It would seem, however, if there is any possible truth in the idea, that the Sicilian endowments were a sort of ransom for himself and the personal sacrifice of the world which his growing fervour demanded of him, that the expedient was not a successful one. He did not resist the grace of conversion very long; but it is curious to find him, so long after, adopting the same expedient as that which had formed a middle ground for his predecessors in an earlier age, by converting his father's house into a convent. St. Benedict, the first of monastic founders in Europe, was scarcely born when Marcella first called about her the few pious maidens and widows who formed her permanent household in Rome; but by the time of Gregory, the order of Benedict had become one of the great facts and institutions of the time--and his villa was soon filled with a regular community of black-robed monks with their abbot and other leaders. Remaining in the beloved shelter of his natural home, he became a member of this community. He did not even retain, as Marcella did, the government of the new establishment in his own hand, but served humbly, holding no office, as an undistinguished brother. It was not without difficulty that he made up his mind to this step. In the letter to Leander which forms the dedication of his commentary on Job, he gives a brief and vague account of his own hesitations and doubts. The love of things eternal, he says, had taken hold upon his mind while yet custom had so wound its chains round him that he could not make up his mind to change his outward garb. But the new influence was so strong that he engaged in the service of the world as it were in semblance only, his purpose and inclination turning more and more towards the cloister. When the current of feeling and spiritual excitement carried him beyond all these reluctances and hesitations, and he at last "sought the haven of the monastery," having, as he says, "left all that is of the world as at that time I vainly believed, I came out naked from the shipwreck of human life." His intention at this crisis was evidently not that of fitting himself for the great offices of the Church or entering what was indeed one of the greatest professions of the time, the priesthood, the one which, next to that of the soldier, was most apt for advancement. Like Jerome, Gregory's inclination was to be a monk and not a priest, and he expressly tells us that "the virtue of obedience was set against my own inclination to make me take the charge of ministering at the holy altar," which he was obliged to accept upon the ground that the Church had need of him. This disinclination to enter the priesthood is all the more remarkable that Gregory was evidently a preacher born, and seems early in his monastic life to have developed this gift. The elucidation of so difficult and mysterious a book as that of Job was asked of him by his brethren at an early period of his career.