we
are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to
crowds of sixty thousand souls, we realize what power was lodged in the
hands of those who could reach masses so easily swayed and so full of
blind yearnings to escape from the ignoble life to which they were
condemned. How the slumbering souls were awakened is shown by the
successive waves of excitement which swept over one portion of Europe
after another about the middle of the thirteenth century. The dumb,
untutored minds began to ask whether an existence of hopeless and brutal
misery was all that was to be realized from the promises of the gospel.
The church had made no real effort at internal reform; it was still
grasping, covetous, licentious, and a strange desire for something--they
knew not exactly what--began to take possession of men's hearts and
spread like an epidemic from village to village and from land to
land."[446]

What we see here is the power of mere gregariousness, the impulse of
acting in a crowd, without knowledge or purpose. The mere sense of being
in the current movement, or "in the fashion," is a pleasure. When the
movement is great in its compass and the numbers involved there is an
exhilaration about being in it. If the notions by which it is enthused
are great, or holy and noble, in form and pretense, even if not really
so, it may become demonic, and it may accomplish incredible things. We
had a grand illustration of this at the outbreak of the Civil War, in
1861, both in the North and South. Dissent on both sides was overwhelmed
and all were swept away into the prevailing current.

+217. The mendicant orders.+ The mendicant orders responded to the
deepest popular faiths and highest standards of the thirteenth century.
Francis of Assisi ([Symbol: cross] 1226) took up the notion that it was
wrong to own property, or at least meritorious to renounce it, and
affirmed that Christ and his apostles repudiated all property and lived
on alms. The Timotheists of the fifth century had held this notion, but
were rated as heretics.[447] Poverty, for Francis, did not mean a little
property, but absolute rejection of all property. This was necessarily
only a pose. He had to use other men's property, the use being right.
Therefore he could only renounce productive labor. The popular religious
temper of the time revered simplicity, humility, self-denial, and
renunciation of "the world" as especially evangelical virtues. They were