It was not alone for the men of his generation, however, that Francis was destined to furnish a refuge from worldly care and a place of peace and thoughtful life. We have already said that it was by chance, certainly without any conscious intention on Francis' part that the Franciscan order for men which is usually spoken of as the First Order came into existence. The last thing in the world very probably that would ever have entered into the mind of Francis when he began to lead the simple life of a poor little man of God, was the founding of a religious order for women. We tell elsewhere the story, of St. Clare's interest in St. Francis' mode of life and of the trials that she underwent in order to obtain permission and opportunity to fashion her own life in the same way. The problem was even more serious for women than for men. St. Francis considered that they should not be [{265}] allowed to follow the Franciscan custom of going out to seek alms and yet required that they should live in absolute poverty, possessing nothing and supporting themselves only by the contributions of the faithful and the work of their hands. St. Clare attempted the apparently impossible and solved the problem of a new career for the women of her time.
It was not very long before St. Clare's example proved as infective as that of St. Francis himself. While in the beginning the members of her family had been the most strenuous objectors against her taking up such an unwonted mode of existence it was not long before she was joined in the monastery of St. Damian where her little community was living, by her sister who was to become almost as famous as herself under the name of St. Agnes, and by her mother and other near relatives, from Assisi and the neighborhood. This Second Order of St. Francis to which only women were admitted proved to have in it the germ of as active life as that of the first order. Before the end of the Thirteenth Century there were women Franciscans in every country in Europe. These convents furnished for women a refuge from the worried, hurried, over-busy life around them that proved quite as attractive as the similar opportunity for the men. For many hundreds of years down even to our own time, women were to find in the quiet obscurity of such Franciscan convents a peaceful, happy life in which they occupied themselves with simple conventual duties, with manual labor in their monastery gardens, with the making of needle work in which they became the most expert in the world, with the illuminating of missals and office books of such artistic beauty that they have become the most precious treasures of our great libraries, and with the long hours of prayer by which they hoped to accomplish as much in making the world better as if they devoted themselves to ardent efforts of reform which, of course, the circumstances of the time would not have permitted.
Finally there was the Third Order of St. Francis, which was to gather to itself so many of the distinguished people of the century whose occupations and obligations would not permit them to live the conventual life, but who yet felt that they must be attached by some bond to this beautiful sanctity that was [{266}] entering into all the better life of the century. The Third Order was established so as to permit all the world to become Franciscans to whatever degree it considered possible, and to share in the sublime Christianity of the founder whom they all admired so much, even if they were not able to imitate his sublimer virtues. Into this Third Order of St. Francis most of the finer spirits of the time entered with enthusiasm. We need only recall that Louis IX. of France, the greatest Monarch of the century, considered it a special privilege to be a follower of the humble Francis, and that St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the daughter of a king, the wife and mother of a ruling prince, gave another example of the far-reachingness of Francis' work. Dante was another of the great members of the Third Order and was buried in the habit of St. Francis, glorying in the thought of the brotherhood this gave him with the saint he loved so much.
All down the centuries since, other distinguished men in many countries of Europe were proud to claim the same distinction. Modern science is supposed to be unorthodox in its tendencies and electricity is the most recent of the sciences in development. Three of the great founders in electricity, Volta, Galvani and Ampere, were members of the Third Order of St. Francis and at least one of them, Galvani, insisted on being buried in the habit of the order six centuries after the death of his father Francis in order to show how much he appreciated the privilege. There is no man who lived in the Thirteenth Century who influenced the better side of men more in all the succeeding ages down to and including our own time, than the poor little man of God of Assisi. He is just coming into a further precious heritage of uplift for the men of our time, that is surprising for those who are so buried in the merely material that they fail to realize how much the ideal still rules the minds of thinking men, but that seems only natural and inevitable to those who appreciate all the attractiveness there is in a simple life lived without the bootless hurry, the unattaining bustle and the over-strained excitement of the strenuous existence.
What St. Francis and his order accomplished in Italy another great Saint, Dominic, was achieving in the West. The [{267}] fact that another order similar to that of St. Francis in many respects, yet differing from it in a number of essential particulars, should have arisen almost at the same time shows how profoundly the spirit of organization of effort had penetrated into the minds of these generations of the Thirteenth Century. While poverty was to be the badge of St. Dominic's followers as well as those of St. Francis, learning was to replace the simplicity which St. Francis desired for his sons. The order of preachers began at once to give many eminent scholars to the Church, and for three centuries there was not a single generation that did not see as Dominicans some of the most intellectual men of Europe. Leaders they were in philosophy, in the development of thought, in education, and in every phase of ecclesiastical life. The watch dogs of the Lord, (Domini Canes) they were called, punning on their name because everwhere, they were in the van of defense against the enemies of Christianity. That the Thirteenth Century should have given rise to two such great religious orders stamps it as a wonderfully fruitful period for religion as well as for every other phrase of human development.
In order to understand what these great founders tried to do, the work of these two orders must be considered together. They have never ceased, during all the intervening seven centuries, to be the source of great influence in the religious world. They have proven refuges for many gentle spirits at all times and have been the homes of learning, as well as of piety. While occasionally their privileges have been abused, and men have taken advantage of the opportunities to be idle and luxurious, this has happened much seldomer than the world imagines. Not a single century has failed to show men among them whom the world honors as Saints, and whose lives have been examples of what can be accomplished by human nature at its best. They have been literally schools of unselfishness, and men have learned to think less of themselves and more of their labor by the contemplation of the lives of these begging friars. What they did for England, the Rev. Augustus Jessopp, a non-conformist clergyman in England, has recently told very well, and the more one studies their history, the higher the estimation of them; and the more one knows of [{268}] them, the less does one talk of their vices. Green in his "History of the English People" has paid them a tribute that it is well to remember:—
"To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of the Thirteenth Century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was aroused at the sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. 'Zeal,' he cried, 'must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth.' His fiery ardor and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi. The life of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all: he flings his very clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature and God. His passionate verse claims the moon for his sister and the sun for his brother; he calls on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His last faint cry was a 'Welcome, Sister Death.' Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim was the same, to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, to carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by the entire reversal of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the preacher, the monk for a friar. To force the new 'brethren' into entire dependence on those among whom they labored the vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the 'Begging Friars' were to subsist on the alms of the poor, they might possess neither money nor lands, the very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in a few years around Francis and Dominic, and the begging preachers, clad in their coarse frock of serge, with the girdle of rope around their waist, wandered barefooted as [{269}] missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor."
SIDE CAPITAL (LINCOLN)