prevailed upon to let them stand on the plea that they were needed
to shelter travellers and pilgrims. He established also the order of
Poor Clares, so called from a noble maiden, Clare, who became its first
superior. This was, for women, what his order of the Friars Minor was
for men; though the Clares remained strictly enclosed, while the Friars
went abroad preaching, and established missions in various quarters of
the globe. Finally, he formed his Third Order, which included laymen and
laywomen living in the world, who bound themselves by simple vows of
virtue and charity, while continuing in their accustomed phase of life.
Thousands joined the Friars; and probably millions were enrolled in the
Third Order. It has been said that Francis first made known to the
Middle Ages the power of association among the weak and humble, and that
from the pages on which he inscribed his institutes sprang modern
democracy in Italy. Certain it is that the Emperor Frederick II.
received a letter from some of his Italian feudal supporters, saying:
"The Friars Minor ... have raised themselves against us. They have
publicly condemned both our mode of life and our principles, they have
shattered our rights, and have brought us to nothingness." Yet the
Franciscan Friars and the Third Order had done this only by the contrast
of example, of poverty, fasting, prayer, self-denial, and charity of the
heart as well as of the hands.

The work of Saint Francis did much to undermine feudalism; and it almost
regenerated the spirit of Christianity in the thirteenth century. "Man
of the people," writes R. F. O'Connor, "he did more for the people than
ever yet had been done by any one; whose vocation was to revive in the
midst of a corrupting opulence the esteem and practice of poverty, which
he ennobled, ... and, without setting class against class, _or violating
the least point of the divine or human law_, levelled every social
barrier and united princes and peasants in a bond of union which neither
time nor eternity was to sever."

This phase of his influence should interest us of to-day, when the same
problems of wealth and poverty and of superficiality in religion
confront our arrogant modern "civilization." That St. Francis was not a
madman is evident from the orderliness of his work, his clear
legislative and administrative capacity, his calm, powerful, amiable
sway over all sorts of people. Yet he was possessed by an absolute
passion and ecst