Long crushed between the Lombards and Byzantines, between the unsoftened ferocity of the barbarians and the vexatious decrepitude of despotism, Gregory, with that instinctive perception of future events which God sometimes grants to pure souls, sought elsewhere a support for the Roman Church. His eyes were directed to the new races, who were scarcely less ferocious than the Lombards, but who did not, like them, weigh upon Italy and Rome, and who already exhibited elements of strength and continuance. It is impossible to do more here than touch on these noble enterprises. He entered into correspondence with Childebert, the Gallo-Frank king, and with the French bishops, to obtain the rectification of abuses and the purification of the Gallican church from simony, and the nomination of laymen to the episcopal office, two vices which consumed the vitals of Christianity in France. Spain had become Arian under the Visigoths, but the Catholic faith had triumphed with the accession of Recared, in 587. S. Leander, bishop of Seville, was the principal author of the conversion of the Visigoths. Gregory wrote to him and to other bishops of Spain. They consulted him, and he gave them his advice. He wrote, and gave councils full of wisdom to the king Recared, himself. He brought back to the unity of the Church the schismatical bishops of Istria, and wholly suppressed the Donatist schism in Africa. But one of the most striking points in the life of S. Gregory is his zeal for the conversion of England. Amid the labours of his exalted position, S. Gregory never remitted his anxiety for the evangelization of that distant isle. In July, A.D. 596, he dispatched S. Augustine (May 26th), with forty companions, on that mission to which we owe so much, that, with every feeling of love and veneration for the remnant of Celtic Christianity which had then escaped the sword of Pagan Saxondom, we may yet say, with the Venerable Bede, "If Gregory be not to others an apostle, he is one to us, for the seal of his apostleship are we in the Lord." The services which he rendered to the Liturgy are well known. Completing and putting in order the work of his predecessors, he gave its definite form to the holy sacrifice of the Mass, in that celebrated Sacramentary which remains the most august monument of Liturgical science. It may be said also that he created, and, by anticipation, saved, Christian art, by fixing, long before the persecution of the Iconoclasts, the true doctrine respecting the veneration of images, in that fine letter to the bishop of Marseilles, in which he reproves him for having, in the excess of his zeal against idolatry, broken the statues of the saints, and reminds him that through all antiquity the history of the saints has been pictorically represented, and that painting is to the ignorant what letters are to those who can read.