under the very eyes of St. Francis, there is
need only to indicate it briefly. His work may have received many
infiltrations from the Waldensian movement, but Catharism was wholly
foreign to it.

This is naturally explained by the fact that St. Francis never consented
to occupy himself with questions of doctrine. For him faith was not of
the intellectual but the moral domain; it is the consecration of the
heart. Time spent in dogmatizing appeared to him time lost.

An incident in the life of Brother Egidio well brings out the slight
esteem in which theology was held by the early Brothers Minor. One day,
in the presence of St. Bonaventura, he cried, perhaps not without a
touch of irony, "Alas! what shall we ignorant and simple ones do to
merit the favor of God?" "My brother," replied the famous divine, "you
know very well that it suffices to love the Lord." "Are you very sure of
that?" replied Egidio; "do you believe that a simple woman might please
Him as well as a master in theology?" Upon the affirmative response of
his interlocutor, he ran out into the street and calling to a beggar
woman with all his might, "Poor old creature," he exclaimed, "rejoice,
for if you love God, you may have a higher place in the kingdom of
heaven than Brother Bonaventura!"[21]

The Cathari, then, had no direct influence upon St. Francis,[22] but
nothing could better prove the disturbance of thought at this epoch
than that resurrection of Manicheism. To what a depth of lassitude and
folly must religious Italy have fallen for this mixture of Buddhism,
Mazdeism, and gnosticism to have taken such hold upon it! The Catharist
doctrine rested upon the antagonism of two principles, one bad, the
other good. The first had created matter; the second, the soul, which,
for generation after generation passes from one body to another until it
achieves salvation. Matter is the cause and the seat of evil; all
contact with it constitutes a blemish,[23] consequently the Cathari
renounced marriage and property and advocated suicide. All this was
mixed up with most complicated cosmogonical myths.

Their adherents were divided into two classes--the pure or perfect, and
the believers, who were proselytes in the second degree, and whose
obligations were very simple. The adepts, properly so called, were
initiated by the ceremony of the _consolamentum_ or imposition of hands,
which induced the descent upon them of the Consoling Spirit. Among them
were enthusia