Of these the _Rex Christe, factor omnium_ delighted Luther so much that he declared it in his impetuous way “the best hymn ever written”—an opinion which he would find few nowadays to endorse. Gregory disliked pagan literature and cultivated the style and prosody of Ambrose. It is possible, therefore, that among the Ambrosian hymns there may be those which he has written and which are credited to an earlier date. But the cause of hymnology suffers little by the loss. He was not a poet; but as the man who made the papacy a thing and not a name—as the man who evangelized Britain—and as the man who gave the Gregorian tones to the praises of the Church, he will be held in kindly and lasting remembrance. There was in him a vein of peculiar sarcasm as well as of deep earnestness and of great sagacity, yet his literary merits are not to be weighed against those words and actions written viewlessly on the air, but which still effectually vibrate through the polity of the Roman Catholic Church.
It happened with Bede as with some other Latin hymn-writers—there were several persons who had the same name as himself. Hilary and Fortunatus and Notker are not the only cases of confusion, for there were certainly three Bedes, and they were not long removed from each other in point of time. Beda Major—the elder or greater Bede—was a presbyter and monk of Lindisfarne, commemorated by his more celebrated namesake. Another was a holy man of the time of Charles the Great. But our own Beda or Bedan was a presbyter and monk of Jarrow, and is distinguished from the rest by the title of “Venerable,” which he shares with Peter the Venerable of Cluny.
There are few finer figures in early English history. Sprung from pagan and utterly illiterate ancestry, he has taken his place as an historian, a scholar, a natural philosopher, and a poet; and in every department of this varied knowledge he has shown his ability and industry. English literature recalls him; English history praises him; English scholarship has elaborately edited his writings, and English patriotism has affectionately honored his memory.
Cuthbert, his disciple, who wrote his life, begins his narration in the following words:
“The presbyter Beda, venerable and beloved of God, was born in the province of Northumbria, in the territory of the monasteries of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which is in Wearmouth and at Jarrow, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation the six hundred and seventy-seventh, which is the second year of the solitary life of St. Cuthbert.” It also was the ninth year after the reduction of Saxon England to the Roman obedience at the Synod of Whitby.