wealth, and that his private means were seriously restricted. That a
man of business should be blind to the preciousness of money was a
sufficient proof then, as now, that he must be mad.

O ye wary men of the world, bristling with the shrewdest of maxims,
bursting with the lessons of experience, ye of the cool heads and the
cold grey eyes, ye whom the statesman loves, and the tradesman
trusts, cautious, sagacious, prudent; when the rumbling of the
earthquake tells us that the foundations of the earth are out of
course, we must look for deliverance to other than you! A grain of
enthusiasm is of mightier force than a million tons of wisdom such as
yours; then when the hour of the great upheaval has arrived, and
things can no longer be kept going!

"Build up my church!" said the voice again to this gushing emaciated
fanatic in the second-rate Italian town, this dismal bankrupt of
twenty-four years of age, "of lamentably low extraction," whom no
University claimed as her own, and whom the learned pundits pitied.
At last he understood the profounder meaning of the words. It was no
temple made with hands, but the _living_ Church that needed
raising. The dust of corruption must be swept away, the dry bones be
stirred; the breath of the divine Spirit blow and reanimate them. Did
not the voice mean that? What remained but to obey?

In his journeyings through France it is hardly possible that St.
Francis should not have heard of _the poor men of Lyons_ whose
peculiar tenets at this time were arousing very general attention. It
is not improbable that he may have fallen in with one of those
translations of the New Testament into the vernacular executed by
Stephen de Emsa at the expense of Peter Waldo, and through his means