At this period of his life his love for display was as remarkable as his subsequent simplicity. He delighted in rich attire and surrounded himself with the pomp and circumstance of his position. A rich man and a rich man’s son, he was thoroughly in sympathy with passing affairs, and as Rome bloomed the more vigorously above her own decay, he was himself one of those “flowers of evil” whose gaudy hues brightened the scene. But at the same time he became accustomed to the management of large affairs, and his administration secured to him the good will of his associates and subordinates. It can often be noticed that these early Fathers came to their power in the Church after having been strictly and carefully trained in the world. Hilary and Ambrose were as conspicuous examples of this foreordination as was Gregory the Great.
Not long previous to this time—for it had been about the year of Gregory’s birth—Benedict had reformed the monastic order. His work, to put it briefly, consisted in guarding the entrance to monasticism and in regulating the hours, habits, and customs of those celibates who professed such a vocation for the religious life. From his wise and systematic arrangements, which have been but little improved upon though often reinforced by “reformations,” monasticism derived that adaptation to the active and practical life of the West, which it had lacked in the preceding centuries. Indeed, he so far reacted against the contemplative idleness of the East, as to aim rather at an industrial than a learned order. But his successors corrected this defect, and gave the order the literary and educational character which has been its greatest claim to the gratitude of Christendom. Thus it came to be that the Benedictine Fathers became the order of scholars, the editors of the Fathers, of the _Acta Sanctorum_, and of the _Histoire Litteraire de France_. The permanent revenues, the fixity and quiet of these monastic lives, the slow coral-building of these unknown workers, have resulted in gathering for us all that the mediaeval historian can desire upon the religious side. And it is here that, delving amid the dust of these mountainous masses of literature, the student of Latin hymnology will find his rarest delight. For these acute scholars have literally picked up and printed, yea, and what is more to the purpose, they have indexed and classified—whatever he can wish in the way of productions in prose and verse by any known author. The old MSS. are strained through into readable type. Their contents are sorted and sifted. And he who pores over these pages will rise from them at length with a profound conviction that the scholarship of the Latin Church, and particularly the Benedictine Order, deserves well from the world of letters and merits the admiration of the Church Universal.