preach the gift of self to others, the renunciation of wealth, the horror
of brutal force, the equality and obedience which would ensure the peace
of the world. St. Francis trod the roads clad as one of the poorest, a
rope girdling his grey gown and his bare feet shod with sandals, and he
carried with him neither purse nor staff. And he and his brethren spoke
aloud and freely, with sovereign florescence of poetry and boldness of
truth, attacking the rich and the powerful, and daring even to denounce
the priests of evil life, the debauched, simoniacal, and perjured
bishops. A long cry of relief greeted the Franciscans, the people
followed them in crowds--they were the friends, the liberators of all the
humble ones who suffered. And thus, like revolutionaries, they at first
so alarmed Rome, that the popes hesitated to authorise their Order. When
they at last gave way it was assuredly with the hope of using this new
force for their own profit, by conquering the whole vague mass of the
lowly whose covert threats have ever growled through the ages, even in
the most despotic times. And thenceforward in the sons of St. Francis the
Church possessed an ever victorious army--a wandering army which spread
over the roads, in the villages and through the towns, penetrating to the
firesides of artisan and peasant, and gaining possession of all simple
hearts. How great the democratic power of such an Order which had sprung
from the very entrails of the people! And thence its rapid prosperity,
its teeming growth in a few years, friaries arising upon all sides, and
the third Order* so invading the secular population as to impregnate and
absorb it. And that there was here a genuine growth of the soil, a
vigorous vegetation of the plebeian stock was shown by an entire national
art arising from it--the precursors of the Renascence in painting and
even Dante himself, the soul of Italia's genius.

* The Franciscans, like the Dominicans and others, admit, in
addition to the two Orders of friars and nuns, a third Order