Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 619

Gregory to Maximus, bishop of Salona. Having received the letters of our brother and fellow-bishop Marinianus, and Castorius our secretary having returned, we have learned that your fraternity has most fully satisfied us concerning those matters about which there had been doubt; and we render great thanks to Almighty God, because from the very marrow of my heart all the rancour of sinister suspicion has been uprooted. For which reason I wished to release Stephen, our common son, your deacon, with the utmost speed. But frequent pains of my illnesses compelled him to tarry with me for even a few days. But after I began to be even a little better, I straightway took care to send him back with joy.

And so we have sent, according to custom, the pallium to be used at the sacred solemnities of Mass, whose spirit we wish you to claim in all things. For the honour of this vesture is humility and justice. With the whole mind, therefore, let your fraternity hasten to show itself humble in prosperity, and in adversity—if ever it befall—upright with justice; friendly to the good, opposed to the perverse; never bearing down the face of anyone speaking for the truth; persisting in works of mercy according to the strength of one's means, and yet desiring to persist even beyond one's strength; compassionate to the weak, rejoicing with the well-disposed, counting others' losses as one's own, exulting over others' joys as over one's own;

raging in correcting vices, soothing the hearers' minds in fostering virtues; in anger holding judgment without anger, but in tranquillity not deserting the censure of its severity. This, most dear brother, is the meaning of the pallium received, which if you carefully keep, what you have shown yourself to have received outwardly, you have inwardly. Furthermore, I commend to your fraternity in all things our brother and fellow-bishop Sabinianus, and if there be any causes, let them meanwhile be postponed. Let charity remain fixed between you, so that thus, if ever a contention arise about outward things, an examination may come, in such a way that charity may not abandon the mind. Our common son the archdeacon Honoratus we also commend.

Concerning whom, if it is so, as we have learned through Castorius our secretary, that through him already three archdeacons before, keeping the ecclesiastical custom, on the completion of the five-year period were compelled to go out—we wish indeed that he may find the charity of your holiness. For a judgment ought not to be demanded concerning a cause which he himself judged. But if it is not so, all swelling of mind being suppressed, and all hatred set aside, he ought to be received in charity, and by no means to be removed from the place in which he was found. Messianus also, the cleric who had fled to us, we have with confidence given to our common son the deacon Stephen, sure that him whom we send to your fraternity, you ought to show in him not hatred, but the grace of your power.

May Almighty God guard you with His protection, and so dispose us, that after the tempests of this temporal time, we may be able together with joy to arrive at things eternal.