Rome was swept by the plague: Gregory had himself done his utmost to abate it by sanitary measures: Pelagius himself had been its victim. Now the abbot of St. Andrew's organised a demonstration of public penitence, and preached a famous sermon which another Gregory, himself a hearer, and afterwards the great bishop of Tours, statesman and historian, recorded from his lips. As the penitential procession, moving in seven bodies and. singing litanies, passed through the streets, death was still busy: in one hour, as the solemn march went on, eighty men fell dead: but at last, said a legend of later days, the Archangel Michael was seen to stand on the cupola of the Mausoleum of Hadrian and to sheathe his flaming sword. So the plague was stayed: and the Castle of Sant' Angelo, with all its long history of romance and crime, bears witness to the memory
Six months after the death of Pelagius, in August 590, came the sanction of Maurice the Emperor to the choice that had been made of his successor. Gregory, still a deacon, prepared for flight, but he was discovered, taken to St. Peter's and consecrated a successor of the Apostle as bishop of Rome. It was on 3 September 590.
It was a ship rotten in every plank and leaking at every seam that he came to captain: so he wrote to his brother of Constantinople. With a real regret did he abandon the Rachel of contemplation for the Leah of active life. Yet if any ecclesiastic was ever fitted for rule, for statesmanship, for practical labour among men, it was Gregory the Great.
If Gregory's most obvious achievements, in the sight of his own time, lay in the region of politics, it must be remembered always that he himself viewed his whole work from the standing-point of a Christian bishop. He sets this before every reader in his Regulae Pastoralis Liber, a book which, probably addressed to John of Ravenna, his "brother and fellow-bishop," was welcomed by all who knew him, both clerk and lay, by the Emperor Maurice, who had a Greek translation made of it, as well as by Leander of Seville: and, later on, to read it became part of the necessary rendition of a bishop. Throughout the book there is a sense of tremendous responsibility. The conduct of a prelate, says Gregory, ought to surpass the conduct of the people as a shepherd's life does that of his flock. In his elevation he should deal with high things, and high persons, yet should he not seek to please men, being mindful of the duty of reproof and yet reproving with gentleness. The mind anxious about the management of exterior business is deprived of the sense of wholesome fear; and the soul is flattered with a false promise of good works: there is danger in refusal as well as in acceptance of high places; but most danger lest while earthly pursuits engross the senses of the pastor the dust that is driven by the wind of temptation blind the eyes of the whole Church. The entire treatise shews an intimacy of practical knowledge in regard to
