Pope Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540-604)
“Raise the moral standards of your subjects by your own innocence of life, encouraging, warning, persuading, correcting, and showing them an example by your good deeds.”
- From a letter from Pope Gregory I to King Ethelbert of Kent c. 601, included in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (and relevant letters), translated by Leo Sherley-Pride, R. E. Latham and D. H. Farmer (Penguin Classics, 2003).