the place for asking if he was wrong; grave authors have
demonstrated at length the economic troubles which would have been let
loose upon the world if men had followed him. Alas! his madness, if
madness it were, is a kind of which one need not fear the contagion.

He felt that in this respect the Rule could not be too absolute, and
that if unfortunately the door was opened to various interpretations of
it, there would be no stopping-point. The course of events and the
periodical convulsions which shook his Order show clearly enough how
rightly he judged.

I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a
scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems
evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held
up by the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples.

Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be
confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid
horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced
everything only that he might the better possess everything. The lives
of the immense majority of our contemporaries are ruled by the fatal
error that the more one possesses the more one enjoys. Our exterior,
civil liberties continually increase, but at the same time our inward
freedom is taking flight; how many are there among us who are literally
possessed by what they possess?[9]

Poverty not only permitted the Brothers to mingle with the poor and
speak to them with authority, but, removing from them all material
anxiety, it left them free to enjoy without hindrance those hidden
treasures which nature reserves for pure idealists.

The ever-thickening barriers which modern life, with its sickly search
for useless comfort, has set up between us and nature did not exist for
these men, so full of youth and life, eager for wide spaces and the
outer air. This is what gave St. Francis and his companions that quick
susceptibility to Nature which made them thrill in mysterious harmony
with her. Their communion with Nature was so intimate, so ardent, that
Umbria, with the harmonious poetry of its skies, the joyful outburst of
its spring-time, is still the best document from which to study them.
The tie between the two is so indissoluble, that after having lived a
certain time in company with St. Francis, one can hardly, on reading
certain passages of his biographers, help _seeing_ the spot where the
incident too