which gave heaven to the laity, to
the married burgher, the artisan, the peasant; which fertilised the
religious ideal with the simplest and sweetest instincts of mankind.
But, Third Order apart, the mission of the regular Franciscans and
Dominicans is wholly different from that of the earlier orders of
monasticism proper. The earlier monks, however useful and venerable as
tillers of the soil and students of all sciences, were, nevertheless,
only agglomerated hermits, retired from the world for the safety each of
his own soul; whereas the preaching, wandering friars are men who mix
with the world for the sake of souls of others. Thus, throughout the
evolution of religious communities, down to the Jesuits and Oratorians,
to the great nursing brother-and sisterhoods of the seventeenth century,
we can watch the substitution of care for lay souls in the place of
more saintly ones--a gradual secularisation in unsuspected harmony with
the heretical and philosophical movements which tend more and more to
make religion an essential function of life, instead of an activity with
which life is for ever at variance.

In accordance with this evolution is the great enthroning of love in the
thirteenth century: it means the replacing of the terror of a divinity,
who was little better than a metaphysical Moloch (sometimes, and oftener
than we think, a metaphysical Ormuzd and Ahriman of Manichean character),
by the idolatry of an all-gracious Virgin, of an all-compassionate and
all-sympathising Christ.

It was an effort at self-righting of the unhappy world, this love-fever
which followed on the many centuries of monastic self-mutilation; for,
in sickness of the spirit, the hot stage, for all its delirium, means
a possibility of life. Moreover, it gave to mankind a plenitude of
happiness such as is necessary, whether reasonable or unreasonable, for
mankind to continue living at all; art, poetry, freedom, all the things
which form the _Viaticum_ on mankind's journey through the dreary ages,
requiring for their production, it would seem, an extra dose of faith,
of hope, and happiness. Indeed, the Franciscan movement is important not
so much for its humanitarian quality as for its optimism.

Many other religious movements have asserted, with equal and greater
efficacy, the need for charity and loving-kindness; but none, as it
seems to me, has conceived like it that charity and loving-kindness are
not mitigations of misery, but aids to jo