PRAYER.

"Almighty, most high and sovereign God, holy Father, righteous Lord, King of heaven and earth, we give thee thanks for thine own sake, in that by thy holy will, and by thine only Son and thy Holy Spirit thou hast created all things spiritual and corporeal, and that after having made us in thine image and after thy likeness, thou didst place us in that paradise which we lost by our sin. And we give thee thanks because after having created us by thy Son, by that love which is thine, and which thou hast had for us, thou hast made him to be born very God and very man of the glorious and blessed Mary, ever Virgin, and because by his cross, his blood, and his death thou hast willed to ransom us poor captives. And we give thee thanks that thy Son is to return in his glorious majesty to send to eternal fire the accursed ones, those who have not repented and have not known thee; and to say to those who have known and adored thee and served thee by repentance, 'Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from before the foundation of the world.' And since we, wretched and sinful, are not worthy to name thee, we humbly ask our Lord Jesus Christ, thy well-beloved Son, in whom thou art well pleased, that he may give thee thanks for everything; and also the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, as it may please thee and them; for this we supplicate him who has all power with thee, and by whom thou hast done such great things for us. Alleluia.

"And we pray the glorious Mother, the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, St. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and all the choir of blessed Spirits, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities and Powers, Virtues and Angels, Archangels, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Peter, Paul, and the holy Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Holy Innocents, Apostles, Evangelists, Disciples, Martyrs, Confessors, Virgins, the blessed ones, Elijah and Enoch, and all the saints who have been, shall be, and are, we humbly pray them by thy love to give thee thanks for these things, as it pleases thee, sovereign, true, eternal and living God, and also to thy Son, our most holy Lord Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, forever and ever. Amen. Alleluia.

"And we supplicate all those who desire to serve the Lord God, in the bosom of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, all priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes and exorcists, readers, porters, all clerks, all monks and nuns, all children and little ones, paupers and exiles, kings, and princes, workmen and laborers, servants and masters, the virgins, the continent and the married, laics, men and women, all children, youths, young men and old men, the sick and the well, the small and the great, the peoples of every tribe and tongue and nation, all men in every part of the world whatsoever, who are or who shall be, we pray and beseech them, all we Brothers Minor, unprofitable servants, that all together, with one accord we persevere in the true faith and in penitence, for outside of these no person can be saved.

"Let us all, with all our heart and all our thought, and all our strength, and all our mind, with all our vigor, with all our effort, with all our affection, with all our inward powers, our desires, and our wills, love the Lord God, who has given to us all his body, all his soul, all his life, and still gives them every day to each one of us. He created us, he saved us by his grace alone; he has been, he still is, full of goodness to us, us wicked and worthless, corrupt and offensive, ungrateful, ignorant, bad. We desire nothing else, we wish for nothing else; may nothing else please us, or have any attraction for us, except the Creator, the Redeemer, the Saviour, sole and true God, who is full of goodness, who is all goodness, who is the true and supreme good, who alone is kind, pious, and merciful, gracious, sweet, and gentle, who alone is holy, righteous, true, upright, who alone has benignity, innocence, and purity; of whom, by whom, and in whom is all the pardon, all the grace, all the glory of all penitents, of all the righteous and all the saints who are rejoicing in heaven.

"Then let nothing again hinder, let nothing again separate, nothing again retard us, and may we all, so long as we live, in every place, at every hour, at every time, every day and unceasingly, truly and humbly believe. Let us have in our hearts, let us love, adore, serve, praise, bless, glorify, exalt, magnify, thank the most high, sovereign, eternal God, Trinity and Unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Creator of all men, both of those who believe and hope in him and of those who love him. He is without beginning and without end, immutable and invisible, ineffable, incomprehensible, indiscernible, blessed, lauded, glorious, exalted, sublime, most high, sweet, lovely, delectable, and always worthy of being desired above all things, in all the ages of ages. Amen."

Have not these artless repetitions a mysterious charm which steals deliciously into the very depths of the heart? Is there not in them a sort of sacrament of which the words are only the rude vehicle? Francis is taking refuge in God, as the child throws itself upon its mother's bosom, and in the incoherence of its weakness and its joy stammers out all the words it knows, repeating by them all only the eternal "I am thine" of love and faith.

There is in them also something which recalls, not only by citations, but still more by the very inspiration of the thought, that which we call the sacerdotal prayer of Christ. The apostle of poverty appears here as if suspended between earth and heaven by the very strength of his love, consecrated the priest of a new worship by the inward and irresistible unction of the Spirit. He does not offer sacrifice like the priest of the past time; he sacrifices himself, and carries in his body all the woes of humanity.

The more beautiful are these words from the mystical point of view, the less do they correspond with what is expected in a Rule; they have neither the precision nor the brief and imperative forms of one. The transformations which they were to undergo in order to become the code of 1223 were therefore fatal when we consider the definitive intervention of the Church of Rome to direct the Franciscan movement.

It is probable that this rough draft of a Rule, such as we have it now, is that which was distributed in the chapter of Whitsunday, 1221. The variants, sometimes capital, which are found in the different texts, can be nothing other than outlines of the corrections proposed by the provincial ministers. Once admit the idea of considering this document as a rough draft, we are very soon brought to think that it had already undergone a rapid preliminary revision, a sort of pruning, in which ecclesiastical authority has caused to disappear all that was in flagrant contradiction with its own projects for the Order.

If it is asked, who could have made these curtailments, one name springs at once to our lips—Ugolini. He criticised its exaggerated proportions, its want of unity and precision. Later on it is related that Francis had seen in a dream a multitude of starving friars, and himself unable to satisfy their wants, because though all around him lay innumerable crumbs of bread, they disappeared between his fingers when he would give them to those about him. Then a voice from heaven said to him: "Francis, make of these crumbs a wafer; with that thou shalt feed these starving ones."

There is little hazard in assuming that this is the picturesque echo of the conferences which took place at this time between Francis and the cardinal; the latter might have suggested to him by such a comparison the essential defects of his project. All this, no doubt, took place during Francis's stay in Rome, in the beginning of 1221. 4

Before going there, we must cast a glance over the similarity in inspiration and even in style which allies the Rule of 1221 with another of St. Francis's works, that which is known under the title of The Admonitions.5 This is a series of spiritual counsels with regard to the religious life; it is closely united both in matter and form with the work which we have just examined. The tone of voice is so perfectly the same that one is tempted to see in it parts of the original draft of the Rule, separated from it as too prolix to find place in a Rule.

However it may be with this hypothesis, we find in The Admonitions all the anxieties with which the soul of Francis was assailed in this uncertain and troubled hour. Some of these counsels sound like bits from a private journal. We see him seeking, with the simplicity of perfect humility, for reasons for submitting himself, renouncing his ideas, and not quite succeeding in finding them. He repeats to himself the exhortations that others had given him; we feel the effort to understand and admire the ideal monk whom Ugolini and the Church have proposed to him for an example:

The Lord says in the Gospels: "He who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple. And he who would save his life shall lose it." One gives up all he possesses and loses his life when life gives himself entirely into the hands of his superior, to obey him.... And when the inferior sees things which would be better or more useful to his soul than those which the superior commands him, let him offer to God the sacrifice of his will.

Reading this one might think that Francis was about to join the ranks of those to whom submission to ecclesiastical authority is the very essence of religion. But no; even here his true feeling is not wholly effaced, he mingles his words with parentheses and illustrations, timid, indeed, but revealing his deepest thought; always ending by enthroning the individual conscience as judge of last resort.6

All this shows clearly enough that we must picture to ourselves moments when his wounded soul sighs after passive obedience, the formula of which, perinde ac cadaver, goes apparently much farther back than the Company of Jesus. These were moments of exhaustion, when inspiration was silent.

One day he was sitting with his companions, when he began to groan and say: "There is hardly a monk upon earth who perfectly obeys his superior." His companions, much astonished, said: "Explain to us, father, what is perfect and supreme obedience." Then, comparing him who obeys to a corpse, he replied: "Take a dead body, and put it where you will, it will make no resistance; when it is in one place it will not murmur, when you take it away from there it will not object; put it in a pulpit, it will not look up but down; wrap it in purple, it will only be doubly pale."7

This longing for corpse-like obedience witnesses to the ravages with which his soul had been laid waste; it corresponds in the moral domain to the cry for annihilation of great physical anguish.

The worst was that he was absolutely alone. Everywhere else the Franciscan obedience is living, active, joyful. 8

He drank this cup to the very dregs, holding sacred the revolts dictated by conscience. One day in the later years of his life a German friar came to see him, and after having long discussed with him pure obedience:

"I ask you one favor," he said to him, "it is that if the Brothers ever come to live no longer according to the Rule you will permit me to separate myself from them, alone or with a few others, to observe it in its completeness." At these words Francis felt a great joy. "Know," said he, "that Christ as well as I authorize what you have just been asking;" and laying hands upon him, "Thou art a priest forever," he added, "after the order of Melchisedec."9

We have a yet more touching proof of his solicitude to safeguard the spiritual independence of his disciples: it is a note to Brother Leo.10 The latter, much alarmed by the new spirit which was gaining power in the Order, opened his mind thereupon to his master, and doubtless asked of him pretty much the same permission as the friar from Germany. After an interview in which he replied viva voce, Francis, not to leave any sort of doubt or hesitation in the mind of him whom he surnamed his little sheep of God, pecorella di Dio, wrote to him again:

Brother Leo, thy brother Francis wishes thee peace and health.

I reply yes, my son, as a mother to her child. This word sums up all we said while walking, as well as all my counsels. If thou hast need to come to me for counsel, it is my wish that thou shouldst do it. Whatever may be the manner in which thou thinkest thou canst please the Lord God, follow it, and live in poverty. Do this (faites le11), God will bless thee and I authorize it. And if it were necessary for thy soul, or for thy consolation that thou shouldst come to see me, or if thou desirest it, my Leo, come.

Thine in Christ.

Surely we are far enough here from the corpse of a few pages back.

It would be superfluous to pause over the other admonitions. For the most part they are reflections inspired by circumstances. Counsels as to humility recur with a frequency which explains both the personal anxieties of the author, and the necessity of reminding the brothers of the very essence of their profession.

The sojourn of St. Francis at Rome, whither he went in the early months of 1221, to lay his plan before Ugolini, was marked by a new effort of the latter to bring him and St. Dominic together.12

The cardinal was at this time at the apogee of his success. Everything had gone well with him. His voice was all powerful not only in affairs of the Church, but also in those of the Empire. Frederic II., who seemed to be groping his way, and in whose mind were germinating dreams of religious reformation, and the desire of placing his power at the service of the truth, treated him as a friend, and spoke of him with unbounded admiration.13

In his reflections upon the remedies to be applied to the woes of Christianity, the cardinal came at last to think that one of the most efficacious would be the substitution of bishops taken from the two new Orders, for the feudal episcopate almost always recruited from local families in which ecclesiastical dignities were, so to speak, hereditary. In the eyes of Ugolini such bishops were usually wanting in two essential qualities of a good prelate: religious zeal and zeal for the Church.

He believed that the Preaching and the Minor Friars would not only possess those virtues which were lacking in the others, but that in the hands of the papacy they might become a highly centralized hierarchy, truly catholic, wholly devoted to the interests of the Church at large. The difficulties which might occur on the part of the chapters which should elect the bishops, as well as on the side of the high secular clergy, would be put to flight by the enthusiasm which the people would feel for pastors whose poverty would recall the days of the primitive Church.

At the close of his interviews with Francis and Dominic, he communicated to them some of these thoughts, asking their advice as to the elevation of their friars to prelatures. There was a pious contest between the two saints as to which should answer first. Finally, Dominic said simply that he should prefer to see his companions remain as they were. In his turn, Francis showed that the very name of his institute made the thing impossible. "If my friars have been called Minores," he said, "it is not that they may become Majores. If you desire that they become fruitful in the Church of God, leave them alone, and keep them in the estate into which God has called them. I pray you, father, do not so act that their poverty shall become a motive for pride, nor elevate them to prelatures which would move them to insolence toward others."14

The ecclesiastical policy followed by the popes was destined to render this counsel of the two founders wholly useless.15

Francis and Dominic parted, never again to meet. The Master of the Preaching Friars shortly after set out for Bologna, where he died on August 6th following, and Francis returned to Portiuncula, where Pietro di Catana had just died (March 10, 1221). He was replaced at the head of the Order by Brother Elias. Ugolini was doubtless not without influence in this choice.

Detained by his functions of legate, he could not be present at the Whitsunday chapter (May 30, 1221).16 He was represented there by Cardinal Reynerio,17 who came accompanied by several bishops and by monks of various orders.18 About three thousand friars were there assembled, but so great was the eagerness of the people of the neighborhood to bring provisions, that after a session of seven days they were obliged to remain two days longer to eat up all that had been brought. The sessions were presided over by Brother Elias, Francis sitting at his feet and pulling at his robe when there was anything that he wished to have put before the Brothers.

Brother Giordani di Giano, who was present, has preserved for us all these details and that of the setting out of a group of friars for Germany. They were placed under the direction of Cæsar of Speyer, whose mission succeeded beyond all expectation. Eighteen months after, when he returned to Italy, consumed with the desire to see St. Francis again, the cities of Wurzburg, Mayence, Worms, Speyer, Strasburg, Cologne, Salzburg, and Ratisbon had become Franciscan centres, from whence the new ideas were radiating into all Southern Germany.

The foundation of the Tertiaries, or Third Order, generally in the oldest documents called Brotherhood of Penitence, is usually fixed as occurring in the year 1221; but we have already seen that this date is much too recent, or rather that it is impossible to fix any date, for what was later called, quite arbitrarily, the Third Order is evidently contemporary with the First.19

Francis and his companions desired to be the apostles of their time; but they, no more than the apostles of Jesus, desired to have all men enter their association, which was necessarily somewhat restricted, and which, according to the gospel saying, was meant to be the leaven of the rest of humanity. In consequence, their life was literally the apostolic life, but the ideal which they preached was the evangelical life, such as Jesus had preached it.

St. Francis no more condemned the family or property than Jesus did; he simply saw in them ties from which the apostle, and the apostle alone, needs to be free.

If before long sickly minds fancied that they interpreted his thought in making the union of the sexes an evil, and all that concerns the physical activity of man a fall; if unbalanced spirits borrowed the authority of his name to escape from all duty; if married persons condemned themselves to the senseless martyrdom of virginity, he should certainly not be made responsible. These traces of an unnatural asceticism come from the dualist ideas of the Catharists, and not from the inspired poet who sang nature and her fecundity, who made nests for doves, inviting them to multiply under the watch of God, and who imposed manual labor on his friars as a sacred duty.

The bases of the corporation of the Brothers and Sisters of Penitence were very simple. Francis gave no new doctrine to the world; what was new in his message was wholly in his love, in his direct call to the evangelical life, to an ideal of moral vigor, of labor, and of love.

Naturally, there were soon found men who did not understand this true and simple beauty; they fell into observances and devotions, imitated, while living in the world, the life of the cloister to which for one reason or another they were not able to retire; but it would be unjust to picture to ourselves the Brothers of Penitence as modelled after them.

Did they receive a Rule from St. Francis? It is impossible to say. The one which was given20 them in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV. is simply the recasting and amalgamation of all the rules of lay fraternities which existed at the end of the thirteenth century. To attribute this document to Francis is nothing less than the placing in a new building of certain venerated stones from an ancient edifice. It is a matter of façade and ornamentation, nothing more.

Notwithstanding this absence of any Rule emanating from Francis himself, it is clear enough what, in his estimation, this association ought to be. The Gospel, with its counsels and examples, was to be its true Rule. The great innovation designed by the Third Order was concord; this fraternity was a union of peace, and it brought to astonished Europe a new truce of God. Whether the absolute refusal to carry arms21 was an idea wholly chimerical and ephemeral, the documents are there to prove, but it is a fine thing to have had the power to bring it about for a few years.

The second essential obligation of the Brothers of Penitence appears to have been that of reducing their wants so far as possible, and while preserving their fortunes to distribute to the poor at proper intervals the free portion of the revenue after contenting themselves with the strictly necessary.22

To do with joy the duties of their calling; to give a holy inspiration to the slightest actions; to find in the infinitely littles of existence, things apparently the most commonplace, parts of a divine work; to keep pure from all debasing interest; to use things as not possessing them, like the servants in the parable who would soon have to give account of the talents confided to them; to close their hearts to hatred, to open them wide to the poor, the sick, to all abandoned ones, such were the other essential duties of the Brothers and Sisters of Penitence.

To lead them into this royal road of liberty, love, and responsibility, Francis sometimes appealed to the terrors of hell and the joys of paradise, but interested love was so little a part of his nature that these considerations and others of the same kind occupy an entirely secondary place in those of his writings which remain, as also in his biographies.

For him the gospel life is natural to the soul. Whoever comes to know it will prefer it; it has no more need to be proved than the outer air and the light. It needs only to lead prisoners to it, for them to lose all desire to return to the dungeons of avarice, hatred, or frivolity.

Francis and his true disciples make the painful ascent of the mountain heights, impelled solely, but irresistibly, by the inner voice. The only foreign aid which they accept is the memory of Jesus, going before them upon these heights and mysteriously living again before their eyes in the sacrament of the eucharist.

The letter to all Christians in which these thoughts break forth is a living souvenir of St. Francis's teachings to the Tertiaries.

To represent these latter to ourselves in a perfectly concrete form we may resort to the legend of St. Lucchesio, whom tradition makes the first Brother of Penitence.23

A native of a little city of Tuscany he quitted it to avoid its political enmities, and established himself at Poggibonsi, not far from Sienna, where he continued to trade in grain. Already rich, it was not difficult for him to buy up all the wheat, and, selling it in a time of scarcity, realize enormous profits. But soon overcome by Francis's preaching, he took himself to task, distributed all his superfluity to the poor, and kept nothing but his house with a small garden and one ass.

From that time he was to be seen devoting himself to the cultivation of this bit of ground, and making of his house a sort of hostelry whither the poor and the sick came in swarms. He not only welcomed them, but he sought them out, even to the malaria-infected Maremma, often returning with a sick man astride on his back and preceded by his ass bearing a similar burden. The resources of the garden were necessarily very limited; when there was no other way, Lucchesio took a wallet and went from door to door asking alms, but most of the time this was needless, for his poor guests, seeing him so diligent and so good, were better satisfied with a few poor vegetables from the garden shared with him than with the most copious repast. In the presence of their benefactor, so joyful in his destitution, they forgot their own poverty, and the habitual murmurs of these wretches were transformed into outbursts of admiration and gratitude.

Conversion had not killed in him all family ties; Bona Donna, his wife, became his best co-laborer, and when in 1260 he saw her gradually fading away his grief was too deep to be endured. "You know, dear companion," he said to her when she had received the last sacraments, "how much we have loved one another while we could serve God together; why should we not remain united until we depart to the ineffable joy? Wait for me. I also will receive the sacraments, and go to heaven with you."

So he spoke, and called back the priest to administer them to him. Then after holding the hands of his dying companion, comforting her with gentle words, when he saw that her soul was gone he made over her the sign of the cross, stretched himself beside her, and calling with love upon Jesus, Mary, and St. Francis, he fell asleep for eternity.