say, 'Our Father,
who art in heaven,' in whom I have placed all my treasures and my
hopes."

The bishop covered him with his mantle and held him clasped in his arms,
until the by-standers brought Francis the cloak of a poor peasant. "Oh,
what a grand bankrupt this merchant becomes to-day!" Bossuet wrote of
him, long afterward. "Oh man worthy of being written in the book of the
evangelical poor, and henceforward living on the capital of Providence!"
From that time Francis wore mendicant's garb and begged his food in the
streets.

What did he accomplish by all this? To begin with, he succeeded in
rebuilding three churches. But his influence was destined to be much
more far-reaching than that, and of a very different nature. One day,
while he was supplicating in church, his brother Angelo passed near him,
and said to a friend, scoffingly: "Go, ask him to sell you some drops of
his sweat." "No," said Francis; "I shall not sell my sweat to men. I
shall sell it at a higher price, to God." He gave his sweat, his toil,
his sufferings, and his renunciation to God, in exchange for the
regeneration of men in a corrupt age.

All Europe, at that time the whole civilized world, was suffering. The
mass of the people were the poor, who were in deep distress, ground down
by the pride and oppressions of the barons and the rich. The country was
devastated by wars, large and small. The emperors of Germany were trying
to establish their dominion over Italy and to control the Pope. The
Church itself, after emerging from an heroic struggle with centuries of
barbarism, had been obliged to accept and use the feudal system as a
means of self-defence; and now the wrongs, the injustices, the
selfishness of feudal society were beginning to exercise a corrupting
influence on the exterior of the Church itself. Unselfish and holy men
in ecclesiastical places, both high and humble, preserved the spirit and
sanctity of Christian faith, but were not able wholly to counteract the
evils of pride, wealth, and luxury that invaded the Church from the
worldly side, and infected its unworthy servants. Francis perceived that
the only hope or relief possible to that age lay in a decisive spiritual
revolution, to be effected without violence, which would recall people
to the primitive simplicity, unselfishness, and absolute devotion of the
time of Christ and the apostolic period. This revolution could be
accomplished, he saw, only by a personal example so stron