ch he brought about we must read the sermons of
his contemporaries; declamatory, scholastic, subtile, they delighted in
the minutiae of exegesis or dogma, serving up refined dissertations on
the most obscure texts of the Old Testament, to hearers starving for a
simple and wholesome diet.

With Francis, on the contrary, all is incisive, clear, practical. He
pays no attention to the precepts of the rhetoricians, he forgets
himself completely, thinking only of the end desired, the conversion of
souls. And conversion was not in his view something vague and
indistinct, which must take place only between God and the hearer. No,
he will have immediate and practical proofs of conversion. Men must give
up ill-gotten gains, renounce their enmities, be reconciled with their
adversaries.

At Assisi he threw himself valiantly into the thick of civil
dissensions. The agreement of 1202 between the parties who divided the
city had been wholly ephemeral. The common people were continually
demanding new liberties, which the nobles and burghers would yield to
them only under the pressure of fear. Francis took up the cause of the
weak, the _minores_, and succeeded in reconciling them with the rich,
the _majores_.

His spiritual family had not as yet, properly speaking, a name, for,
unlike those too hasty spirits who baptize their productions before they
have come to light, he was waiting for the occasion that should reveal
the true name which he ought to give it.[19] One day someone was
reading the Rule in his presence. When he came to the passage, "Let the
brethren, wherever they may find themselves called to labor or to serve,
never take an office which shall put them over others, but on the
contrary, let them be always under (_sint minores_) all those who may be
in that house,"[20] these words _sint minores_ of the Rule, in the
circumstances then existing in the city, suddenly appeared to him as a
providential indication. His institution should be called the Order of
the Brothers Minor.

We may imagine the effect of this determination. The _Saint_, for
already this magic word had burst forth where he appeared,[21] the
Saint had spoken. It was he who was about to bring peace to the city,
acting as arbiter between the two factions which rent it.

We still possess the document of this _pace civile_, exhumed, so to
speak, from the communal archives of Assisi by the learned and pious
Antonio Cristofani.[22] The opening lines are as fol