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 he appointed a council to meet at Rome, and obtained an order from the emperor for the attendance of these bishops. They petitioned for exemption, saying that their faith was that formerly taught them by pope Vigilius, and protesting against submission to the bp. of Rome as their judge. The emperor countermanded the order, and Gregory acquiesced.

In 591 his orthodox zeal was directed with more success against the African Donatists. It was the custom in Numidia for the senior bishop, whether Donatist or Catholic, to exercise metropolitan authority over the other bishops. Such senior now happened to be a Donatist, and he assumed the customary authority. Gregory wrote to the Catholic bishops of Numidia, and to Gennadius, exarch of Africa, urging them to resist such a claim (Ep. i. 74, 75), and the Donatist bishop was deposed, but the sect continued in Africa as long as Christianity did. This is not the only instance of Gregory, like others of his age, not being averse to persecution as a means of conversion. In Sicily he enjoined rigorous measures (summopere persequi) for the recovery of the Manicheans to the church (Ep. iv. 6); there, and in Corsica, Sardinia, and Campania, the heathen peasants and slaves on the papal estates were by his order compelled to conform, not only by exactions on such as refused, but also by the imprisonment of freemen, and the corporal castigation (verberibus et cruciatibus) of slaves (Ep. iii. 26; vii. ind. ii. 67), and in France he exhorted queen Brunichild to similar measures of coercion (Ep. vii. 5). On the other hand, there are three letters of his, written in the same year as those about the African Donatists, which evince a spirit of unusual toleration towards Jews. They are addressed to three bishops, Peter of Tarracina, Virgilius of Arles, and Theodorus of Marseilles. The first had driven the Jews from their synagogues, and the last two had converted a number by offering them the choice of baptism or exile. Gregory strongly condemns such proceedings, "because conversions wrought by force are never sincere, and those thus converted seldom fail to return to their vomit when the force is removed." (Ep. i. 34, i. 45; cf. Ep. vii. ind. i. 26, vii. ind. ii. 5, vii. 2, 59.) Yet he had no objection to luring them into the fold by the prospect of advantage, for in a letter to a deacon Cyprian, who was steward of the papal patrimony in Sicily, he directs him to offer the Jews a remission of one-third of the taxes due to the Roman church if they became Christians, saying, in justification, that though such conversions might be insincere, their children would be brought up in the bosom of the church (Ep. iv. 6, cf. Ep. xii. 30). In such apparent inconsistencies we may see his good sense and Christian benevolence in conflict with the impulses of zeal and the notions of his age.

Gregory was no less active in reforming the church itself. Great laxity was prevalent among the monks, of which the life of Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, affords ample evidence. Several of Gregory's letters are addressed to monks who had left their monasteries for the world and marriage. He issued the following regulations for the restoration of monastic discipline: no monk should be received under 18 years of age, nor any husband without his wife's consent (in one case he orders a husband who had entered a monastery to be restored to his wife [Ep. ix. 44]); two years of probation should always be required, and three in the case of soldiers; a professed monk leaving his order should be immured for life; no monk, though an abbat, should leave the precincts of his monastery, except on urgent occasions; under no pretext should any monk leave his monastery alone, on the ground that "Qui sine teste ambulat non rectè vivit." He provided for the more complete separation of the monastic and clerical orders, forbidding any monk to remain in his monastery after ordination, and any priest to enter a monastery except to exercise clerical functions, or to become a monk without giving up his clerical office; and further exempting some monasteries from the jurisdiction of bishops. This last important provision was extended to all monasteries by the Lateran synod, held under him in 601.

He was no less zealous in his correction of the clergy. Several bishops under his immediate metropolitan jurisdiction and elsewhere he rebuked or deposed for incontinency and other crimes. His own nuncio at Constantinople, Laurentius the archdeacon, he recalled and deposed. From the clergy generally he required strict chastity, forbidding them to retain in their houses any women but their mothers, sisters, or wives married before ordination, and with these last prohibiting conjugal intercourse (Ep. i. 50, ix. 64). Bishops he recommends to imitate St. Augustine in banishing from their houses even such female relatives as the canons allow (Ep. vii. ind. ii. 39; xi. 42, 43). In Sicily the obligation to celibacy had, in 588, been extended to subdeacons. This rule he upheld by directing the bishops to require a vow of celibacy from all who should in future be ordained subdeacons, but acknowledging its hardship on such as had made no such vow on their ordination, he contented himself with forbidding the advancement to the diaconate of existing subdeacons who had continued conjugal intercourse after the introduction of the rule (Ep. i. ind. ix. 42).

He also set himself resolutely against the prevalent simony, forbidding all bishops and clergy to exact or accept fee or reward for the functions of their office; and he set the example himself by refusing the annual presents which it had been customary for the bishops of Rome to receive from their suffragans, or payment for the pallium sent to metropolitans, which payment was forbidden to all future popes by a Roman synod in 595.

In 592 began a struggle in reference to discipline with certain bishops of Thessaly and Dalmatia, in the province of Illyricum. Hadrianus of Thebes had been deposed by a provincial synod under his metropolitan the bp. of Larissa, and the sentence had been confirmed by John of Justiniana Prima, the primate of Illyricum. The deposed prelate appealed to Gregory, who, after examining the whole case, ordered the primate to reinstate Hadrianus (Ep. ii. ind. xi. 6, 7). He also ordered Natalis, bp. of Salona in Dalmatia and metropolitan, under pain of excommunication,