and upon the aid of Gaulish priests as interpreters of the barbarous English tongue. The mission was, vaguely, to "the nation of the English," for Gregory knew no difference between the men of Deira and the men of Kent; and Augustine would learn at Paris, if not before, that the wife of Aethelberht of Kent was daughter of a Frankish king.
The tale of the landing, the preaching, and the success will be told elsewhere. Here it belongs only to note that Gregory continued to take the keenest interest in the venture he had planned. He instructed Vergilius of Arles to consecrate Augustine as bishop, and spread over Christendom the news of the great work that was accomplished. To Eulogius, patriarch of Alexandria, he told of the conversion due, as he said, to their prayers, and he warmly thanked Syagrius, bishop of Autun, and Brunhild for their aid. To Augustine in 601 he sent the pallium, a mark of favour conferred by pope or emperor, not, it would seem, as conferring metropolitan authority, which Augustine had already exercised, but as recognising his position as a special representative of the Roman See. To the queen Berhta, whose somewhat tardy support of the Christian faith in her husband's land he was able now to eulogise and to report even to the Emperor at Constantinople, he wrote words of exhortation to support Augustine, and to Aethelberht her husband admonition and praise with his favourite eschatological reference. To the end Gregory remained the trusted adviser of the Apostle of the English. He sent special reinforcements, with all manner of things, says Bede, needed for public worship and the service of the Church, commending the new missionaries again to the Gaulish bishops and instructing them especially as to the conversion of heathen temples into Christian churches. And he gave a very careful reply, written with characteristic breadth and tact, to the questions which Augustine addressed to him when the difficulties of his work had begun to be felt. The authenticity of these answers, it is true, has been doubted, but the evidence, external as well as internal, appears to be sufficient.[1] The questions related to the support of the mission clergy, the liturgical use of the national Church now formed in England, the co-operation necessary in the consecration of bishops, and to matters touching the moral law about which among a recently heathen nation a special sensitiveness was desirable. Gregory's answers were those of a monk, even of a precisian, but they were also eminently those of a man of affairs and a statesman. "Things," he said "are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things," and the claim of Rome herself depended on such an assertion. As a monk he dealt firmly with morals: as a statesman he sketched out the future organisation of the English Church. London
- ↑ See Mason, Mission of St Augustine, pp. viii, ix. Ewald does not decide against them.
