 Chapter 8 The Mirror of Christ No man who has been given the freedom of the faith is likely to fall into those whole and corner extravagances in which later degenerate Franciscans, or rather Fratticelli, sought to concentrate entirely on St. Francis as a Second Christ, the creator of a new Gospel. In fact, any such notion makes nonsense of every motive in the man's life, for no man would reverently magnify what he was meant to rival or only profess to follow what he existed to supplant. On the contrary, as will appear later, this little study would rather specifically insist that it was really the papal sagacity that saved the great Franciscan movement for the whole world and the Universal Church and prevented it from petering out as that sort of stale and second-rate sect that is called a new religion. Everything that is written here must be understood not only as distinct from, but diametrically opposed to the idolatry of the Fratticelli. The difference between Christ and St. Francis was the difference between the creator and the creature, and certainly no creature was ever so conscious of that colossal contrast as St. Francis himself. But subject to this understanding it is perfectly true and it is vitally important that Christ was the pattern on which St. Francis sought to fashion himself, and that at many points their human and historical lives were even curiously coincident, and above all that compared to most of us at least, St. Francis is a most sublime approximation to his master, and even in being an intermediary and a reflection is a splendid and yet a merciful mirror of Christ. And this truth suggests another, which I think has hardly been noticed, but which happens to be a highly forcible argument for the authority of Christ being continuous in the Catholic Church. Cardinal Newman wrote in his liveliest controversial work a sentence that might be a model of what we mean by saying that his creed tends to lucidity and logical courage. In speaking of the ease with which truth may be made to look like its own shadow or sham, he said, quote, and if antichrist is like Christ, Christ I suppose is like antichrist, close quote. Mere religious sentiment might well be shocked at the end of the sentence, but nobody could object to it except the logician who said that Caesar and Pompeii were very much alike, especially Pompeii. It may give a much milder shock if I say here what most of us have forgotten, that if St. Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis, and my present point is that it is really very enlightening to realize that Christ was like St. Francis. What I mean is this, that if men find certain riddles and hard sayings in the story of Galilee and if they find the answers to those riddles in the story of Assisi, it really does show that a secret has been handed down in one religious tradition and no other. It shows that the casket that was locked in Palestine can be unlocked in Umbria, for the Church is the keeper of the keys. Now in truth, while it has always seemed natural to explain St. Francis in the light of Christ, it has not occurred to many people to explain Christ in the light of St. Francis. Perhaps the word light is not here the proper metaphor, but the same truth is admitted in the accepted metaphor of the mirror. St. Francis is the mirror of Christ, rather as the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but it is also much nearer to us, and being less vivid it is more visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being necessarily less of a mystery, he does not for us so much open his mouth in mysteries. Yet as a matter of fact, many minor things that seem mysteries in the mouth of Christ would seem merely characteristic paradoxes in the mouth of St. Francis. It seems natural to re-read the more remote incidents with the help of the more recent ones. It is a truism to say that Christ lived before Christianity, and it follows that as an historical figure he is a figure in heathen history. I mean that the medium in which he moved was not the medium of Christendom, but of the Old Pagan Empire, and from that alone, not to mention the distance of time, it follows that his circumstances are more alien to us than those of an Italian monk such as we might meet even today. I suppose the most authoritative commentary can hardly be certain of the current or conventional weight of all his words or phrases, of which of them would then have seemed a common illusion and which a strange fancy. This archaic setting has left many of the saying standing like hieroglyphics and subject to many and peculiar individual interpretations. Yet it is true of almost any of them that if we simply translate them into the Umbrian dialect of the First Franciscans they would seem like any other part of the Franciscan story. Doubtless in one sense fantastic, but quite familiar. All sorts of critical controversies have revolved round the passage which bits men consider the lilies of the field and copy them in taking no thought of the morrow. The skeptic has alternated between telling us to be true Christians and do it and explaining that it is impossible to do. When he is a communist as well as an atheist, he is generally doubtful whether to blame us for preaching what is impracticable or for not instantly putting it into practice. I am not going to discuss here the point of ethics and economics. I merely remark that even those who are puzzled at the saying of Christ would hardly pause in accepting it as a saying of St. Francis. And it would be surprised to find that he had said, I beseech you little brothers, that you be wise as Brother Daisy and Brother Dandelion, for never do they lie away thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory. Even more bitterness and bewilderment has arisen about the command to turn the other cheek and to give the coat to the robber who has taken the cloak. It is widely held to imply the wickedness of war among nations, about which in itself not a word seems to have been said. Taken thus, literally and universally, it much more clearly implies the wickedness of all law and government. Yet there are many prosperous peacemakers who are much more shocked at the idea of using the brute force of soldiers against a powerful foreigner than they are at using the brute force of policemen against a poor fellow citizen. Here again I am content to point out that the paradox becomes perfectly human and probable if addressed by Francis to Franciscans. Nobody would be surprised to read that Brother Juniper did then run after the thief that had stolen his hood, beseeching him to take his gown also, for so St. Francis had commanded him. Nobody would be surprised if St. Francis told a young noble about to be admitted to his company that so far from pursuing a bricken to recover his shoes he ought to pursue him to make him a present of his stockings. We may like or not the atmosphere these things imply, but we know what atmosphere they do imply. We recognize a certain note as natural and clear as the note of a bird, the note of St. Francis. There is in it something of gentle mockery of the very idea of possessions, something of a hope of disarming the enemy by generosity, something of a humorous sense of bewildering the worldly with the unexpected, something of the joy of carrying an enthusiastic conviction to a logical extreme. But anyhow we have no difficulty in recognizing it if we have read any of the literature of the little brothers and the movement that began in Assisi. It seems reasonable to infer that if it was this spirit that made such strange things possible in Umbria it was the same spirit that made them possible in Palestine. If we hear the same unmistakable note and sense the same indescribable savor in two things at such a distance from each other it seems natural to suppose that the case that is more remote from our experience was like the case that is closer to our experience. As the thing is explicable on the assumption that Francis was speaking to Franciscans it is not an irrational explanation to suggest that Christ was also speaking to some dedicated band that had much the same function as Franciscans. In other words it seems only natural to hold as the Catholic Church has held that these councils of perfection were part of a particular vocation to astonish and awaken the world. But in any case it is important to note that when we do find these particular features with their seemingly fantastic fitness reappearing after more than a thousand years we find them produced by the same religious system which claims continuity and authority from the scenes in which they first appeared. Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of Christianity, but it is the ancient Church that can again straddle the world with the paradoxes of Christianity. Ubi Petrus Ibi Franciscus. But if we understand that it was truly under the inspiration of his Divine Master that St. Francis did these merely quaint or eccentric acts of charity we must understand that it was under the same inspiration that he did acts of self-denial and austerity. It is clear that these more or less playful parables of the love of men were conceived after a close study of the Sermon on the Mount, but it is evident that he made an even closer study of the silent Sermon on that other mountain, the mountain that was called Golgotha. Here again he was speaking the strict historical truth when he said that in fasting or suffering humiliation he was but trying to do something of what Christ did, and here again it seems probable that as the same truth appears at the two ends of a chain of tradition, the tradition has preserved the truth. But the import of this fact at the moment affects the next phase in the personal history of the man himself. For, as it becomes clearer that his great communal scheme is an accomplished fact, and past the peril of an early collapse, as it becomes evident that there already is such a thing as an order of the friarism minor, this more individual and intense ambition of St. Francis emerges more and more. As soon as he certainly has followers, he does not compare himself with his followers towards whom he might appear as a master. He compares himself more and more with his master towards whom he appears only as a servant. This, it may be said in passing, is one of the moral and even practical conveniences of the ascetical privilege. Every other sort of superiority may be superciliousness, but the saint is never supercilious, for he is always by hypothesis in the presence of a superior. The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god. But in any case the service to which St. Francis had committed himself was one which about this time he conceived more and more in terms of sacrifice and crucifixion. He was full of the sentiment that he had not suffered enough to be worthy even to be a distant follower of his suffering god. And this passage in his history may really be roughly summarized as the search for martyrdom. This was the ultimate idea in the remarkable business of his expedition among the Saracens in Syria. There were indeed other elements in his conception which are worthy of more intelligent understanding than they have often received. His idea, of course, was to bring the crusades in a double sense to their end, that is, to reach their conclusion and to achieve their purpose. Only he wished to do it by conversion and not by conquest, that is, by intellectual, not material means. The modern mind is hard to please, and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical when it has just called any practical method immoral. But the idea of St. Francis was far from being a fanatical or necessarily even an unpractical idea, though perhaps he saw the problem as rather too simple, lacking the learning of his great inheritor, Raymond Lully, who understood more but has been quite as little understood. The way he approached the matter was indeed highly personal and peculiar. But that was true of almost everything he did. It was in one way a simple idea, as most of his ideas were simple ideas. But it was not a silly idea. There was a great deal to be said for it, and it might have succeeded. It was, of course, simply the idea that it is better to create Christians than to destroy Muslims. If Islam had been converted, the world would have been immeasurably more united and happy. For one thing, three quarters of the wars of modern history would never have taken place. It was not absurd to suppose that this might be affected without military force by missionaries who were also martyrs. The Church had conquered Europe in that way and may yet conquer Asia or Africa in that way. But when all this is allowed for, there is still another sense in which St. Francis was not thinking of martyrdom as a means to an end. But almost as an end in itself. In the sense that to him the supreme end was to come closer to the example of Christ. Through all his plunging and restless days ran the refrain, I have not suffered enough, I have not sacrificed enough, I am not yet worthy even of the shadow of the crown of thorns. He wondered about the valleys of the world, looking for the hill that has the outline of a skull. A little while before his final departure for the east, a vast and triumphant assembly of the whole order had been held near Partinucula and called the Assembly of the Straw Huts, and from the manner in which that mighty army encamped in the field. Tradition says that it was on this occasion that St. Francis met St. Dominic for the first and last time. It also says, what is probable enough, that the practical spirit of the Spaniard was almost appalled at the devout irresponsibility of the Italian, who had assembled such a crowd without organizing a commissariat. Dominic the Spaniard was like nearly every Spaniard, a man with the mind of a soldier. His charity took the practical form of provision and preparation. But, apart from the disputes about faith which such incidents open, he probably did not understand in this case the power of mere popularity produced by mere personality. In all his leaps in the dark, Francis had an extraordinary faculty of falling on his feet. The whole countryside came down like a landslide to provide food and drink for this sort of pious picnic. Peasants brought wagons of wine and game, great nobles walked about doing the work of footmen. It was a very great victory for the Franciscan spirit of a reckless faith not only in God, but in man. Of course there is much doubt and dispute about the whole story and the whole relation of Francis and Dominic, and the story of the Assembly of the Straw Huts is told from the Franciscan side. But the alleged meeting is worth mentioning precisely because it was immediately before St. Francis set forth on his bloodless crusade that he is said to have met St. Dominic, who has been so much criticized for lending himself to a more bloody one. There is no space in this little book to explain how St. Francis as much as St. Dominic would ultimately have defended the defense of Christian unity by arms. Indeed it would need a large book instead of a little book to develop that point alone from its first principles. For the modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration, and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he met by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them, such as decency or the error of the Atomite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Muslim or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them, such as reverence or the error of the atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lopsided illogical deadlock of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar and called it the liberality of his own mind. Many evil men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea, it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly because they have not really thought out their idea of property. But while it is probable that Saint Francis would have reluctantly agreed with Saint Dominic that war for the truth was right in the last resort, it is certain that Saint Dominic did enthusiastically agree with Saint Francis that it was far better to prevail by persuasion and enlightenment if it were possible. Saint Dominic devoted himself much more to persuading than to persecuting, but there was a difference in the methods simply because there was a difference in the men. About everything Saint Francis did there was something that was in a good sense childish and even in a good sense willful. He threw himself into things abruptly as if they had just occurred to him. He made a dash for his Mediterranean enterprise with something of the air of a schoolboy running away to the sea. In the first act of that attempt he characteristically distinguished himself by becoming the patron saint of Stoilways. He never thought of waiting for introductions or bargains or any of the considerable backing that he already had from rich and responsible people. He simply saw a boat and threw himself into it as he threw himself into everything else. It has all that air of running a race which makes his whole life read like an escapade or even literally an escape. He lay like lumber among the cargo with one companion whom he had swept with him in his rush. But the voyage was apparently unfortunate and erratic and ended in an enforced return to Italy. Apparently it was after this first false start that the Great Reunion took place at the Partonucula and between this and the final Syrian journey there was also an attempt to meet the Muslim menace by preaching to the Moors in Spain. In Spain indeed several of the first Franciscans had already succeeded gloriously in being martyred, but the Great Francis still went about stretching out his arms for such torments and desiring that agony in vain. No one would have said more readily than he, that he was probably less like Christ than those others who had already found their calvary, but the thing remained with him like a secret, the strangest of the sorrows of man. His later voyage was more successful so far as arriving at the scene of operations was concerned. He arrived at the headquarters of the Crusade which was in front of the besieged city of Damietta and went on in his rapid and solitary fashion to seek the headquarters of the Saracens. He succeeded in obtaining an interview with the Sultan and it was at that interview that he evidently offered and as some say proceeded to fling himself into the fire as a divine ordeal defying the Muslim religious teachers to do the same. It is quite certain that he would have done so at a moment's notice. Indeed, throwing himself into the fire was hardly more desperate in any case than throwing himself among the weapons and tools of torture of a horde of fanatical Mohammedans and asking them to announce Mohammed. It is said further that the Mohammedan Muftis showed some coldness toward the proposed competition and that one of them quietly withdrew while it was under discussion which would also appear credible. But for whatever reason Francis evidently returned as freely as he came. There may be something in the story of the individual impression produced on the Sultan which the narrator represents as a sort of secret conversion. There may be something of the suggestion that the holy man was unconsciously protected among half-barbarous orientals by the halo of saintity that is supposed in such places to surround an idiot. There is probably as much or more in the more generous explanation of that graceful though capricious courtesy and compassion which mingled with wilder things in the stately sold-ons of the type and tradition of Solomon. Finally, there is perhaps something in the suggestion that the tale of St. Francis might be told as a sort of ironic tragedy in comedy called the man who could not get killed. Men liked him too much for himself to let him die for his faith and the man was received instead of the message. But all these are only converging guesses at a great effort that is hard to judge because it broke off short like the beginnings of a great bridge that might have united east and west and remains one of the great might have beens of history. Meanwhile, the great movement in Italy was making giant strides. Backed now by papal authority as well as popular enthusiasm and creating a kind of comradeship among all classes, it had started a riot of reconstruction on all sides of religious and social life and especially began to express itself in that enthusiasm for building which is the mark of all resurrections of western Europe. There had notably been established at Bologna, a magnificent mission house of the Friars Minor and the vast body of them and their sympathizers surrounded it with a course of acclamation. Their unanimity had a strange interruption. One man alone in that crowd was seen to turn and suddenly denounce the building as if it had been a Babylonian temple, demanding indignantly since when the lady of poverty had thus been insulted with the luxury of palaces. It was Francis, a wild figure returned from his eastern crusade and it was the first and last time that he spoke in wrath to his children. A word must be said later about this serious division of sentiment and policy about which many Franciscans and to some extent Francis himself parted company with the more moderate policy which ultimately prevailed. At this point we need only note it as another shadow fallen upon his spirit after his disappointment in the desert and as in some sense the prelude to the next phase of his career which is the most isolated and the most mysterious. It is true that everything about this episode seems to be covered with some cloud of dispute even including its date. Some writers putting it much earlier in the narrative than this, but whether or no it was chronologically it was certainly logically the culmination of the story and may best be indicated here. I say indicated for it must be a matter of little more than indication, the thing being a mystery both in the higher moral and the more trivial historical sense. Anyhow the conditions of the affair seem to have been these. Francis and a young companion in the course of their common wandering came past a great castle all lighted up with the festivities attending a son of the house receiving the honor of knighthood. This aristocratic mansion which took its name from Montefeltro they entered in their beautiful and casual fashion and began to give their own sort of good news. There were some at least who listened to the saint as if he had been an angel of God. Among them a gentleman named Orlando Ochiusi who had great lands in Tuscany and who proceeded to do St. Francis a singular and somewhat picturesque act of courtesy. He gave him a mountain a thing somewhat unique among the gifts of the world. Presumably the Franciscan rule which forbade a man to accept money had made no detailed provision about accepting mountains. Nor indeed did St. Francis accept it save as he accepted everything as a temporary convenience rather than a personal possession. But he turned it into a sort of refuge for the Arimatical rather than the monastic life. He retired there when he wished for a life of prayer and fasting which he did not ask even his closest friends to follow. This was Alverno of the Apennines and upon its peak there rests for ever a dark cloud that has a rim or halo of glory. What it was exactly that happened there may never be known. The latter has been, I believe, a subject of dispute among the most devout students of the saintly life as well as between such students and others of the more secular sort. It may be that St. Francis never spoke to a soul on the subject. It would be highly characteristic and it is certainly in any case that he said very little. I think he is only alleged to have spoken of it to one man. Subject, however, to such truly sacred doubts. I will confess that to me personally this one solitary and indirect report that has come down to us reads very like the report of something real of some of those things that are more real than what we call daily realities. Even something as it were double and bewildering about the image seems to carry the impression of an experience shaking the senses as does the passage in revelations about the supernatural creatures full of eyes. It would seem that St. Francis beheld the heavens above him occupied by a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross. There seems some mystery about whether the winged figure was as self-crucified or in the posture of crucifixion or whether it merely enclosed in its frame of wings some colossal crucifix. But it seems clear that there was some question of the former impression. For St. Bonaventura distinctly says that St. Francis doubted how a seraph could be crucified since those awful and ancient principalities were without the infirmity of the passion. St. Bonaventura suggests that the seeming contradiction may have meant that St. Francis was to be crucified as a spirit since he could not be crucified as a man. But whatever the meaning of the vision, the general idea of it is very vivid and overwhelming. St. Francis saw above him filling the whole heavens some vast immemorial unthinkable power ancient like the ancient of days whose calm men had conceived under the forms of winged bulls or monstrous cherubim and all that winged wonder was in pain like a wounded bird. This seraphic suffering, it is said, pierced his soul with a sort of grief and pity. It may be inferred that some sort of mounting agony accompanied the ecstasy. Finally, after some fashion the apocalypse faded from the sky and the agony within subsided and silence and the natural air filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple chasms and cleft abysses of the aponines. The head of the solitary sank amid all that relaxation and quiet in which time can drift by with the sense of something ended and complete, and as he stared downwards he saw the marks of nails in his own hands. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of St. Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 9 Miracles and Death The tremendous story of the stigmata of St. Francis, which was the end of the last chapter, was in some sense the end of his life. In a logical sense it would have been the end even if it had happened at the beginning. But truer traditions refer it to a later date and suggest that his remaining days on the earth had something about them of the lingering of a shadow. Whether St. Bonaventura was right in his hint that St. Francis saw in that ceramic vision something almost like a vast mirror of his own soul that could at least suffer like an angel, though not like a god, or whether it expressed under an imagery more primitive and colossal than common Christian art the primary paradox of the death of god, it is evident from its traditional consequences that it was meant for a crown and for a seal. It seems to have been after seeing this vision that he began to go blind. But the incident has another and much less important place in this rough and limited outline. It is the natural occasion for considering briefly and collectively all the facts or fables of another aspect of the life of St. Francis, an aspect which is, I will not say, more disputable but certainly more disputed. I mean all that mass of testimony and tradition that concerns his miraculous powers and supernatural experiences with which it would have been easy to stud and bejewel every page of the story. Only that certain circumstances necessary to the conditions of this narrative make it better to gather, somewhat hastily, all such jewels into a heap. I have here adopted this course in order to make allowance for a prejudice. It is indeed, to a great extent, a prejudice of the past, a prejudice that is plainly disappearing in days of greater enlightenment and especially of a greater range of scientific experiment and knowledge. But it is a prejudice that is still tenacious in many of an older generation and still traditional in many of the younger. I mean, of course, what used to be called the belief that miracles do not happen, as I think Matthew Arnold expressed it, in expressing the standpoint of so many of our Victorian uncles and great uncles. In other words, it was the remains of that skeptical simplification by which some of the philosophers of the early 18th century had popularized the impression, for a very short time, that we had discovered the regulations of the cosmos, like the works of a clock, of so very simple a clock, that it was possible to distinguish, oh, most at a glance, what could or could not have happened in human experience. It should be remembered that these real skeptics of the golden age of skepticism were quite as scornful of the first fancies of science as of the lingering legends of religion. Voltaire, when he was told that a fossil fish had been found on the peaks of the Alps, laughed openly at the tale and said that some fasting monk or hermit had dropped his fish bones there, possibly in order to effect another monkish fraud. Everybody knows by this time that science has had its revenge on skepticism. The border between the credible and the incredible has not only become once more as vague as in any barbaric twilight, but the credible is obviously increasing and the incredible shrinking. A man in Voltaire's time did not know what miracle he would next have to throw up. A man in our time does not know what miracle he will next have to swallow. But long before these things had happened, in those days of my boyhood when I first saw the figure of St. Francis far away in the distance and drawing me even at that distance, in those Victorian days which did seriously separate the virtues from the miracles of the saints, even in those days I could not help feeling vaguely puzzled about how this method could be applied to history. Even then I did not quite understand and even now I do not quite understand on what principle one is to pick and choose in the chronicles of the past which seem to be all of a piece. All our knowledge of certain historical periods and notably of the whole medieval period rest on certain connected chronicles written by people who are some of them nameless and all of them dead, who cannot in any case be cross-examined and cannot in some cases be corroborated. I have never been quite clear about the nature of the right by which historians accepted masses of detail from them as definitely true and suddenly denied their truthfulness when one detail was preternatural. I do not complain of their being skeptics. I am puzzled about why the skeptics are not more skeptical. I can understand they're saying that these details would never have been included in a chronicle except by lunatics or liars, but in that case the only inference is that the chronicle was written by liars or lunatics. They will write for instance, Monkish fanaticism found it easy to spread the report that miracles were already being worked at the tomb of Thomas Speckett. Why should they not equally say, Monkish fanaticism found it easy to spread the slander that four nights from King Henry's court had assassinated Thomas Speckett in the cathedral? They would write something like this. The credulity of the age readily believed that Joan of Arc had been inspired to point out the Dauphin although he was in disguise. Why should they not write on the same principle? The credulity of the age was such as to suppose that an obscure peasant girl could get an audience at the court of the Dauphin. And so in the present case when they tell us that there is a wild story that St. Francis flung himself into the fire and emerged scatheous upon what precise principle are they forbidden to tell us of a wild story that St. Francis flung himself into the camp of the ferocious Muslims and returned safe. I only ask for information, for I do not see the rationale of the thing myself. I will undertake to say that there was not a word written of St. Francis by any contemporary who was himself incapable of believing and telling a miraculous story. Perhaps it is all Monkish fables and there never was any St. Francis or any St. Thomas Becket or any Joan of Arc. This is undoubtedly a reduxio out of certum, but it is a reduxio out of certum of the view which thought all miracles absurd. And in abstract logic this method of selection would lead to the wildest absurdities. An intrinsically incredible story could only mean that the authority was unworthy of credit. It would not mean that other parts of the story must be received with complete credulity. If somebody has said he had met a man in yellow trousers who proceeded to jump down his own throat, we should not exactly take our Bible oath or be burned at the stake for the statement that he wore yellow trousers. If someone claimed to have gone up in a blue balloon and found that the moon was made of green cheese, we should not exactly take an affidavit that the balloon was blue any more than that the moon was green. And the really logical conclusion from throwing doubts on all tales like the miracles of St. Francis was to throw doubts on the existence of men like St. Francis. And there really was a modern moment, a sort of high water mark of insane skepticism when this sort of thing was really said and done. People used to go about saying that there was no such person as St. Patrick, which is every bit as much of a human and historical howler as saying there was no such person as St. Francis. There was a time, for instance, when the madness of mythological explanation had dissolved a large part of solid history under the universal and luxuriant warmth and radiance of the sun myth. I believe that that particular sun has already set, but there have been any number of moons and meteors to take its place. St. Francis, of course, would make a magnificent sun myth. How could anybody miss the chance of being a sun myth when he is actually best known for a song called The Canticle of the Sun? It is needless to point out that the fire in Syria was the dawn in the east and the bleeding wounds in Tuscany, the sunset in the west. I could expound this theory at considerable length, only as so often happens to such fine theorists. Another and more promising theory occurs to me. I cannot think how everybody, including myself, can have overlooked the fact that the whole tale of St. Francis is of totemistic origin. It is unquestionably a tale that simply swarms with totems. The Franciscan woods are as full of them as any red Indian fable. Francis is made to call himself an ass because in the original mythos, Francis was merely the name given to the real four-footed dunkeying. Afterwards, vaguely evolved into a half-human god or hero. And that, no doubt, is why I used to feel that the brother, wolf, and sister bird of St. Francis were somehow like the Brer Fox and Cis Cow of Uncle Remus. Some say there is an innocent stage in infancy in which we do really believe that a cow talked or a fox made a tar baby. Anyhow, there is an innocent period of intellectual growth in which we do sometimes really believe that St. Patrick was a sun myth or St. Francis a totem. But for the most of us, both these phases of paradise are past. As I shall suggest in a moment, there is one sense in which we can for practical purposes distinguish between probable and improbable things in such a story. It is not so much a question of cosmic criticism about the nature of the event as of literary criticism about the nature of the story. Some stories are told much more seriously than others. But apart from this, I shall not attempt here any definite differentiation between them. I shall not do so for a practical reason affecting the utility of the proceeding. I mean, the fact that in a practical sense, the whole of this matter is again in the melting pot from which many things may emerge molded into what rationalism would have called monsters. The fixed points of faith and philosophy do indeed remain always the same. Whether a man believes that fire in one case could fail to burn depends on why he thinks it generally does burn. If it burns nine sticks out of ten because it is its nature or doom to do so, then it will burn the tith stick as well. If it burns nine sticks because it is the will of God that it should, then it might be the will of God that the tith should be unburned. Nobody can get behind that fundamental difference about the reason of things. It is as rational for a theist to believe in miracles as for an atheist to disbelieve in them. In other words, there is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in miracles, and that is because he does not believe in materialism. But these fixed points of faith and philosophy are things for a theoretical work and have no particular place here. And in the matter of history and biography, which have their place here, nothing is fixed at all. The world is in a welter of the possible and impossible, and nobody knows what will be the next scientific hypothesis to support some ancient superstition. Three quarters of the miracles attributed to Saint Francis would already be explained by psychologists, not indeed as a Catholic explains them, but as a materialist must necessarily refuse to explain them. There is one whole department of the miracles of Saint Francis, the miracles of healing. What is the good of a superior skeptic throwing them away is unthinkable at the moment when faith healing is already a big, booming, Yankee business like Barnum's show. There is another whole department analogous to the tales of Christ, perceiving men's thoughts. What is the use of censoring them and blacking them out because they are marked miracles when thought reading is already a parlor game like musical chairs? There is another whole department to be studied separately if such scientific study were possible. Of the well attested wonders worked from his relics and fragmentary possessions. What is the use of dismissing all that as inconceivable when even these common psychical parlor tricks turned perpetually upon touching some familiar object or holding in the hand some personal possession? I do not believe, of course, that these tricks are of the same type as the good works of the Saint, save perhaps in the sense of Diabolus Simius Dei, but it is not a question of what I believe and why, but of what the skeptic disbelieves and why. And the moral for the practical biographer and historian is that he must wait till things settle down a little more before he claims to disbelieve anything. This being so, he can choose between two courses and not without some hesitation I have here chosen between them. The best and boldest course would be to tell the whole story in a straightforward way, miracles and all, as the original historians told it. And to this sane and simple course, the new historians will probably have to return. But it must be remembered that this book is avowedly only an introduction to Saint Francis or the study of Saint Francis. Those who need an introduction are in their nature strangers. Within the object is to get them to listen to Saint Francis at all, and in doing so it is perfectly legitimate so to arrange the order of the facts that the familiar come before the unfamiliar, and those they cannot once understand, before those they have a difficulty in understanding. I should only be too thankful if this thin and scratchy sketch contains a line or two that attracts men to study Saint Francis for themselves, and if they do study him for themselves, they will soon find that the supernatural part of the story seems quite as natural as the rest. But it was necessary that my outlines should be a merely human one, since I was only presenting his claim on all humanity, including skeptical humanity. I therefore adopted the alternative course, of showing first that nobody but a barn fool could fail to realize that Francis of Assisi was a very real historical human being, and then summarizing briefly in this chapter the superhuman powers that were certainly a part of that history and humanity. It only remains to say a few words about some distinctions that may reasonably be observed in the matter by any man of any views. That he may not confuse the point and climax of the Saint's life with the fancies and rumors that were really only the fringes of his reputation. There is so immense a mass of legends and anecdotes about Saint Francis of Assisi, and there are so many admirable compilations that cover nearly all of them, that I have been compelled within these narrow limits to pursue a somewhat narrow policy that of following one line of explanation and only mentioning one anecdote here or there, because it illustrates that explanation. If this is true about all the legends and stories, it is especially true about the miraculous legends and the supernatural stories. If we were to take some stories as they stand, we should receive a rather bewildered impression that the biography contains more supernatural events than natural ones. Now, it is clean against Catholic tradition, coincident in so many points with common sense, to suppose that this is really the proportion of these things in practical human life. Moreover, even considered as supernatural or preternatural stories, they obviously fall into certain different classes, not so much by our experience of miracles, as by our experience of stories. Some of them have the character of fairy stories, in their form, even more than their incident. They are obviously tales told by the fire to peasants or the children of peasants under conditions in which nobody thinks he is propounding a religious doctrine to be received or rejected, but only rounding off a story in the most symmetrical way, according to that sort of decorative scheme or pattern that runs through all fairy stories. Others are obviously in their form most emphatically evidence. That is, they are testimony that is truth or lies, and it will be very hard for any judge of human nature to think they are lies. It is admitted that the story of the stigmata is not a legend, but can only be a lie. I mean, that it is certainly not a late legendary accretion added afterwards to the fame of Saint Francis, but it is something that started almost immediately with his earliest biographers. It is practically necessary to suggest that it was a conspiracy. Indeed, there has been some disposition to put the fraud upon the unfortunate Elias, whom so many parties have been disposed to treat as a useful universal villain. It has been said, indeed, that these early biographers, Saint Bonaventura and Solano, and the three companions, though they declare that Saint Francis received the mystical wounds, do not say that they themselves saw these wounds. I do not think this argument conclusive, because it only arises out of the very nature of the narrative. The three companions are not in any case making an affidavit, and therefore none of the admitted parts of their story are in the form of an affidavit. They are writing a chronicle of a comparatively impersonal and very objective description. They do not say, I saw Saint Francis's wounds. They say, Saint Francis received wounds. But neither do they say, I saw Saint Francis go into partinucula. They say, Saint Francis went into the partinucula. But I cannot understand why they should be trusted as eyewitnesses about the one fact and not trusted as eyewitnesses about the other. It is all of a piece. It would be a most abrupt and abnormal interruption in their way of telling the story if they suddenly began to curse and to swear, and give their names and addresses, and take their oath that they themselves saw and verified the physical facts in question. It seems to me, therefore, that this particular discussion goes back to the general question I have already mentioned, the question of why these chronicles should be credited at all, if they are credited with abounding in the incredible. But that again will probably be found to revert in the last resort to the mere fact that some men cannot believe in miracles because they are materialists. That is logical enough, but they are bound to deny the preternatural as much in the testimony of a modern scientific professor as that of a medieval monkish chronicler, and there are plenty of professors for them to contradict by this time. But whatever may be thought of such supernaturalism in the comparatively material and popular sense of supernatural acts, we shall miss the whole point of Saint Francis, especially of Saint Francis after Alverno, if we do not realize that he was living a supernatural life, and there is more and more of such supernaturalism in his life as he approaches towards his death. This element of the supernatural did not separate him from the natural, but it was the whole point of his position that it unified him more perfectly to the natural. It did not make him dismal or dehumanized, for it was the whole meaning of his message that such mysticism makes a man cheerful and humane. But it was the whole point of his position and it was the whole meaning of his message that the power that did it was a supernatural power. If this simple distinction were not apparent from the whole of his life, it would be difficult for anyone to miss it in reading the account of his death. In a sense he may be said to have wondered as a dying man, just as he had wondered as a living one. As it became more and more apparent that his health was failing, he seems to have been carried from place to place like a pageant of sickness or almost like a pageant of mortality. He went to Urieti, to Nersia or perhaps to Naples, certainly to Cortona by the Lake of Perugia. But there is something profoundly pathetic and full of great problems in the fact that at last, as it would seem, his flame of life leapt up and his heart rejoiced when they saw afar off on the assassin hill, the solemn pillars of the portfolio. He who had become a vagabond for the sake of a vision, he who had denied himself all sense of place and possession, he whose whole gospel and glory it was to be homeless, received, like a Parthian shot from nature, the sting of the sense of home. He also had his maladie du clucheur, his sickness of the spire, though his spire was higher than ours. Never, he cried with the sudden energy of strong spirits and death, never give up this place. If you would go anywhere or make any pilgrimage, return always to your home, for this is the holy house of God. And the procession passed under the arches of his home, and he laid down on his bed, and his brethren gathered round him for the last long vigil. It seems to me no moment for entering into these subsequent disputes about which successors he blessed are in what form and with what significance. In that one mighty moment he blessed us all. After he had taken farewell of some of his nearest and especially some of his oldest friends, he was lifted at his own request off his own rude bed and laid on the bare ground, as some say clad only in a hair-shirt, as he had first gone forth into the wintery woods from the presence of his father. It was the final assertion of his great fixed idea, of praise and thanks bringing to their most towering height out of nakedness and nothing. As he lay there, we may be certain that his seared and blinded eyes saw nothing but their object and their origin. We may be sure that the soul, in its last inconceivable isolation, was face to face with nothing less than God incarnate and Christ crucified. But for the men standing around him there must have been other thoughts mangled with these, and many memories must have gathered like ghosts in the twilight, as that day wore on and that great darkness descended in which we all lost a friend. For what lay dying there was not Dominic of the dogs of God, a leader in logical and controversial wars that could be reduced to a plan and handed on like a plan, a master of a machine of a democratic discipline by which others could organize themselves. What was passing from the world was a person, a poet, an outlook on life like a light that was never after on sea or land, a light, a thing not to be replaced or repeated while the earth endures. It has been said that there was only one Christian who died on the cross. It is true to say in this sense that there was only one Franciscan whose name was Francis. Huge and happy as was the popular work he left behind him, there was something that he could not leave behind any more than a landscape painter can leave his eyes in his will. It was an artist in life who was here called to be an artist in death, and he had a better right than Nero, his anti-type, to say, quality artifacts pereo. For Nero's life was full of posing for the occasion like that of an actor, while the Umbrians had a natural and continuous grace like that of an athlete. But St. Francis had better things to say and better things to think about, and his thoughts were caught upwards where we cannot follow them in divine and dizzy heights to which death alone can lift us up. Round about him stood the brethren in their brown habits, those that had loved him even if they afterwards disputed with each other. There was Bernard, his first friend and Angelo, who had served as his secretary, and Goliath's his successor, whom tradition tried to turn into a sort of Judas, but who seemed to have been little worse than an official in the wrong place. His tragedy was that he had a Franciscan habit without a Franciscan heart, or at any rate with a very unfranciscan head. But, though he made a bad Franciscan, he might have made a decent Dominican. Anyhow, there was no reason to doubt that he loved Francis, for Ruffians and Savages did that. Anyhow, he stood among the rest as the hours passed and the shadows lengthened in the house of the Portunucula, and nobody need think so ill of him as to suppose that his thoughts were there in the tumultuous future, in the ambitions and controversies of his later years. A man might fancy that the birds must have known when it happened, and made some motion in the evening sky. As they had once, according to the tale, scattered to the four winds of heaven in the patterns of a cross at his sign of dispersal, they might now have written in such dotted lines a more awful augury across the sky. Hidden in the woods, perhaps, were little cowering creatures never again to be so much noticed and understood, and it has been said that animals are sometimes conscious of things to which man their spiritual superior is for the moment blind. We do not know whether any shiver passed through all the thieves and the outcasts and the outlaws to tell them what had happened to him who never knew the nature of scorn. But, at least in the passages and porches of the Portunucula, there was a sudden stillness where all the brown figures stood like bronze statues, for the stopping of the great heart that had not broken till it held the world. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 The Testament of St. Francis In one sense, doubtless, it is a sad irony that St. Francis, who all his life had desired all men to agree, should have died amid increasing disagreements. But we must not exaggerate this discord as some have done, so as to turn it into a mere defeat of all his ideals. There are some who represent his work as having been merely ruined by the wickedness of the world, or what they always assumed to be the even greater wickedness of the Church. This little book is an essay on St. Francis, and not on the Franciscan order, still less on the Catholic Church or the papacy, or the policy pursued toward the extreme Franciscans or the Fratticelli. It is therefore only necessary to note in a very few words what was the general nature of the controversy that raged after the great saint's death, and to some extent troubled the last days of his life. The dominant detail was the interpretation of the vow of poverty, or the refusal of all possessions. Nobody, so far as I know, ever proposed to interfere with the vow of the individual friar that he would have no individual possessions. Nobody, that is, proposed to interfere with his negation of private property. But some Franciscans, invoking the authority of Francis on their side, went further than this, and further, I think, than anybody else has ever gone. They proposed to abolish not only private property, but property. That is, they refused to be corporately responsible for anything at all—for any buildings or stores or tools. They refused to own them collectively even when they used them collectively. It is perfectly true that many, especially among the first supporters of this view, were men of a splendid and selfless spirit wholly devoted to the great saint's ideal. It is also perfectly true that the pope and the authorities of the Church did not think this conception was a workable arrangement, and went so far in modifying it as to set aside certain clauses in the great saint's will. But it is not at all easy to see that it was a workable arrangement, or even an arrangement at all, for it was really a refusal to arrange anything. Everybody knew, of course, that Franciscans were communists, but this was not so much being a communist as being an anarchist. Surely upon any argument, somebody or something must be answerable for what happened to or in or concerning a number of historical edifices and ordinary goods and chattels. Many idealists of a socialistic sort—notably of the School of Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells—have treated this dispute as if it were merely a case of the tyranny of wealthy and wicked puntiffs crushing the true Christianity of Christian socialists. But in truth, this extreme ideal was in a sense the very reverse of socialist, or even social. Precisely the thing which these enthusiasts refused was that social ownership on which socialism is built. What they primarily refused to do was what socialists primarily exist to do, to own legally in their corporate capacity, nor is it true that the tone of the popes towards the enthusiasts was merely harsh and hostile. The pope maintained for a long time a compromise which he had especially designed to meet their own conscientious objections, a compromise by which the papacy itself held the property in a kind of trust for the owners who refused to touch it. The truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough in Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic history of industrial civilization. It shows that the saints were sometimes great men when the popes were small men, but it also shows that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right, and it will be found after all very difficult for any candid and clear-headed outsider to deny that the pope was right when he assisted that the world was not made only for Franciscans. For that was what was behind the quarrel. At the back of that particular practical question, there was something much larger and more momentous, the stir and wind of which we can feel as we read the controversy. We might go so far as to put the ultimate truth thus. Saint Francis was so great and original a man that he had something in him of what makes the founder of a religion. Many of his followers were more or less ready in their hearts to treat him as the founder of a religion. They were willing to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the Christian spirit had escaped from Israel. They were willing to let it eclipse Christendom as the Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel. Francis, the fire that ran through the rows of Italy, was to be the beginning of a conflagration in which the old Christian civilization was to be consumed. That was the point the pope had to settle, whether Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided rightly, apart from the duties of his place, for the church could include all that was good in the Franciscans, and the Franciscans could not include all that was good in the church. There is one consideration which though sufficiently clear in the whole story, has not perhaps been sufficiently noted, especially by those who cannot see the case for a certain Catholic common sense larger even than Franciscan enthusiasm. Yet, it arises out of the very merits of the man whom they so rightly admire. Francis of Assisi, as has been said again and again, was a poet. That is, he was a person who could express his personality. Now, it is everywhere the mark of this sort of man that his very limitations make him larger. He is what he is not only by what he has, but in some degree by what he has not. But the limits that make the lines of such a personal portrait cannot be made the limits of all humanity. St. Francis is a very strong example of this quality in the man of genius, that in him even what is negative is positive, because it is part of a character. An excellent example of what I mean may be found in his attitude towards learning and scholarship. He ignored and in some degree discouraged books and book learning, and from his own point of view and that of his own work in the world, he was absolutely right. The whole point of his message was to be so simple that the village idiot could understand it. The whole point of his point of view was that it looked out freshly upon a fresh world that might have been made that morning. Save for the great primal things, the creation and the story of Eden, the first Christmas and the first Easter, the world had no history. But is it desired or desirable that the whole Catholic Church should have no history? It is perhaps the chief suggestion of this book that St. Francis walked the world like the pardon of God. I mean that his appearance marked the moment when men could be reconciled not only to God, but to nature, and most difficult of all, to themselves. For it marked the moment when all the stale paganism that had poisoned the ancient world was at last worked out of the social system. He opened the gates of the Dark Ages as of a prison of purgatory where men had cleansed themselves as hermits in the desert or heroes in the barbarian wars. It was, in fact, his whole function to tell man to start afresh and, in that sense, to tell them to forget. If they were to turn over a new leaf and begin a fresh page with the first large letters of the alphabet, simply drawn and brilliantly colored in the early medieval manner, it was clearly a part of that particular childlike cheerfulness that they should paste down the old page that was all black and bloody with horrid things. For instance, I have already noted that there is not a trace in the poetry of this first Italian poet of all that pagan mythology which lingered long after paganism. The first Italian poet seems the only man in the world who has never ever heard of Virgil. This was exactly right for the special sense in which he is the first Italian poet. It is quite right that he should call a nightingale a nightingale and not have its songs spoiled or saddened by the terrible tales of Ithilus or Procini. In short, it is really quite right and quite desirable that St. Francis should never have heard of Virgil. But do we really desire that Dante should never have heard of Virgil? Do we really desire that Dante should never have read any pagan mythology? It has been truly said that the use that Dante made of such fables is altogether part of a deeper orthodoxy, that his huge heathen fragments, his gigantic figures of Minos or Charon only give a hint of some enormous natural religion behind all history and from the first foreshadowing the faith. It is well to have the symbol as well as David in the Diazire, that St. Francis would have burned all the leaves of all the books of the civil in exchange for one fresh leaf from the nearest tree is perfectly true and perfectly proper to St. Francis. But it is good to have the Diazire as good as the canticle of the sun. By this thesis, in short, the coming of St. Francis was like the birth of a child in a dark house lifting its doom, a child that grows up unconscious of the tragedy and triumphs over it by his innocence. In him it is necessarily not only innocence but ignorance. It is the essence of the story that he should pluck at the green grass without knowing it grows over a murdered man or climbed the apple tree without knowing it was the divot of a suicide. It was such an amnesty and reconciliation that the freshness of the Franciscan spirit brought to all the world. But it does not follow that it ought to impose its ignorance on all the world, and I think it would have tried to impose it on all the world. For some Franciscans it would have seemed right that Franciscan poetry should expel Benedictine prose. For the symbolic child it was quite rational. It was right enough that for such a child the world should be a large new nursery with blank white-washed walls, on which he could draw his own pictures in chalk in the childish fashion, crude and outline and gay in color, the beginnings of all our art. It was right enough that to him such a nursery should seem the most magnificent mansion of the imagination of man. But in the Church of God there are many mansions. Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the church. If the Franciscan movement had turned into a new religion, it would, after all, have been a narrow religion. Insofar as it did turn here and there into a heresy it was a narrow heresy. It did what heresy always does. It set the mood against the mind. The mood was indeed originally the good and glorious mood of the great St. Francis. But it was not the whole mind of God or even of man. And it is a fact that the mood itself degenerated as the mood turned into a monomania. A sect that came to be called the Fraticelli declared themselves the true sons of St. Francis and broke away from the compromises of Rome in favor of what they would have called the complete program of a sissy. In a very little while these loose Franciscans began to look as ferocious as flagellants. They launched new and violent vetoes. They denounced marriage, that is, they denounced mankind. In the name of the most human of saints they declared war upon humanity. They did not perish particularly through being persecuted. Many of them were eventually persuaded. And the unpersuaded rump of them that remained, remained without producing anything in the least calculated to remind anybody of the real St. Francis. What was the matter with these people was that they were mystics, mystics and nothing else but mystics, mystics and not Catholics, mystics and not Christians, mystics and not men. They rotted away because in the most exact sense they would not listen to reason. And St. Francis, however wild and romantic his gyrations might appear to many, always hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair. The great saint was sane, and with the very sound of the word sanity, as at a deeper chord struck upon a harp, we come back to something that was indeed deeper than everything about him that seemed at almost elvish eccentricity. He was not a mere eccentric because he was always turning towards the center and part of the maze. He took the queerest and most zigzag shortcuts through the wood, but he was always going home. He was not only far too humble to be an heresy arch, but he was far too human to desire to be an extremist in the sense of an exile at the end of the earth. The sense of humor which salts all the stories of his escapades along prevented him from ever hardening into the solemnity of sectarian self-righteousness. He was, by nature, ready to admit that he was wrong. And if his followers had on some practical points to admit that he was wrong, they only admitted that he was wrong in order to prove that he was right. For it is they, his real followers, who have really proved that he was right, and even in transcending some of his negations, have triumphantly extended and interpreted his truth. The Franciscan order did not fossilize or break off short like something of which the true purpose has been frustrated by official tyranny or internal treason. It was this, the central and orthodox trunk of it, that afterwards bore fruit for the world. It counted among its sons Bonaventura, the great mystic, and Bernardino, the popular preacher, who filled Italy with the very beatific buffooneries of a joglia de dieu. It counted Raymond Lully with his strange learnings and his large and daring plans for the conversion of the world. A man intensely individual, exactly as Saint Francis, was intensely individual. It counted Roger Bacon, the first naturalist whose experiments with light and water had all the luminous quaintness that belongs to the beginnings of natural history, and whom even the most material scientists have hailed as a father of science. It is not merely true that these were great men who did great work for the world. It is also true that they were a certain kind of men, keeping the spirit and savor of a certain kind of man, that we can recognize in them a taste and tang of audacity and simplicity, and know them for the sons of Saint Francis. For that is the full and final spirit in which we should turn to Saint Francis, and the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above all things a great giver, and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving, which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of ascent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance, a grammar of gratitude. He understood, down to its very depths, the theory of thanks, and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realize that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist. And something of that larger truth is repeated in a lesser form in our own relations with so mighty a maker of history. He also is a giver of things we could not have even thought of for ourselves. He also is too great for anything but gratitude. From him came a whole awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and colors could be seen anew. The mighty men of genius, who made the Christian civilization that we know, appear in history almost as his servants and imitators. Before Dante was, he had given poetry to Italy. Before St. Louis ruled, he had risen as the tribune of the poor. And before Guiotto had painted the pictures, he had enacted the scenes. That great painter who began the whole human inspiration of European painting had himself gone to St. Francis to be inspired. It is said that when St. Francis staged, in his own simple fashion, a nativity play of Bethlehem with kings and angels in the stiff and gay medieval garments and the golden wigs that stood for halos, a miracle was wrought full of the Franciscan glory. The holy child was a wooden doll or bambino, and it is said that he embraced it and that the image came to life in his arms. He assuredly was not thinking of lesser things. But we may at least say that one thing came to life in his arms and that was the thing that we call the drama. Say for his intense individual love of song, he did not perhaps himself embody the spirit in any of these arts. He was the spirit that was embodied. He was the spiritual essence and substance that walked the world before anyone had seen these things in visible forms derived from it. A wondering fire as if from nowhere, at which men more material could light both torches and tapers. He was the soul of medieval civilization before it even found a body. Another and quite different stream of spiritual inspiration derives largely from him, all that reforming energy of medieval and modern times that goes to the burden of Deus est Deus paparum. His abstract order for human beings was in a multitude of just medieval laws against the pride and cruelty of riches. It is today behind much that is loosely called Christian socialism and can more correctly be called Catholic Democrat. Neither on the artistic nor the social side would anybody pretend that these things would not have existed without him. Yet it is strictly true to say that we cannot now imagine them without him since he has lived and changed the world. And something of that sense of impotence which was more than half his power will descend on anyone who knows what that inspiration has been in history and can only record it in a series of struggling and meager sentences. He will know something of what St. Francis meant by the great and good debt that cannot be paid. He will feel at once the desire to have done infinitely more and the futility of having done anything. He will know what it is to stand under such a deluge of dead men's marvels and have nothing in return to establish against it, to have nothing to set up under the overhanging, overwhelming arches of such a temple of time and eternity, but this brief candle burnt out so quickly before his shrine. End of Chapter 10. End of Saint Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton