Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/195

GREGORY THE GREAT 159 The frame of mind shown in the Dialogues was, however, characteristic of all Christian writers of that time. The. same atmosphere of the marvelous, the same Mental wealth of miracles — some of which seem child- the ear? ° f ish and others immoral to the modern reader — Middle Ages are found in all the saints' Lives of the period, in the history of the Franks by Bishop Gregory of Tours, of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, and of the Church in England by the monk, Bede. Among the miracles ascribed to St. Columban — who died in 615, and of whom we shall presently speak — by the monk, Jonas, in his almost contemporary biography, are such as filling a storehouse with grain, curing a finger cut in harvesting, preventing a beer vat left open by a monk from overflowing the pitcher set beneath the spigot, and causing a raven to become conscience-smitten and return a stolen glove. Gregory of Tours resembled his namesake the pope, not merely in his firm belief in the miracle-working powers of the relics of the saints, so that he sought a cure for every bodily ill at the shrine of his own St. Martin of Tours, and also in the special sanctity of the persons of the clergy and the property of the Church, but furthermore in his readiness to overlook the most serious faults in rulers provided they supported the orthodox faith. Thus, the ruthless and blood-stained Clovis is a Christian hero for the good Bishop of Tours, while Pope Gregory treated the cruel and unscrupulous Frankish queen, Brun- hilda, as the hope of true religion in Gaul, and wrote cordial congratulations on his accession to Phocas who became By- zantine emperor by murdering Maurice and all his family. Less tactful, but more fearlessly outspoken against iniquity in high places, was St. Columban, whom Brunhilda forced to leave the monastery where he had spent twenty years be- cause he rebuked her grandson for keeping concubines. While Pope Gregory believed that the bones of the saints possessed marvelous virtues, — a belief by no Gregory's means so contrary to the science of antiquity as common to that of our time, — he did not, like Gregory sense cf Tours and some other Christians, go so far as to advise