thee as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' It was also said to him, 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it: and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.' He thus received the keys of the celestial kingdom; the power to bind and loose was given to him; the care of all the Church and the primacy were committed to him; and yet he did not call himself universal Apostle. But that most holy man, John, my brother in the priesthood, would fain assume the title of universal bishop. I can but exclaim, O tempora! O mores!"
We cannot pass over these words of St. Gregory without pointing out their great importance. This learned doctor interprets, as we have seen, the texts of the Gospel, which refer to St. Peter, in the sense most favourable to that Apostle. He exalts Peter as having had the primacy in the Apostolic college; as having been intrusted by the Lord himself with the care of the whole Church. What does he infer from all this? Ever since the Popes have abused the texts that he quotes, in order to attribute to themselves an absolute and universal authority in the Church, we know how they reason. They give to the language of the Gospel, in the first place, the very broadest and most absolute sense, and then apply it to themselves as the successors of St. Peter. St. Gregory acts quite otherwise: he places Peter's prerogatives side by side with his humility, which kept him from claiming universal authority; he is so far from holding himself out as Peter's heir, that he only quotes the example of that Apostle to confound John of Constantinople, and all those who would claim
