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.”