What mortal could venture to decide which of the two great victories allowed by Gibbon to the Church is the greater? But we at least are the children of the second. It was wrought in secrecy and unconsciousness, as the greatest works of nature and of grace are wrought, but we know just so much as this, that St. Gregory was one of its greatest artificers. The Anglo-Saxon race in particular, for more than a thousand years, has celebrated the Mass of St. Gregory as that of the Apostle of England. Down to the disruption of the sixteenth century, the double line of its bishops in Canterbury and York, with their suffragans, regarded him as their founder, as much as the royal line deemed itself to descend from William the Conqueror. If Canterbury was Primate of all England and York Primate of England, it was by the appointment of Gregory. And the very civil constitution of England, like the original constitutions of the western kingdoms in general, is the work in no small part of that Church which St. Augustine carried to Ethelbert, and whose similar work in Spain Gibbon has acknowledged. Under the Norman oppression it was to the laws of St. Edward that the people looked back. The laws of St. Edward were made by the bishops of St. Gregory. How deeply St. Gregory was impressed with the conviction of his own vocation to be the head of the whole Church we have seen in his own repeatedly quoted words.[215] What can a Pope claim more than the attribution to himself as Pope of the three great words of Christ spoken to Peter? Accordingly, all his conduct was directed to maintain every particular church in its due subordination to the Roman Church, to reconcile schismatics to it, to overcome the error and the obstinacy of heretics. Again, since all nations have been called to salvation in Christ, St. Gregory pursued the conversion of the heathen with the utmost zeal. When only monk and cardinal deacon, he had obtained the permission of Pope Pelagius to set out in person as missionary to paganised Britain. He was brought back to Rome after three days by the affection of the people, who would not allow him to leave them. When the death of Pope Pelagius placed him on the papal throne, he did not forget the country the sight of whose enslaved children had made them his people of predilection.