He also attended to the religious matters of Spain. This province had ceased to be Arian in 587 with the accession of Recared; and with it and with Istria he was entirely successful in his methods of unity and peace. He also overcame the Donatist party in Africa, who had for years been ordaining their own bishops side by side with the regular succession, and sometimes in actual alternation with them.
To crown all, he organized a mission to the distant island of the fair-faced Angli in 596, the very date at which the young Childebert perished by poison in the twenty-sixth year of his age. Then it was that Augustine, after one recoil which showed that he was not quite up to the mark of Gregory’s zeal, finally set out in earnest with forty companions. The month was July. The mission was almost an embassy. It went through the intervening kingdoms endorsed to and by their kings. And it went to cheer the little feeble remnant of the Celtic Christians who had escaped the Saxon sword, and to draw from the Venerable Bede his grateful tribute to the man who had already well deserved the title of great. “For,” says Bede, “if Gregory be not to others an apostle, he is one to us, for the seal of his apostleship are we in the Lord.”
When we remember, also, his secular services in saving Rome from sack and pillage, we cannot but perceive that he was laying, broad and deep, the foundations of that temporal authority which the Pope of Rome was soon to claim. The revenues of the Roman bishop were growing enormously. He had in Sicily and elsewhere his agents and stewards (_defensores_). He was rapidly arising to a position of almost independent dignity. His deference to kings was only that of Christian courtesy and love. In another man some of this might have been disfigured by self-seeking and moral obliquity of purpose. In Gregory we find, throughout his career, a noble integrity which was certainly austere enough, but which was in the main pure and free from spot. His weakness was that of overconciliation, of which the case of Phocas is a flagrant example. But his strength was in his just judgment and in his masterful manipulation of the materials before him.
In his way, too, he saved Christian art as well as Christian music. He condemns the Bishop of Marseilles (Massilia) for having broken some statues of the saints. And while his remonstrance may perhaps be quoted in favor of image-worship, it certainly cannot be quoted for that blind iconoclasm which would destroy pagan beauty before the shrine of Christian ugliness. In the association of his name with the Gregorian chant he did almost as great a kindness to the Church as did Ambrose when he brought to her services the Greek hymns of the East.