"Also, I am told that your Excellency issued a certain decree against the misbelief of the Jews, which they strove by a bribe to have modified. This bribe you despised, and in the desire to please God preferred innocence to gold. This brought to my mind king David's act. He longed for a draught from the fountain of Bethlehem, which the enemy's host encompassed. His soldiers risked their lives to bring it. But he refused, saying: 'God forbid that I should drink the blood of these men. So he offered it to the Lord.'[208] If an armed king made a sacrifice to God of the water which he refused, think what a sacrifice to Almighty God that king presented who for His love refused to receive, not water, but gold. Therefore, most excellent son, I say confidently that the gold which you refused to receive against God you offered to Him. These are great deeds, the glory of which is due to God....
"Government of subjects should be tempered with great moderation, lest power steal away the judgment. A kingdom is ruled well when the glory of ruling does not overmaster the spirit. Provide also against fits of anger, lest unlimited power be used hurriedly. Anger in punishing even delinquents should not anticipate judgment like a mistress, but follow reason as a servant, coming when she is called. If it once is in possession of the mind, it puts down to justice even a cruel deed. Therefore it is written: 'The wrath of man worketh not the justice of God'; and again: 'Let everyone be swift to hear but slow to speak'. I do not doubt but that by God's help you practise all this. But as opportunity offers, I creep behind your good works, that when an adviser adds himself to what you do without advice, you may not be alone in your doing. May Almighty God stretch forth His heavenly hand to protect you in all your acts, granting you prosperity in the present life, and, after long years, eternal joy.
"I enclose a small key from the most sacred body of the Apostle St. Peter, with his blessing. It contains an iron filing from his chains, that what bound his neck for martyrdom may deliver yours from all sin. I have also given the bearer of these a cross for you: it contains some of the wood of the Lord's cross, and hair of St. John Baptist; by which you may always be consoled by our Saviour through the intercession of His precursor. To our most reverend brother and fellow-bishop Leander we have sent the pallium from the See of the Apostle St. Peter, in accordance with ancient custom, with your life, with his own goodness and dignity."
This letter of St. Gregory had been drawn forth by one from king Rechared to him, in which the king said he had been minded to inform of his conversion one who was superior to all other bishops, that he had sent a golden jewelled chalice which he hoped might be found worthy of the Apostle who was first in honour. "I beseech your Highness, when you have an opportunity, to find me out with your golden letters. For how truly I love you is not, I think, unknown to one whose breast the Lord inspires, and those who behold you not in the body, yet hear your good report; I commend to your Holiness with the utmost veneration Leander, bishop of Seville, who has been the means of making known to us your good will. I am delighted to hear of your health, and beg of your Christian prudence that you would frequently commend to our common Lord in your prayers the people who, under God, are ruled by us, and have been added to Christ in your times, that true charity towards God may be strengthened by the very distance which divides us."[209]
The fact commemorated in these letters was indeed one for which the Pope might well use the angelical hymn of praise. "The bishops of Spain,"[210] says Gibbon, "respected themselves and were respected by the public; their indissoluble union confirmed their authority; and the regular discipline of the Church introduced peace, order, and stability into the government of the State. From the reign of Rechared, the first Catholic king, to that of Witiza, the immediate predecessor of the unfortunate Roderic, sixteen national councils were successively convened. The six metropolitans—Toledo, Seville, Merida, Braga, Tarragona, and Narbonne—presided according to their respective seniority; the assembly was composed of their suffragan bishops, who appeared in person or by their proxies; and a place was assigned to the most holy or opulent of the Spanish abbots. During the first three days of the convocation, as long as they agitated the ecclesiastical questions of doctrine and discipline, the profane laity was excluded from their debates, which were conducted, however, with decent solemnity. But on the morning of the fourth day the doors were thrown open for the entrance of the great officers of the palace, the dukes and counts of the provinces, the judges of the cities, and the Gothic nobles; and the decrees of heaven were ratified by the consent of the people. The same rules were observed in the provincial assemblies, the annual synods which were empowered to hear complaints and to redress grievances; and a legal government was supported by the prevailing influence of the Spanish clergy.... The national councils of Toledo, in which the free spirit of the barbarians was tempered and guided by episcopal policy, have established some prudent laws for the common benefit of the king and people. The vacancy of the throne was supplied by the choice of the bishops and palatines; and after the failure of the line of Alaric, the regal dignity was still limited to the pure and noble blood of the Goths. The clergy who anointed their lawful prince always recommended the duty of allegiance; and the spiritual censures were denounced on the heads of the impious subjects who should resist his authority, conspire against his life, or violate by an indecent union the chastity even of his widow. But the monarch himself, when he ascended the throne, was bound by a reciprocal oath to God and his people that he would faithfully execute his important trust. The real or imaginary faults of his administration were subject to the control of a powerful aristocracy; and the bishops and palatines were guarded by a fundamental privilege that they should not be degraded, imprisoned, tortured, nor punished with death, exile, or confiscation, unless by the free and public judgment of their peers."
We have here the historian, who is one of the bitterest enemies of the Christian Church and Faith, avowing that the barbarian Visigoths received from the hands of that Church and Faith, at the end of the sixth century, the great institutions of a limited Christian monarchy, consecrated by the Church, in which the king at his accession solemnly avowed his responsibility for his exercise of the immense functions entrusted to him; also of parliaments, in which clergy and laity sat together in common deliberation upon the affairs of the State, grievances were redressed, and laws for the benefit of king and people passed; in fact, a reign of legal government, based upon law and justice, and confirmed by religious sanction.
And in all this the hand of the Pope was seen, sending to the chief bishop of Spain the pallium direct from the body of St. Peter, on which it had been laid, as the visible symbol of apostolic power dwelling in the Apostle's See, and radiating from it.
This is the first instance, and not the least striking, of a fact which lies at the foundation of modern Europe; for so the Teuton war leaders became Christian kings, and so the northern barbarians were changed into Christian nations. For that which Gibbon here describes took place in all the Teuton peoples who accepted the Catholic faith. He has elsewhere said: "The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious and decisive victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire, and over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the empire and embraced the religion of the Romans".[211]
Of this latter victory we can celebrate the accomplishment, as St. Gregory did, in the words of the angelic hymn, but the details have not been preserved for us, even in the scanty proportion which we possess concerning the former. Fighting for thirty years with the Lombards for the very existence of Rome, Gregory was the contemporary and witness of this second victory. Not until the Arian heresy was subdued by the Catholic faith could it be said to be accomplished. The pontificate of his ancestor in the third degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople, who ruled its emperor. Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church in Africa, and the Visigoth Arians had possession of France from the Loire southwards, and of Spain. Nowhere in the whole world was there a Catholic prince. The north and east of France and Belgium was held by the still pagan Franks. By the time of Gregory, Clovis and his sons had extinguished the Arian Visigoth kingdom and the Arian kingdom of Burgundy, and ruled one Catholic kingdom of all France. Under Rechared, the Arian Visigoth kingdom in Spain became Catholic. Gregory also announced to his friend, the patriarch Eulogius, that the pagan Saxons in England were receiving the Catholic faith by thousands from his missionary. The taint which the wickedness of the eastern emperor Valens had been so mysteriously allowed to communicate to the nascent faith of the Teuton tribes, through the noblest of their family, the Goths, was, during the century which passed between Pope Felix and Pope Gregory, purged away. It was decided beyond recal that the new nations of the West should be Catholic. Five times had Rome been taken and wasted: at one moment, it is said, all its inhabitants had deserted it and fled. The ancient city was extinct: in and out of it rose the Rome of the Popes, which Gregory was feeding and guarding. The eastern emperor, who called himself the Roman prince, in recovering her had destroyed her; but the life that was in her Pontiff was indestructible. The ecumenical patriarch was foiled by the Servant of the servants of God: in proportion as the eastern bishops submitted their original hierarchy, of apostolic institution, and the graduated autonomy which each enjoyed under it, to an imperial minister, termed a patriarch, in Constantinople, all the bishops of the West, placed as they were under distinct kingdoms, found their common centre, adviser, champion, and ruler in the Chair of Peter, fixed in a ruined Rome. If Gregory, in his daily distress, thought that the end of the world was coming, all subsequent ages have felt that in him the world of the future was already founded. In the two centuries since the death of the great Theodosius, the countries which form modern Europe had passed through indescribable disturbance, a misery without end—dislodgement of the old proprietors, a settlement of new inhabitants and rulers. The Christian religion itself had receded for a time far within the limits which it had once reached, as in the north of France, in Germany, and in Britain. The rulers of broad western lands, with the conquering host which they led, had become the victims first, and then the propagators, of the same fatal heresy. The conquered population alone remained Catholic. The conversion of Clovis was the first light which arose in this darkness. And now, a hundred years after that conversion, Paris and Bordeaux, and Toulouse and Lyons, Toledo and Seville, were Catholic once more, and Gregory, a provincial captive in a collapsing Rome, was owned by all these cities as the standard and arbiter of their faith, and the king of the Visigoths thankfully received a few filings from the chains of the Apostle Peter as a present which worthily celebrated his conversion.
It is to be observed that this absolute defeat of the Arian heresy in several countries is accomplished in spite of the power which, in all of them, was wielded by Arian rulers. In vain had Genseric, Hunnerich, Guntamund, and Thrasimund oppressed and tortured the Catholics of Africa, banished their bishops, and set up nominees of their own as Arian bishops in their places for a hundred years. No sooner did Belisarius land on their soil than the fabric reared with every possible deceit and cruelty fell to the ground. The Arian Vandal king was carried away in triumph, as the spoil of a single battle, to Constantinople, and the Catholic bishops, while they hailed Justinian as their deliverer, met in plenary council, acknowledging the Primacy of Peter, as in the days of St. Augustine. In vain had the powerful Visigoth monarchy, seated during three generations at Toulouse, persecuted with fraud and cruelty its Catholic people. A single blow from the arm of Clovis delivered from their rule the whole country from the Loire to the Pyrenees. In vain had Gondebald and his family in Burgundy wavered between the heresy which he professed and the Catholic faith which he admired. The children of Clovis absorbed that kingdom also. But the strongest example of all remains. In vain, too, had Theodorick, after the murder of his rival Odoacer when an invited guest in the banquet of Ravenna, covered over the savage, and governed with wisdom and moderation a Catholic people, whom he soothed by choosing their noblest—Cassiodorus, Symmachus, and Boethius—for his ministers. He had formed into a family compact by marriages the Arian rulers in Africa, Spain, and Gaul. His moderation gave way when he saw the eastern emperor resume the policy of a Catholic sovereign. He put on the savage again, and he ended with the murder not only of his own long-trusted ministers, but of the Pope, who refused to be his instrument in procuring immunity for heresy from a Catholic emperor.