The mission having thus far met with such marvellous success Augustine felt that the time was come for him to assume a regular ecclesiastical position, and accordingly he journeyed to Arles, where the archbishop of that see, in accordance with orders received from Gregory, consecrated him as archbishop of the English nation.[48] Divers doubts and questionings having occurred to the soul of the new metropolitan he despatched, about 600, two of his brethren, Laurentius and Peter, to lay his difficulties before his Roman patron. The questions asked are of an extraordinary kind, and startle us by their strange juxtaposition of things momentous and things indifferent. Thus a question whether it is permissible for two brothers to marry two sisters, to whom they themselves stand in no kind of relationship, is followed by another, whether a man may be permitted to many his father’s widow. It is difficult to believe that the framer of such a question can have even read St. Paul’s letters to the Christians of Corinth. However, if the archbishop’s questions seem to us rather surprising, the pope’s answers are noble and statesmanlike. Especially memorable is his answer to the inquiry: “The faith being one, what can I say as to the diverse customs of the Churches, as, for instance, where the mass is celebrated in one way in the Holy Roman Church and in another way in the Churches of Gaul?” Pope Gregory replied, “You, my brother, know well the custom of the Roman Church in which you were reared. But my pleasure is that you should anxiously select whatever custom you may find, whether in the Roman or in the Gaulish or any other Church, which is pleasing to Almighty God, and teach the customs which you have thus gathered from many Churches to the Church of the Angles, which is yet new to the faith. For things are not to be prized according to the places from which they originate, but places are to be loved according to the good things to which they give birth.”