Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/110

 74 Readings in European History 28. Sad state of the western world as depicted in the letters of Gregory the Great. was Gregory I, to whom his own age and posterity have assigned the appellation of the Great. Now was the crisis in which the Papacy must reawaken its obscured and suspended life. It was the only power which lay not entirely and absolutely prostrate before the disasters of the times, a power which had an inherent strength, and might resume its majesty. It was this power which was most imperatively required to preserve all which was to survive out of the crumbling wreck of Roman civilization. To Western Christianity was absolutely necessary a centre, standing alone, strong in traditionary reverence, and in acknowledged claims to supremacy. Even the perfect organization of the Christian hierarchy might in all human probability have fallen to pieces in perpetual conflict : it might have degenerated into a half secular feudal caste with hereditary benefices, more and more entirely subserv- ient to the civil authority, a priesthood of each nation or each tribe, gradually sinking to the intellectual or religious level of the nation or tribe. . . . It is impossible to conceive what had been the confusion, the lawlessness, the chaotic state of the middle ages, without the mediaeval Papacy ; and of the mediaeval Papacy the real father is Gregory the Great. In all his predecessors there was much of the uncertainty and indefmiteness of a new dominion. Christianity had converted the Western world it had by this time transmuted it : in all except the Roman law, it was one with it. Even Leo the Great had something of the Roman dictator. Gregory is the Roman altogether merged in the Christian bishop. The calamities of the times, especially the coming of "the most unspeakable Lombards," as he com- monly calls them, convinced Gregory that the end of the world was near at hand. In a letter written to a fellow-bishop shortly after he reluctantly became pope, he gives a dark picture of the world and of his heavy responsibilities :