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.