which shine all the more brilliantly the deeper we make the surrounding
obscurity. The words of Jesus spoken on a hundred different occasions
came at last to be formed into a single discourse, the Sermon on the
Mount. It is in such cases that criticism needs to be delicate, to
mingle a little divination with the heavy artillery of scientific
argument.

The texts are sacred, but we must not make fetiches of them;
notwithstanding St. Matthew, no one to-day dreams of representing Jesus
as uttering the Sermon on the Mount all at one time. In the same way, in
the narratives concerning the relations between St. Francis and Ugolini,
we find ourselves every moment shut up in no-thoroughfares, coming up
against contradictory indications, just so long as we try to refer
everything to two or three meetings, as we are at first led to do.

With a simple act of analysis these difficulties disappear and we find
each of the different narratives bringing us fragments which, being
pieced together, furnish an organic story, living, psychologically true.

From the moment at which we have now arrived, we must make a much larger
place for Ugolini than in the past; the struggle has definitively opened
between the Franciscan ideal--chimerical, perhaps, but sublime--and the
ecclesiastical policy, to go on until the day when, half in humility,
half in discouragement, Francis, heartsick, abdicates the direction of
his spiritual family.

Ugolini returned to Rome at the end of 1217. During the following winter
his countersign is found at the bottom of the most important bulls;[32]
he devoted this time to the special study of the question of the new
orders, and summoned Francis before him. We have seen with what