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 Another Random Document on
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fainting Barbarian into the monastery and give him some blessed
bread. And when he had come to himself the abbot represented to
him the injustice and cruelty of his conduct, and exhorted him to
change it for the future. The Goth was completely subdued.” [2]
The picture of the holy Abbot sitting and reading in the doorway is
one which recurs several times in his history, and it is good to know
that the doorway is one of the very few fragments remaining of
Benedict’s home at Monte Cassino. It still contains, I believe, an
inscription to that effect. The Lombard destruction left this archway
standing, and also the little tower whence Benedict’s bell called the
monks to work and prayer. One loves even to touch the stones that
knew his presence at Monte Cassino. Subiaco is full of him indeed,
but it was at Monte Cassino that his greatest work was done; over
its foreseen destruction he wept bitterly and it was there that he
died.
A yet more notable encounter than the one with Galla took place at
the arched doorway, in 542, one year before Benedict’s death. Totila,
the Ostrogoth, swept down through Italy to retrieve the losses and
defeats inflicted on his predecessor by Belisarius. It was a triumphal
progress. He was on his way to Naples when the whim took him to
see for himself the venerated prophet of the holy mountain. But first
he wished to test the prophet’s powers. So he caused the captain of
his guard to be dressed in all his own royal robes, down to the
famous purple boots, gave him three noble counts for his attendants
and a great escort of soldiers, and told him to go and pass himself
off on Benedict as the real Totila. We are not informed how the
unlucky captain regarded his mission—probably with fear and
reluctance—but it failed dismally. As he approached the monastery,
St. Benedict perceived him from afar, and called out, “My son, put
off the dress you wear! It is not yours.”
The captain, terrified, threw himself on the ground. Then
remounting, he and his whole company turned round and galloped
away at full speed to tell Totila that it was useless to attempt to
deceive the man of God. And Totila understood, and came himself,
very humbly, and saw the Abbot sitting as usual, in the doorway,
reading a holy book. The conqueror was afraid. He threw himself
face downward on the sward and dared not approach. Three times
Benedict bade him rise—still he lay prone. Then the Saint left his
seat and came and raised Totila up and led him to the house and
talked long and earnestly with him, reproving him for the wrong he
had done, and showing him that he must treat his conquered
subjects kindly and justly. Also St. Benedict, mercifully moved
thereto by the sincerity of the Barbarian, told him what lay in store
for him. “You shall enter Rome; you shall cross the sea; nine years
you shall reign, and in the tenth you shall die.”
And Totila repented of his many evil deeds and begged the seer to
pray for him, and went back to his camp a changed man.
Thenceforth he protected the weak, restrained his followers and
showed himself so mild and wise that the delighted Neapolitans,
who had been expecting a repetition of the awful massacres ordered
by Belisarius, said that Totila treated them as if they were his own
children. From that time the tenth year was ever before his eyes,
and when it came he died, contrite and resigned.
One gleam from home was shed on St. Benedict at Monte Cassino.
His sister Scholastica had long since followed his example and given
herself to God. It was not permitted to women to take the final vows
before the age of forty, but that did not prevent them from preparing
for the irrevocable dedication by living together in religious
communities, under a fixed rule, from their early youth, when they
were so inclined. Such a life Scholastica had led, somewhere in the
solitudes of the Sabines—perhaps in her own home at Norcia; but
she came at last to Monte Cassino and built a convent there for
herself and her companions, so as to be near the brother she loved.
Only once a year did they meet, and then they spent the day
together in a hut on the side of Benedict’s mountain, he coming
down with a few of the brethren, and she accompanied by some of
the nuns. All their discourse was of holy things, and much they
spoke of the longed-for joys of heaven.
Now in the year 543 they had thus passed the day together, and
evening was drawing on. St. Benedict rose, saying that he and his
companions must return to the monastery, but Scholastica, for the
first time in all those years, begged him to remain with her till the
morning. The Saint was horrified. “Do you not know, my sister,” he
exclaimed, “that the Rule forbids a monk to pass the night out of the
monastery? How can you ask me to do such a thing?”
Scholastica did not reply. She bowed her head on her hands on the
table that had served for their repast, and wept, praying to God that
her brother might stay, for she knew that they were to meet no
more in this world. She wept so heart-brokenly that her tears
flooded the table and made little rivers on the ground. It was a mild
February evening, and the sun had sunk away from a calm and
cloudless sky. But suddenly a fearful tempest arose, the thunder
roared, the rain came down in torrents, the lightning seared the
heavens from side to side.
“Sister, what have you done?” St. Benedict exclaimed, fearing that
the storm was a manifestation of the Divine displeasure.
Scholastica raised her head and smiled at him through her tears.
“God has granted what you refused,” she said. “Go back to the
monastery now, brother, if you can!”
But there was no going back through that tempest, and St. Benedict,
perceiving that the Lord was on Scholastica’s side, stayed with her
till morning, and they had great sweetness of holy converse all night
long. And when the sun rose, Scholastica asked for his blessing and
said farewell for the last time, and she and her nuns went down the
hill to their own convent, looking back many times, I think, to that
other one on the hill. And three days later she died, and her brother
saw her soul mount to heaven under the appearance of a spotless
dove, and he called his monks and said to them with great rejoicing:
“My sister is with God. Go and bring her body hither that we may
bury it with honour.” Which they did, and Benedict made her a grave
at the foot of the altar in his church.
Now he knew that his own end was approaching, and he disposed
all things rightly, and mightily exhorted his brethren to persevere
and to be faithful to their Rule. And he more than ever afflicted his
body with penance and abounded in charity to the poor. And thirty-
four days after Scholastica had departed, a great fever seized him,
so that he had no strength and suffered much. But he never ceased
from praying, and bade all his monks pray that God would have
mercy on his soul. On the sixth day of the fever he bade them carry
him into the church, where he had already caused his sister’s grave
to be opened to receive him. There, on the edge of the grave,
supported by his disciples, he received the Holy Viaticum, and then
bade them lift him to his feet. He stretched out his arms, praised
God once more for all His goodness, and died—standing, like the
gallant warrior he was!
They buried him beside Scholastica. Two of his monks, whom he had
sent forth on a mission, were very far away from Monte Cassino
when they saw, in the dead of night, a vast number of the stars of
heaven run together to form a great bridge of light towards the east.
A voice spoke to them, saying, “By this road, Benedict, the beloved
of God, has ascended to heaven.”
 CHAPTER III
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT

Three years before St. Benedict and his sister Scholastica passed
away, there was born, in a palace on the Cœlian Hill, a child who
was christened Gregory, a name which signified “Vigilant.” His
lineage was exceedingly illustrious, his parents belonging to the
great old Gens Anicia, a family of nobles which had been respected
and honoured ever since the days of the Republic, and in which, to
use the words of a chronicler of Gregory’s time, “the men seemed all
to have been born Consuls, and the women Saints.”
Gregory’s mother was St. Silvia, and I have seen the garden, on the
quiet Cœlian Hill, where as a child he ran about at her side, asking a
thousand questions, as clever children will, while she tended her
flowers and gathered healing herbs—the “basilica” and “Madrecara”
and “erba della Madonna” still dear to Roman apothecaries, to make
into medicines for the sick poor who thronged her charitable doors.
Mothers see a long way, and while Gregory’s father was planning a
great career in the world for his only son, Silvia was praying that
God would keep him pure, and make him great in His sight. And her
prayers prevailed, as mothers’ prayers generally do, and though she
had to wait a little, she lived to see their fulfilment.
As the boy grew up he threw himself heart and soul into his father’s
plans; he studied hard, and his naturally brilliant gifts brought him
much distinction. He rejoiced in all the pleasant things that birth and
wealth had bestowed on him—good looks, popularity, rich garments,
and sparkling jewels—and no doubt was immensely pleased and
flattered when, being still quite young, he was made Proctor of
Rome. That charge, however, was a grave one at the time, as the
Lombards, the most cruel and brutal of all the savage tribes that had
threatened the eternal city, chose the period of Gregory’s proctorship
to descend upon her and make her feel the weight of their heavy
hand. There were religious troubles too, and Gregory, who, through
all his busy official life in the world, was an ardent Christian, was
deeply exercised and distressed by them. But the world was only to
claim him for a little while, in his early manhood. Then he was
withdrawn from it to be prepared, through many long years of
prayer and penance and study, to step forth towards the end of his
life as its rescuer and ruler. Little by little the inner call came, faint at
first, sometimes resisted, but ever stronger, till Gregory understood
and obeyed.
His heart had gone out at once to the Benedictine monks, when, on
the destruction of Monte Cassino by the Lombards, they had sought
refuge in Rome. Some of them became his most intimate friends,
and their encouragement smoothed his path from the world to the
cloister. From the moment when he recognized and embraced his
vocation, all hesitation left him. He sold all his goods, distributed the
larger part to the poor, and, as if to atone for what the Lombards
had destroyed, built and endowed six new monasteries, placing
twelve Benedictines in each, in Sicily. That done, he converted his
home on the Cœlian into a seventh, where he gathered another
community about him, of the same learned Order. His father was
dead, and his mother, on becoming a widow, had already built a
convent close by, where she had taken the veil herself.
Gregory now devoted himself to three things, prayer, study, and
charity. For his own use—he was quickly elected Abbot of the
monastery—he reserved a small cell, where he could enjoy the
solitude he now so greatly desired, but—a delightfully human touch!
—he could not get on without his favourite cat, and one can see him
in imagination, pausing from his writing to smooth her velvety head
when she sprang upon the table and rubbed it against his cheek! I
had a little cat once who would sit motionless on a chair beside me
all night while I was writing, but the instant I laid down the pen she
was on my lap or my shoulder, talking in her own way, most
intelligently and cheeringly; so I was mightily pleased when I read
about St. Gregory’s cat!
The Benedictine Rule provided for all hospitality to strangers and the
poor, but at the same time directed that the monks themselves were
not to be disturbed from prayer and study. St. Gregory, however,
seems to have received all who wished to see him, perhaps as an
exercise of patience. Now there was a poor shipwrecked sailor who
seemed inclined to abuse the privilege. He came again and again,
and was never turned away, but on the occasion of what proved to
be his last visit Gregory had not a single thing left to give him. He
was looking round his rough cell in perplexity, when a messenger
appeared bringing the silver basin full of porridge which was the only
food he allowed himself, and which his mother sent him every day.
Here was what was needed! The next moment the needy sailor man
was walking away with the hot porridge and the silver porringer.
What St. Silvia said when she heard of the incident has not been
recorded—but Gregory never gave the matter another thought until
one day, long after, when the importunate sailor appeared to him in
his true character, that of an angel of light, and told him that God
had taken note of his charity, and—an alarming prophecy for the
Saint—that he would be elected Pope and do great things for the
Church.
All he asked was to be left quiet in his monastery, where he was
putting his whole heart into living the life of a model monk. In his
ardour against himself, he carried his penances too far and fasted so
rigorously that he came near to dying—an imprudence for which he
paid ever after in broken health and in being debarred from fasting
at all. He complains pitifully of having to “drag about such a big body
with so little strength,” but this was the least of the trials that
awaited him.
In the year 577, when Gregory was about thirty-seven years of age,
the reigning Pope, Benedict I, sent for him and insisted upon making
him one of the Cardinal Deacons to whom was entrusted the
jurisdiction of the seven “Regions” into which the city was divided.
Gregory protested, but had to take on the charge, and from that
time forward he belonged less to himself than to others. He was too
necessary and valuable to be spared. The next year, Pope Benedict
being dead, his successor, Pelagius II, decided to send Gregory on a
very difficult and important mission to the Emperor Tiberius
Constantinus at Constantinople, where trouble of all kinds seemed to
be brewing. Although Gregory bewails this “thrusting out from port
into the storm,” one cannot but feel how the alert fighting spirit in
the man leaps to the call. The born leader may persuade himself
that he is happiest in the seclusion he thinks good for his soul, but
when the call to arms comes, every repressed fibre of his being
wakes and cries for action.
When Gregory, taking with him several of his monks, sailed away
from Italy, he little dreamed that years were to pass before he
should return. On his arrival in Constantinople the first matter to
claim his attention was the ugly new heresy started by Eutychius,
who had drawn the Emperor and many others into the path of error
by declaring that there was to be no resurrection of the flesh.
Gregory was politely received by the Emperor, and instantly
requested the latter to call a conference in which the dogma should
be discussed. Tiberius consented, and there followed the famous
conference in which Gregory’s fiery eloquence and invincible logic
quashed the heresy at once. When he had finished speaking the
Emperor commanded that a fire should be lighted, and with his own
hands, and in the presence of a vast concourse, burnt the book
which Eutychius had written to propound the heresy, and declared
himself now and for ever the faithful son of the Church. Eutychius,
touched to the heart by Gregory’s arguments, accepted defeat and
rebuke as but small punishment for his fault, and when he was
dying, soon afterwards, pulled up the skin of one poor emaciated
hand with the fingers of the other, and cried to those around him, “I
confess that in this flesh we shall rise from the dead.”
Gregory proved a successful ambassador in every way. The relations
between the Church and the imperial court had been badly
interrupted by the Lombard invasion, but he welded them smoothly
and firmly together. Tiberius died while Gregory was in
Constantinople, and his successor, Maurice, was badly disposed to
the Church. Gregory brought him to a better mind and obliged him
to rescind an edict he had just issued forbidding any member of the
army to embrace the monastic life.
At last, after six years of what must have been the most anxious
work, requiring all that the great man had of wisdom and firmness
and tact, he returned to Italy—to find his beloved Rome in terrible
distress from a visitation of the pestilence. Gregory at once devoted
himself to the care of the sick and dying, and one can fancy how the
poor people’s eyes lighted up when he appeared among them again.
Then the good Pope Pelagius succumbed to the disease, and at once
all eyes turned to Gregory, who was unanimously elected as his
successor.
 ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.
Photo by Anderson, from the Statue in the Church of St. Gregory, Rome.

Gregory was honestly horrified. He refused, he pleaded, he argued,

but no one would listen to him. Then he fled. Disguised as a
peasant, he slipped away and hid himself in a secret cave in the
hills, entreating the Lord to protect him from the awful honour which
his fellow-citizens wished to thrust upon him. They meanwhile were
searching for him in every direction, and would have failed in their
quest had not Heaven put itself visibly on their side. From very far
off they beheld a tall pillar of light resting before the fugitive’s cave—
they rushed to it, dragged him forth, and made him Pope. Seeing
that his fellow-citizens would not listen to him, he wrote to the
Emperor Maurice, begging him not to confirm the election, but the
Romans intercepted the letter; the Emperor was informed of the
election in the usual way, and was only too glad to give it the
imperial sanction, still required then from Constantinople.
For once the “Vox Populi” had proved itself what it never is
nowadays, the “Vox Dei,” and for fourteen years Gregory reigned, in
virtue and wisdom and glory, for the everlasting good of the people
of God. Every gift that Heaven had bestowed upon him vindicated its
unerring designs. He accomplished in those fourteen years so many
wonderful things that cold sense almost refuses its adherence to the
visible facts. His colossal labours for the Church gave us the
Gregorian chant, the Sacramentary of the Missal and the Breviary;
his correspondence, so vast that, like Napoleon and Julius Cæsar, he
is supposed to have dictated to several secretaries at once,
embraces every point that required treating of at home and abroad.
His sermons, day after day, instructed the ignorant in the plain truths
of salvation while they no less amazed and illuminated the minds of
the most learned; and through it all his soul was never disturbed
from the calm heights of union with God, his heart never closed to a
single cry from the suffering and the weary.
The much-abbreviated list of “some of his labours,” as the Breviary
puts it, would stagger the grasp of any modern scholar or ruler. In a
few lines he is shown to us “re-establishing the Catholic Faith in
many places where it had suffered, repressing the Donatists in
Africa, the Arians in Spain, expelling the Agnostics from Alexandria,
and refusing the ‘Pallium’ (the sign of pontifical investiture) to
Syagrius, the Bishop-elect of Autun, until he had turned the ‘heretic
Neophytes’ [3] out of Gaul; quelling the audacity of John, the
Patriarch of Constantinople, who had dared to call himself the ‘Head
of the Universal Church,’ and so on, preaching, writing, praying, and
through it all suffering constantly and acutely.”
There is a legend to the effect that all these pains and sicknesses
had been voluntarily accepted in order to deliver a certain soul from
purgatory. The legend is only a legend, unsupported by the authority
of the Church—but it would have been just like St. Gregory to do it!
In every public or private trouble or upheaval, as well as in every
effort to reorganize and restore, his name, his presence is dominant.
After becoming Pope he lived chiefly at the Lateran palace, then the
official Papal residence, and they still keep there the narrow pallet
that served him for a bed, and—mark this, ye modern schoolboys!—
the little rod which he had to use to keep his dark-eyed, rampageous
young choristers in order!
The men who can govern others with the most unerring wisdom are
often entirely mistaken in their appreciation of themselves. Only the
other day the local and most successful Superior of a great
missionary order in America was bewailing his fate to me. “I told the
Bishop he was making a dreadful mistake in making me the Rector,”
he declared, “it is not my work—I was not intended to govern and
lead! I am a born free-lance—I want to travel all over the country
seeking out the lost souls. I am no good at anything else!”
But the Bishop knew better; and so it was with the great crowd of
clergy and laity who designated Gregory for the Papacy. What he
accomplished during his pontificate has been well summed up by
Montalembert: “Gregory, who alone amongst men has received, by
universal consent, the double surname of Saint and Great, will be an
everlasting honour to the Benedictine order, as to the Papacy. By his
genius, but especially by the charm and ascendancy of his virtue, he
was destined to organize the temporal power of the Popes, to
develop and regulate their spiritual sovereignty, to found their
paternal supremacy over the new-born crowns and races which were
to become the great nations of the future, and to be called France,
Spain, and England. It was he, indeed, who inaugurated the Middle
Ages, modern society, and Christian civilization.”
The task he undertook was a gigantic one, for on the one side he
had to contend with the exactions and oppressions of the corrupt
and decrepit Byzantine Emperors who were still the nominal rulers of
Rome and his own secular masters on the other, with the great new
forces let loose on the world in the increasing vigour and supremacy
of the Lombards and other northern nations, more than half
barbarous still, but, as Gregory clearly perceived, possessed of an
intelligence and vitality which only required training and instruction
to grow into great new polities which would replace the already dead
Roman Empire.
To appreciate his labours one would have to read that colossal
correspondence which has fortunately been preserved entire. Beside
the mighty matters of Church and Empire which it sets forth, there
shows all through the most tender and minute care for the lower
and therefore unprotected classes, as well as for individual souls.
Slavery, in every form, excited Gregory’s generous indignation, and
his most earnest efforts were devoted to restoring slaves to the rank
of human beings. The peasants on the great estates were serfs—
practically slaves. He decreed that their marriages should be
inviolable, their property their own, their wills valid; that wherever
possible the Church revenues should be devoted to buying the
freedom of slaves, and that never, on any plea, should Christians be
sold to Jews or pagans. At the same time he enacted that neither
Jews nor pagans should be baptized by force, and commanded that
the synagogues of the Jews should be restored to them and that
they should be allowed freedom of worship.
Always humble and diffident about asking anything for himself, it is
amusing to find him severely reprimanding a Bishop who had
authorized or permitted extortionate exactions to be practised
against an obscure farmer in Sardinia, and at the same time writing
meekly to the overseer of some ecclesiastical property in Sicily—a
stud farm where were kept four hundred stallions: “You have sent
me one bad horse and four asses. I cannot ride the horse, because
it is bad, nor the asses, because they are asses. If you would assist
to sustain me, send me something that I can use!”
But after all the special bond between St. Gregory and English-
speaking peoples lies in the memorable act by which England was
evangelized, after the Faith first planted there had been annihilated
by the pagan Barbarians, Saxons, Angles, Scandinavians, to whom
she fell an easy prey when Rome withdrew its protecting legions and
abandoned her to her fate.
It is rather sweet to know that it was the fair, innocent beauty of a
group of English children, standing, dazed and frightened, in the
market to be sold, that first touched his heart to such warm pity for
their country. He was then living as the Abbot of the community he
had founded on the Cœlian Hill, and enough has been said to show
how happy he was in his quiet life there.
It must have been some unusual necessity which took him far down
into the town on a certain day and through the noisy crowded slave
market. But on seeing the children, with their blue eyes full of tears
and their long golden hair shining in the sun, everything else was
forgotten; he stopped abruptly to ask who they were.
“Angles, from the isle of Britain,” was the answer, given indifferently
enough. The keeper knew that the big, dark-faced monk was not a
slave-buyer.
“Angles! They are born to be angels!” cried Gregory, and straightway
he flew to the Pope and besought permission to go with some of his
monks to Britain, to preach the Gospel. The Pope, taken by surprise,
consented; and before he had time to think over the matter,
Gregory, with his volunteers, had put three days of travelling
between himself and Rome. Then the news leaked out, and the
people rose like one man and rushed to the Pope, who was on his
way to St. Peter’s, and, arresting his progress, burst into indignant
cries: “You have offended St. Peter! You have ruined Rome in
allowing Gregory to leave us!”
Pelagius saw his mistake and sent messengers in all haste to call
Gregory back. Of course he obeyed; he never forgot England, but it
was only in the sixth year of his own pontificate (596) that he could
carry out his design, and then he could not himself take part in the
expedition. He found a noble substitute in St. Augustine, and it must
have been with a glad heart that he sent him forth, and gave him
and his forty Benedictines the final blessing, as they knelt (so we are
told) on the grassy stretch below the steps of Gregory’s own convent
on the Cœlian Hill. The grass grows there still; still the green trees
shadow the enclosure called St. Gregory’s park, through which one
approaches the church, and still the flowers bloom in Silvia’s garden
where he played as a little boy. Even modern Rome has been loath
to encroach on the place so dear to him who loved Rome so much.
I have often wondered what became of the little English children he
saw, and seeing, loved. Surely he rescued them and placed them
with kind people to be cared for. His quick notice of them reminds
one of our own Pius IX, who could never pass an English child
without stopping to bless it, and, while blessing the child, to pray for
England, whom Augustine and his companions made “the Isle of
Saints” and the “Dowry of Mary.”
One more picture of St. Gregory must close this humble sketch of his
great life. As already related, after he had been elected Pope he sent
a letter to the Emperor Maurice, imploring him not to confirm the
decision of the people. And just then, as if jealous of all the good
work that was going forward, the Powers of Evil let loose a terrible
outbreak of the pestilence in Rome. They could not touch the
spiritual city—Rome invisible, the Sanctuary of the Faith—but the
material one seemed to be delivered into their hands, and terrible
were its sufferings. Poverty and neglect, and the ruin of ceaseless
wars, had made it vulnerable at every point; the pestilence had
swept it again and again, but this was the most frightful visitation of
all. Gregory and his monks, and many other charitable persons
devoted themselves to the sick and dying; the lazarets and hospitals
were crowded—every day with new sufferers as the dead were
carried out; but it became impossible to bury the dead fast enough.
Neither prayer nor effort seemed of any avail, and dull despair
settled on all hearts. Apparently this was to be the end.
Then Gregory instituted the first of those great processions which, in
moments of stress, have moved across the pages of history ever
since, aweing us a little by the whole-hearted faith and trust of our
ancestors in the mercy of Heaven. Gregory decreed that all, clergy
and laity, who could stand on their feet should put on the garments
of penitence and follow him through the stricken streets to pray at
the tomb of St. Peter. And all who could obeyed like one man. What
a sight that must have been when the Saint, “the strong, dark-faced
man of heavy build,” led his afflicted people from the “Mother of
Churches” at the Lateran Gate, down past all the ruined pomp of the
Palatine and the Colosseum and the Forum towards the river and the
great Basilica of Constantine beyond! How the response of the Major
Litanies must have thundered up from all those breaking hearts to
the “skies of brass” that hung over Rome! The ever-repeated “Te
rogamus, audi nos!” and “Libera nos, Domine,” even now bring tears
to one’s eyes with their almost despairing simplicity; then they were
the last appeals of a crushed and ruined race for one more chance
to repent and atone for its heaped misdeeds.
And the chance was granted. As the endless procession moved along
towards St. Peter’s its leader paused before the Mausoleum of
Hadrian, that huge monument of pagan ambition, and raised his
eyes and heart in supplication, offering we know not what of his own
life and destiny for his people’s sins.
Suddenly he stood transfigured. The chanting ceased; all eyes
followed Gregory’s gaze, all ears were strained to catch the heavenly
melody that floated, high and clear, fresh as the song of birds at
dawn, over the sorrowing city.

“Regina Cœli, laetare,

Quia quem meruisti portare,
Resurrexit, sicut, dixit!”

It was the chant of the Resurrection!

“Alleluia, Alleluia!” came the sequel in one burst from that great
multitude, as the angels’ voices grew fainter and were lost in the
depths overhead. And then, on hearts bursting now with relief and
joy there fell the awe that mortals feel in the presence of the
Heavenly Ones, for there, on the summit of the towering fortress,
stood the radiant archangel—and he was sheathing his flaming
sword.
The pestilence was over. Once more God had had mercy on his
people. And, since the angels’ song was addressed to the Queen of
Heaven, we know that it was she whose prayers had stayed the arm
that had clung round her neck in Bethlehem.
St. Gregory passed to his reward on March 12, 604, having reigned
nearly fourteen years. The mourning city chose Sabinianus of
Volterra to succeed him, but only three years had elapsed when
Sabinianus in his turn made place for a Boniface (III) who lived but
one year after his election, and then came another Boniface, a Saint,
a strong man of the Abruzzi, and in his reign the world found out
that though imperial Rome was indeed dead, the Rome that Gregory
and Benedict and their fellow-workers had planted on her grave
during that century of apparent eclipse had taken root below and
shot out branches above, and had become as a mighty tree
affording guidance, shelter, and sustenance to the whole Christian
world.
Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special mission to
fulfil, one that coloured all his acts and sheds its individual lustre on
his memory. No doubt or hesitation seems to accompany the
acceptance and fulfilment of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place
the seal of visible Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the
Faith for all time. To it was Boniface, the fourth of that name, who
decreed and carried out the triumph of which I spoke in a preceding
chapter. But it is a big subject and it must have a chapter to itself.
 CHAPTER IV
MEMORIES OF THE PANTHEON

If you stand before San Pietro in Montorio and look down from the
spot where St. Peter was crucified, you will see, rounding up in the
low-lying heart of the city, a dome, white, huge, uncrowned,
standing out from the darker buildings round it like an enormous
mother-of-pearl shell, softly iridescent, yet, when storm is in the air,
taking on a grey and deathlike hue. That is the Pantheon, and thus it
has stood, reflecting every mood of the Roman sky, since the days of
Hadrian, who became Emperor in the year 117. Hadrian built the
magic dome, but it is not his name that stands out in the gigantic
lettering on the pediment over the portico. Ninety years before his
time, Marcus Agrippa, the intimate friend and (for his sins!) the son-
in-law of Augustus, erected a magnificent temple close to the Baths
which still bear his name in the Campus Martius, the field of which
my brother has told the touching story in “Ave Roma Immortalis.”
Agrippa must have forgotten to properly propitiate the gods; we
moderns should say that he “had no luck,” for his gorgeous temple
was soon struck by lightning and presented a forlorn appearance
when Hadrian, that enthusiastic builder, decided to restore it.
This he did on his usual princely scale; when he had done with it,
the Pantheon (properly “Pantheum,” “all-holy”) must indeed have
dazzled the eyes of the beholders, for the dome was entirely covered
with tiles of gilt bronze that under the rays of the sun made it seem
a second sun that had come to rest on earth. The gilt tiles were
stripped off in 663 by a greedy little Emperor, Constans II, who took
them away to Syracuse, whence the Saracens successfully looted
them a few years afterwards. So the thing that looks like mother-of-
pearl is really only covered with sheets of lead—but even lead, when
the heavens have looked on it long enough, may become a thing of
life and beauty. When Hadrian had finished his building there was
nothing left of Agrippa’s original one except the portico; but Hadrian,
with rare moderation, left the original founder’s name on that. The
Pantheon, which is called by archæologists “the most perfect pagan
monument in Rome,” seems to have been, in its beginnings,
unfortunate, for only sixty-four years after Hadrian’s death it again
stood sadly in need of repair, if we may believe the magniloquent
inscription left on its front by Septimus Severus and his son,
Caracalla, when they had carried out their pious designs of further
restoration.
But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially what he made
it, a vast and perfect round under a vast and perfect dome, a place
where the winds of heaven may sweep down from the central
opening—thirty feet across—overhead, and circle round the wide
well of the interior and rise to the sky again without having
encountered the shock of a single angle on their way. And for more
than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain has fallen and the
sun has shone, and the stars have looked down on Hadrian’s
pavement through the great opening, whence worshippers now, like
the worshippers in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to
the vault of heaven above.
But for two hundred years—as if to partly balance the three
centuries of persecution which had preceded them—the Pantheum
was closed and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred
years during which the silence was never broken, and stars and sun
and winds had their way in the stupendous empty fane. It was the
Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory who closed and sealed its
bronze doors—the same that guard it now (and perhaps this and a
few other such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer,
should be remembered to his attenuated credit), preferring to have
it abandoned altogether rather than used for the service of idols.
And so it stood, a beautiful reproach, from 399 to 609, when our
Pope Boniface told the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame
not to wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a church of the
Lord.
Phocas—that blood-stained figure who emerges now and then to
surprise us by some memorable action—said the Pope was right, and
gave him the building to do with it as he liked. And then Boniface
carried out the great plan which must have been simmering in his
brain for years. The temple, built for the seven deities of the seven
planets, was to become the shrine of the bodies of the Saints and be
consecrated to the one True God, under the title of “St. Mary of the
Martyrs.” Under that perfect dome of exactly equal height and
diameter (142 feet) he would finally lay to rest all the sacred
remains which were still buried in the Catacombs all round the city.
But there was much to do first. The rich architectural disposition of
the interior required no alteration beyond the erection of a High
Altar; the great window to the sky Boniface would not close; when
dust and rubbish were cleared away the material preparations were
over, but the tremendous ceremony of purification and consecration
had yet to be accomplished. For these the illustrious predecessors of
Boniface had been inspired to draw up a ceremonial of such
profound meaning and glorious diction as remains matchless in the
annals of the Liturgy.
We can only see it now with the eyes of the spirit, but, even while
trying to do that, we must not let the magnificence of the external
function make us forget that which the Church so lovingly and
repeatedly impresses upon us—first, that there is but one Sanctuary
worthy of the Most High, His Throne and dwelling in the inaccessible
light of the Fixed Heaven, round which all universes that the human
mind can grasp revolve, like starry spindrift round a living sun; and,
secondly, that the home God has built for Himself on earth and loves
with the most passionate tenderness is the heart of the Christian,
where He will abide for time and eternity if it do not cast Him out.
The chief object of ecclesiastical architecture is to symbolize the
grandeur of the union between the soul and its Creator; as such,
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