last at the cost of a war
which desolates Italy during twenty years, and casts out, indeed, the
Gothic invader and confiscator of Italy, but only to supply his place by
the grinding exactions of an absent master, followed immediately by the
inroad of fresh savages, far worse than the Goth, under whose devastation
Italy is utterly ruined. Whatever portion of dignity the old capital of the
world lent to Leo is utterly lost to Gregory. It has been one tale of
unceasing misery, of terrible downfal to Rome, from Genseric to Agilulf. It
may seem to have been suspended during the thirty-three years of
Theodorick, but it was the iron force of hostile domination wielded by the
gloved hand. When the Goth was summoned to depart, he destroyed ruthlessly.
The rage of Vitiges casts back a light upon the mildness of Theodorick; the
slaughters ordered by Teia are a witness to Gothic humanity. No words but
those of Gregory himself, in applying the Hebrew prophet, can do justice to
the temporal misery of Rome. The Pope felt himself silenced by sorrow in
the Church of St. Peter, but he ruled without contradiction the Church in
East and West. Not a voice is heard at the time, or has come down to
posterity, which accuses Gregory of passing the limits of power conceded to
him by all, or of exercising it otherwise than with the extremest
moderation.

Disaster in the temporal order, continued through five generations, from
Leo to Gregory, has clearly brought to light the purely spiritual
foundation of the papal power. If the attribution to the Pope of the three
great words spoken by our Lord to St. Peter, m