at of filial obedience.
This may perhaps appear strange at first as regards an unauthorized
preacher who comes speaking to the world in the name of his own
immediate personal inspiration. But did not most of the men of '89
believe themselves good and loyal subjects of Louis XVI.?

The Church was to our ancestors what the fatherland is to us; we may
wish to remodel its government, overturn its administration, change its
constitution, but we do not think ourselves less good patriots for that.

In the same way, in an age of simple faith when religious beliefs seemed
to be in the very fibre and flesh of humanity, Dante, without ceasing to
be a good Catholic, could attack the clergy and the court of Rome with a
violence that has never been surpassed. St. Francis so surely believed
that the Church had become unfaithful to her mission that he could speak
in his symbolic language of the widowhood of his Lady Poverty, who from
Christ's time to his own had found no husband. How could he better have
declared his purposes or revealed his dreams?

What he purposed was far more than the foundation of an order, and it is
to do him great wrong thus to restrict his endeavor. He longed for a
true awakening of the Church in the name of the evangelical ideal which
he had regained. All Europe awoke with a start when it heard of these
penitents from a little Umbrian town. It was reported that they had
craved a strange privilege from the court of Rome: that of possessing
nothing. Men saw them pass by, earning their bread by the labor of their
hands, accepting only the bare necessities of bodily sustenance from
them to whom they had given with lavish hands the bread of life. The
people lifted up their heads, breathing in with deep inspirations the
airs of a springtime upon which was already floating the perfume of new
flowers.

Here and there in the world there are many souls capable of all heroism,
if only they can see before them a true leader. St. Francis became for
these the guide they had longed for, and whatever was best in humanity
at that time leaped to follow in his footsteps.

This movement, which was destined to result in the constitution of a new
family of monks, was in the beginning anti-monastic. It is not rare for
history to have similar contradictions to record. The meek Galilean who
preached the religion of a personal revelation, without ceremonial or
dogmatic law, triumphed only on condition of being conquered, and of
pe