of feeling. Yet it seems to me
certain that this enthroning of human love in matters spiritual was an
enormous, indispensable improvement, which, whatever detriment it may
have brought in individual and, so to say, professionally religious
cases, nay, perhaps to all religion as a whole, became perfectly
wholesome and incalculably beneficent in the enormous mass of
right-minded laity.

For human emotion, although so often run to waste, had been at least
elicited, and, once elicited, could find, in nine cases out of ten, its
true and beneficent channel; whereas, in the earlier mediaeval days, the
effort to crush out all human feeling (as with that holy man quoted by
Abelard), to break all human solidarity, had not merely left the world
in the hands of unscrupulous and brutal persons, but had imprisoned all
finer souls in solitary and selfish thoughts of their individual salvation.
Things were now different. The story of Lucchesio of Poggibonsi, recovered
from oblivion by M. Paul Sabatier, is the most lovely expression of
Franciscan tenderness and reverence towards the affections of the
laymen, and ought to be remembered in company with the legend of the
wood-pigeons, whom St. Francis established in his cabin and blessed in
their courtship and nesting. This Lucchesio had exercised a profession
which has ever savoured of damnation to the minds of the poor and their
lovers, that of corn merchant or speculator in grain; but touched by
Franciscan preaching, he had kept only one small garden, which, together
with his wife, he cultivated half for the benefit of the poor. One day
the wife, known in the legend only as Bona Donna, sickened and knew
she must die, and the sacrament was brought to her accordingly. But
Lucchesio never thought that it could be God's will that he should
remain on earth after his wife had been taken from him. So he got
himself shriven, received the last sacraments with her, held her hands
while she died; and when she was dead, stretched himself out, made
the sign of the cross, called on Jesus, Mary, and St. Francis, and
peacefully died in his turn: God could not have wished him to live on
without her. The passionate Franciscan sympathy with human love makes
light of all the accepted notions of bereavement being acceptable as a
divine dispensation. Lucchesio of Poggibonsi was, we are told, a member of
the Third Order of Franciscans, and his legend may help us to appreciate
the value of such institutions,