At first there were a few restless, undisciplined men who grouped
themselves around the older friars. The latter, in their character of
first companions of the Saint, found a moral authority often greater
than the official authority of the ministers and guardians. The people
turned to them by instinct as to the true continuers of St. Francis's
work. They were not far from right.

They had the vigor, the vehemence of absolute convictions; they could
not have temporized had they desired to do so. When they emerged from
their hermitages in the Apennines, their eyes shining with the fever of
their ideas, absorbed in contemplation, their whole being spoke of the
radiant visions they enjoyed; and the amazed and subdued multitude
would kneel to kiss the prints of their feet with hearts mysteriously
stirred.

A larger group was that of those Brothers who condemned these methods
without being any the less saints. Born far away from Umbria, in
countries where nature seems to be a step-mother, where adoration, far
from being the instinctive act of a happy soul soaring upward to bless
the heavenly Father, is, on the contrary, the despairing cry of an atom
lost in immensity, they desired above all things a religious
reformation, rational and profound. They dreamed of bringing the Church
back to the purity of the ancient days, and saw in the vow of poverty,
understood in its largest sense, the best means of struggling against
the vices of the clergy; but they forgot the freshness, the Italian
gayety, the sunny poetry that there had been in Francis's mission.

Full of admiration for him, they yet desired to enlarge the foundations
of his work, and for that they would neglect no means of influence,
certainly not learning.

This tendency was the dominant one in France, Germany, and England. In
Italy it was represented by a very powerful party, powerful if not in
the number, at least in the authority, of its representatives. This was
the party favored by the papacy. It was the party of Brother Elias and
all the ministers-general of the Order in the thirteenth century, if we
except Giovanni di Parma (1247-1257) and Raimondo Gaufridi (1289-1295).

In Italy a third group, the liberals, was much more numerous; men of
mediocrity to whom monastic life appeared the most facile existence,
vagrant monks happy to secure an aftermath of success by displaying the
new Rule, formed in this country the greater part of the Franciscan
family.