In his early manhood naturally he was called to take part in affairs, and was made _Praetor urbanus_. But soon the prevalent feeling of the difficulty of serving God in the world drove him to retirement. His father’s palace on the Coelian hill he changed to a convent, upon the site of which now stands the Church of San Gregorio Magno; and there he became a monk. Passionately he loved the monk’s life, for which he was to long in vain through most of the years to come. Soon he was dragged forth from the companionship of “Mary” to serve with “Martha.” The toiling papacy could not allow a man of his abilities to remain hidden. He was harnessed to its active service, and sent as the papal representative to the Imperial Court at Constantinople; whence he returned, after several years, in 585. Re-entering his monastery on the Coelian, he became its abbot; but was drawn out again, and made pope by acclamation and insistency in the year 590. There is no need to speak of the efficient and ceaseless activity of this pontiff, whose body was never free from pain, nor his soul released from longing for seclusion which only the grave was to bring. Gregory’s mind was less antique, and more barbarous and mediaeval than Augustine’s, whose doctrine he reproduced with garbling changes of tone and emphasis. In the century and a half between the two, the Roman institutions had broken down, decadence had advanced, and the patristic mind had passed from indifference to the laws of physical phenomena to something like sheer barbaric ignorance of the same. Whatever in Ambrose, Jerome, or Augustine represented conviction or opinion, has in Gregory become mental habit, spontaneity of acceptance, matter of course. The miraculous is with him a frame of mind; and the allegorical method of understanding Scripture is no longer intended, not to say wilful, as with Augustine, but has become persistent unconscious habit. Augustine desired to know God and the Soul, and the true Christian doctrine with whatever made for its substantiation. He is conscious of closing his mind to everything irrelevant to this. Gregory’s nature has settled itself within this scheme of Christian knowledge which Augustine framed. He has no intellectual inclinations reaching out beyond. He is not conscious of closing his mind to extraneous knowledge. His mental habits and temperament are so perfectly adjusted to the confines of this circle, that all beyond has ceased to exist for him.