I know not where to find so remarkable a contrast and connection of events as here. Temporal losses, secular ambitions, episcopal usurpations, violent party spirit, schism and heresy in the great eastern patriarchates, and amid it all the descent of the Teutons on the fairest lands of the western empire, the establishment of new sovereignties in Spain, Gaul, and Italy, under barbarians who at the time of their descent were Arian heretics, and afterwards became Catholic, with the result that Gregory has to keep watch within the walls of Rome for a whole generation against the Lombard, still in unmitigated savagery and unabated heresy, and that the world-wide Church acknowledges him for her ruler without a dissenting voice. The "Servant of the servants of God" chides and corrects the would-be "ecumenical patriarch," who has risen since Constantine from the suffragan of a Thracian city to be bishop of Nova Roma and right hand of the emperor; who has deposed Alexandria from the second place and Antioch from the third, but cannot take the first place from the See of Peter. The perpetual ambition of the bishops of Nova Roma, the perpetual fostering of that ambition for his own purpose by the emperor, only illustrates more vividly the inaccessible dignity which both would fain have transferred to the city of Constantine, but were obliged to leave with the city of Peter. As the forum of Trajan sinks down stone by stone, the kings of the West are preparing to flock in pilgrimage to the shrine of Peter. This was the answer which the captives in the forum made to the deliverer of their race. There is nothing like this elsewhere in history. Constantine, Valens, Theodosius, Justinian, and, no less, Alaric and Ataulph, Attila and Genseric, Theodorick and Clovis, Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, as well as St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Cyril, and, again, Dioscorus, Acacius, and a multitude of the most opposing minds and beliefs which these represent, contribute, in their time and degree, for the most part unconsciously, and many against their settled purpose, to acknowledge this Primacy as the Rock of the Church, the source of spiritual jurisdiction, the centre of a divine unity in a warring world. In St. Gregory we see the power which has had antecedents so strange and concomitants so repulsive deposited in the hands of a feeble old man who is constantly mourning over the cares in which that universal government involves him, while the world for evermore shall regard him as the type and standard of the true spiritual ruler, who calls himself, not Ecumenical Bishop, but Servant of the servants of God. It is a title which his successors will take from his hand and keep for ever as the badge of the Primacy which it illustrates, while it serves as the seal of its acts of power. He calls himself servant just when he is supreme.