Let us approach the secret of this transformation in the person of the man who best represents it. Gregory was born about the year 540, and so was witness from his childhood of the intense misery and special degradation of Rome produced by the Gothic war. He was himself the son of Gordian, a man of senatorial rank, from whom he inherited great landed property. Through him he was the great grandson of that illustrious Pope Felix III., whom we have seen resist with success the insolence of Acacius and the despotism of Zeno. Gregory had therefore a doubly noble inheritance--that of a true Roman noble's spirit, and that of the Church's championship. His paternal house stood on that well-known slope of the Coelian hill, opposite the imperial palace on the Palatine, from which in after-time he sent forth St. Augustine with the monks his brethren to be the Apostle of paganised England. He founded six monasteries in Sicily upon his property, and changed his father's palace into a seventh, in which he followed the Benedictine Rule. In early manhood he had been praetor or prefect of the city, being probably the most eminent of all its citizens in wealth and rank. But his mother St. Silvia, a woman of fervent piety, had educated him with great care. He turned from the secular to the religious life, following perhaps her example, since on the death of his father she became a nun. He was a monk on the Coelian hill when Pope Benedict in the year 577 named him seventh deacon of the Roman Church. Pope Pelagius II. sent him as nuncio to Constantinople, an office equally difficult and honourable. The emperor Tiberius was then reigning, with whom he became intimate, and with his successor Mauritius. Gregory dwelt in the imperial palace, with some monks of his own monastery whom he had brought with him, pursuing the Rule in all pious observances, winning also the esteem and friendship of many distinguished men, and making himself fully acquainted with the mechanism of the eastern court. He also delivered the patriarch Eutychius from a false Origenistic notion, that the bodies of the blessed after the resurrection were not glorified, but lost their quality as bodies.[176] There also he became warmly attached to St. Leander, who afterwards, as archbishop of Seville, greatly helped him in recovering Spain from Arianism to the Catholic faith. The charge of Pope Pelagius to his nuncio Gregory throws a vivid light upon the condition of Rome at the time. His instructions ran: "Lay before our lord the emperor that no words can express the calamities brought upon us by the perfidy of the Lombards, breaking their own engagements. Our brother Sebastian, whom we send to you, has promised to describe to him the necessities and dangers of all Italy. Join him in that entreaty to succour us, for the commonwealth is in such distress, that unless God inspire him to show us his servants the mercy of his natural disposition, and move him to give us a single