* * * * * * *

While these things were going on in Italy, another notable reformer
was vexing his righteous soul in Spain. St. Dominic was a very
different man from the gentle and romantic young Italian. Of high
birth, which among the haughty Castillians has always counted for a
great deal, he had passed his boyhood among ecclesiastics and
academics. He was twelve years older than St. Francis. He studied
theology for ten years at the University of Palencia, and before the
twelfth century closed he was an Augustinian Canon. In 1203, while
St. Francis was still poring over his father's ledgers, Dominic was
associated with the Bishop of Osma in negotiating a marriage for
Alphonso the Eighth, king of Castille. For the next ten years he was
more or less concerned with the hideous atrocities of the Albigensian
war. During that dark period of his career he was brought every day
face to face with heresy and schism. From infancy he must have heard
those around him talk with a savage intolerance of the Moors of the
South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo nearer home. Now his eyes were
open to the perils that beset the Church from sectaries who from
within were for casting off her divine authority. Wretches who
questioned the very creeds and rejected the Sacraments, yet
perversely insisted that they were Christian men and women, with a
clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and Cardinals or
the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and immortal souls,
all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose word doth eat
as doth a canker." Dominic "saw that there was no man, and marvelled
that there was no intercessor."

It was not ungodliness that Dominic, in the first instance,
determined to war with, but ignorance and error. _These_ were to