MUSIC 73
nor smile with which a grown man listens to the prattle of children, who in their effort to make out the letters o the alphabet do not yet gather the meaning of what they are reading. "Why should one not be allowed to baptize a pregnant woman? In the eyes of the Al- mighty, fruitfulness is certainly not a fault. What is given to human nature as a gift of God cannot possibly be an obstacle to the grace of baptism." The customs of the people, he says, ought to be tolerated and then gradually and wisely filled with Christian meaning. His first advice was to destroy the heathen temples; but then "after long reflection upon the matter of the Angles" he reached another conclu- sion. No, they ought to remain. Only the images of the gods should be destroyed. Altars should then be erected, the walls sprin- kled with holy water, and relics placed within the altar stones. The fact that a given place had long been associated with the cult should prove advantageous also to the worship of the new true God. If here- tofore the Angles have sacrificed oxen to the demons, they may hence- forth butcher them and eat them in praise of God. For it is impossi- ble to take away everything at once from hearts hardened by custom. If one wishes to climb a high mountain, one cannot run up it but must proceed slowly, step by step. Very gradually and persistently the monks of St. Benedict carried the faith and morals of Rome from the cities of Canterbury and York to the far corners of the British Isles. Soon the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon Church was felt on the continent. Csesar had landed with six legions to carry out the first Roman con- quest of Britain; Gregory had effected the second with forty monks. By so much is, as Gibbon himself must admit, the glory of the Pope greater than that of Caesar.
It is said that as an old man stricken with gout he lay abed instruct- ing students in Church music. Regardless of what his part in the creation or renewal of "Gregorian" choral may really have been, this anecdote by his biographer characterizes the inner nature of the great- est educator in early Christian Europe. There is something of music in everything to which he gave expression. Friends and defenders of culture who laugh at him and his style in writings which influenced centuries more deeply, perhaps, than any others, misunderstand Greg- ory's own smile at "the wisdom of men." To him the life of the mind was not an end in itself, but only a means to help bring about
74
