you--I am one of yourselves. Christ, the very Christ of God, has sent
me with a message to you. Listen!"

It is observable that we never hear of St. Francis that he was a
sermon-maker. He had received no clerical or even academical
training. Up to 1207 he had not even a license to preach. It was only
after this that he was--and apparently without desiring it--ordained
a deacon. In its first beginnings the Franciscan movement was
essentially moral, not theological, still less intellectual. The
absence of anything like dogma in the sermons of the early Minorites
was their characteristic. One is tempted to say it was a mere
accident that these men were not sectaries, so little in common had
they with the ecclesiastics of the time, so entirely did they live
and labour among the laity of whom they were and with whom they so
profoundly sympathized.

The secret of the overwhelming, the irresistible attraction which St.
Francis exercised is to be found in his matchless simplicity, in his
sublime self-surrender. He removed mountains because he believed
intensely in the infinite power of _mere goodness_. While from
the writhing millions all over Europe--the millions ignorant,
neglected, plague-stricken, despairing--an inarticulate wail was
going up to God, St. Francis made it articulate. Then he boldly
proclaimed: "God has heard your cry! It meant this and that. I am
sent to you with the good God's answer." There was less than a step
between accepting him as the interpreter of their vague yearnings and
embracing him as the ambassador of Heaven to themselves.

St, Francis was hardly twenty-eight years old when he set out for
Rome, to lay himself at the feet of the great Pope Innocent the