A little later St. Gregory closed his exposition of the prophet Ezechiel in St. Peter's with these sorrowful words: "So far, dear brethren, by the gift of God, we have searched out hidden meanings for you. Let no man blame me if I close them here, because, as you all witness, our sufferings have grown enormous. On every side we are encircled with swords: on every side we are in imminent peril of death. Some return to us maimed of their hands; of others we hear that they are captured; of others, again, that they are slain. My tongue can no longer expound, when my spirit is weary of my life. Let no one ask me to unfold the Scriptures; for my harp is turned to mourning, and my voice to the cry of the weeper. The eye of my heart no longer keeps its watch in the discussion of mysteries; my soul droops for weariness. Study has lost its charm for me. I have forgotten to eat my bread for the voice of my groaning. How can one who is not allowed to live take pleasure in the mystical sense of Scripture? How can one whose daily chalice is bitterness present sweets for others to drink? What remains for us but while we weep to give thanks for the strokes of the scourge which we suffer for our iniquities. Our Creator is become our Father by the Spirit of adoption whom He has given to us: sometimes He feeds His sons with bread; sometimes He corrects them with the scourge; because He schools us by sorrows and by gifts for the unending inheritance."[183] This was the Rome in which Gregory ruled as Pope for fourteen years, since he saw the archangel's sword sheathed over the castle of St. Angelo, into which name the pagan mausoleum was baptised. Pestilence in the city, where the remnant of a people wandered disconsolate by the mighty halls and vast spaces of the old emperors--swords of pagan or Arian barbarians all round the patched-up walls of Aurelian. City after city through the hapless Italy reported as plundered or ruined by the Lombard devastation. Presently the trials of a sick-bed and frequent attacks of gout were added to his daily tale of sorrows. In the last years of Gregory it came to pass that the universal Church was governed from the sick-bed of one worn down, not by years--for he died at sixty-four--but by sufferings of body and mind. The prisoner of the Lombards had to struggle perpetually with the spirit of Byzantine despotism and the aggressive arrogance of a prelate whom successive eastern sovereigns had nursed from a suffragan of Heraclea to be the claimant of an ecumenical patriarchate. Yet the eyes of Gregory were bent likewise on the northern conquerors who had seized the provinces of the West. Before he was Pope he had observed in the slave-market of Rome the fair-haired Angles whom he would fain make angels; when Pope he sent forth from his father's house, which he had given to the great Father Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle lost to Christ.