Each borrows from its sun.”
As the moon wanes, so there are periods when the Church proves dull, dark, and without much token of spiritual life; but this is for a time only, and precedes a restoration of illumination. The period when S. Francis appeared was one of those of darkness in the Church. The enthusiastic faith of the barbarian kings and nobles, bred of the self-devotion and earnestness of the first missionaries among them, had led to their endowing the Church largely. This was done to enable her to carry on the great work of evangelisation without care for the material concerns of life. But it led to an unfortunate result. As the bishoprics were wealthy, and seats of power, ambitious and greedy men of the noble class rushed into Holy Orders for the sake of these material advantages, and in entire disregard of the religious responsibilities attached to such offices. And as with the prelates, so with the clergy. They seemed to think that the things of Jesus Christ were best served by making themselves comfortable; they were ignorant, careless, and worldly. The great ecclesiastics made a display of their wealth, and exercised their power tyrannically. “The Church might still seem to preach to all,” says Dean Milman; “but it preached in a tone of lofty condescension, it dictated rather than persuaded; but, in general, actual preaching had fallen into disuse; it was in theory the special privilege of the bishops, and the bishops were but few who had either the gift, the inclination, or the leisure from their secular, judicial, or warlike occupations to preach even in their cathedral cities; in the rest of their dioceses their presence was but occasional—a progress or visitation of pomp and form, rather than of popular instruction. The only general teaching of the people was the ritual.
“But the splendid ritual, admirably as it was constituted to impress by its words or symbolic forms the leading truths of Christianity upon the more intelligent, or in a vague way upon the more rude and uneducated, could be administered, and was administered, by a priesthood almost entirely ignorant, but which had learned mechanically, not without decency, perhaps not without devotion, to go through the stated observances. Everywhere the bell summoned to the frequent service, the service was performed, and the obedient flock gathered to the chapel or the church, knelt, and either performed their orisons or heard the customary chant and prayer. This, the only instruction which the mass of the priesthood could convey, might for a time be sufficient to maintain in the minds of the people a quiescent and submissive faith, nevertheless, in itself, could not but awaken in some a desire of knowledge, which it could not satisfy.... And just at this time the popular mind throughout Christendom seemed to demand instruction. There was a wide and vague awakening and yearning of the human intellect. Here that which was heresy stepped in and seized upon the vacant mind. Preaching in public and in private was the strength of all the heresiarchs, of all the sects. Eloquence, popular eloquence, became a new power which the Church had comparatively neglected or disdained, since the time of the Crusades. The Patropassians, the Henricians, the followers of Peter Waldo, and the wilder teachers at least, tinged with the old Manichæan tenets of the East, met on this common ground. They were poor and popular; they felt with the people, whether the lower burghers of the cities, the lower vassals, or even the peasants and serfs; they spoke the language of the people, they were of the people. All these sects were bound together by their common aversion to the clergy—not only the wealthy, worldly, immoral, tyrannical, but the decent yet inert priesthood, who left the uninstructed souls of men to perish.”[[9]]
It was when, apparently, the bulk of the population was hesitating whether to break away from the Church, and when certain ardent spirits began to question whether the Church could be the Kingdom of God, wherein appeared so much of evil, that almost simultaneously two men stood forth to arrest the evil. The story was told afterwards that the pope in a dream had seen the Church under the form of a building tottering to its fall, but that two men rushed forward and sustained it. These men were Dominic and Francis. The former founded an order of preachers, by which Christendom in the West was overspread with a host of zealous, active, and devoted men, whose function was popular instruction.
Francis, seeing the universal greed after lands and money, took the vow of poverty, made that a capital point in his institution. The grasping after possessions should never curse his society, and he donned, and made his disciples don, the poor, coarse dress of the common labourer, to show that they were to be ever of the people, and for the people, even for the lowest. And he aimed first of all to encourage piety—the striving of the soul after God—and to show that within the Church that flame could burn brightest and give out most heat. But he taught as well. It was due to his great desire to bring home to the people the truth of the Incarnation, that he devised the crèche of Christmas, and composed the first Christmas carols. And he was a preacher—fervent, inspired, convincing. His heart so overflowed with love, that even birds and beasts were attracted to him, and his love extended to them—“his sisters and brothers,” as he termed them.
The story of the conversion of S. Francis, the wealthy merchant’s son, is well known. He was a young man, just at the age when the deepest feelings of man’s nature begin to make themselves articulate. One evening he was revelling with his companions of the same age with himself. When supper was over, the merry party dashed out of the hot, lighted room into the open air. The dark indigo-blue vault of heaven overhead was besprent with myriads of stars, and Francis suddenly halted, looked up, and remained silent in contemplation of this wondrous canopy.
“What ails you, Francis?” asked one of the revellers.
“He is star-gazing for a wife,” joked another.
“Ah!” said Francis gravely, “for a wife past all that your imagination can conceive.”
His soul with inarticulate cravings strained after something higher than a merchant’s life behind a counter, a nobler life than revelling and drunkenness. Then probably he first conceived the idea of embracing poverty, and of devoting his whole life to his poor brothers.