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 reëstablishing 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!