rmitting his words of spirit and life to be confiscated by a church
essentially dogmatic and sacerdotal.

In the same way the Franciscan movement was originally, if not the
protest of the Christian consciousness against monachism, at least the
recognition of an ideal singularly higher than that of the clergy of
that time. Let us picture to ourselves the Italy of the beginning of the
thirteenth century with its divisions, its perpetual warfare, its
depopulated country districts, the impossibility of tilling the fields
except in the narrow circle which the garrisons of the towns might
protect; all these cities from the greatest to the least occupied in
watching for the most favorable moment for falling upon and pillaging
their neighbors; sieges terminated by unspeakable atrocities, and after
all this, famine, speedily followed by pestilence to complete the
devastation. Then let us picture to ourselves the rich Benedictine
abbeys, veritable fortresses set upon the hill-tops, whence they seemed
to command all the surrounding plains. There was nothing surprising in
their prosperity. Shielded by their inviolability, they were in these
disordered times the only refuge of peaceful souls and timid hearts.[4]
The monks were in great majority deserters from life, who for motives
entirely aside from religion had taken refuge behind the only walls
which at this period were secure.

Overlook this as we may, forget as we may the demoralization and
ignorance of the inferior clergy, the simony and the vices of the
prelates, the coarseness and avarice of the monks, judging the Church of
the thirteenth century only by those of her sons who do her the most
honor; none the less are these the anchorites who flee into the desert
to escape from wars and vices, pausing only when they are very sure that
none of the world's noises will interrupt their meditations. Sometimes
they will draw away with them hundreds of imitators, to the solitudes of
Clairvaux, of the Chartreuse, of Vallombrosa, of the Camaldoli; but even
when they are a multitude they are alone; for they are dead to the world
and to their brethren. Each cell is a desert, on whose threshold they
cry

O beata solitudo.
O sola beatitudo.

The book of the Imitation is the picture of all that is purest in this
cloistered life.

But is this abstinence from action truly Christian?

No, replied St. Francis. He for his part would do like Jesus, and we may
say that his life is an i