deeper root to that power; he will see that if trickery made that power
to fall, it was something else that caused it to rise.

A greater contrast than that between the "Pastoral Care" and the
"Dialogues" it is hardly possible to conceive. We cannot wonder that the
identity of authorship has been questioned, and that the "Dialogues"
have been attributed to another Gregory. The difficulty is, however,
lessened if we consider the widely different conditions of the readers
addressed. At a time when an old civilisation and a crude barbarism
were intermingled and living side by side, the one was written for the
highest, the other for the lowest in the intellectual scale. The
"Pastoral Care" was addressed to the Roman clergy, with whom, if
anywhere, something of the old culture still lingered. The "Dialogues"
were intended for the barbarians. The book is addressed to Theodolinda,
the Lombard queen. It is a book full of wonderful, not to say puerile,
stories, in which a religious lesson or moral is always conveyed, but
not always one that carries conviction to the mind of the modern
Christian. It reflects the policy of converting the barbarians by
condescending to their tastes, and belongs to the same system as that
increase of pomp and ceremony which was due to the same motive. This
book far outran the former in popularity. It was among the earliest of
Latin books to be translated into vernacular languages. Gregory's
writings were very influential on popular religious literature
throughout the Dark Ages, and nowhere more so than in England, where he
was honoured as a national apostle. There exists an Anglo-Saxon
translation of the "Dialogues," but it has not yet been edited.

The time of Gregory the Great was the time in which, to use Dean
Milman's words, "the human mind was finally Christianised." This
triumph, as usually happens, was overdriven. We see a too jealous