Perhaps the most winsome and Christ-like figure that Roman Catholicism presents, the loveliest flower in her rich garden of sainthood, is the poverty-loving, utterly lowly and loving, care-free and joyous Francis of Assisi, and perhaps, too, it may be said that no Christian character better deserves the study of Protestants. St. Francis is not an ideal figure; he lacks the balance and sanity of Jesus. Yet, perhaps, of all who have passionately set themselves to reproduce the life of Jesus, St. Francis in his utter humility, his complete unworldliness, and his overflowing tenderness can best bring home to Protestantism its hardness and shrewdness, its worldly-wisdom and its self-complacency. What a far-distant world is the world of the man who renounced all possessions, went about to preach and serve in coarsest, meagrest garb, who despised money and loved poverty, whose sympathies went out to birds and fishes, to Brother Fire and Sister Water, who could captivate robbers and even, it was believed, wild creatures of the woods, and at whose coming the Umbrian cities rang their bells and poured out with branches and flags to greet the mean little man with the shabby grey gown and the rapt, pale, worn face.
Let it be granted Protestant countries are more wealthy than Roman Catholic, more progressive, more successful in trade and manufacture, St. Francis gives us a glimpse into the simplicity and childlikeness, humility and romance, that may sometimes find a Roman Catholic atmosphere more genial than a Protestant.
Associated with the Franciscan order of tonsured monks and cloistered nuns, there grew up a great society of men and women taking a middle path between the world and the cloister--plainer in dress, abstaining from the dance and the theatre, eschewing all quarrels, praying and fasting more regularly, practising a more systematic beneficence than ordinary Christians. And it is noteworthy that, in 1882 on the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Francis, Pope Leo XIII. in an encyclical declared that the institution of these Franciscan Tertiaries was alone fitted to save humanity from the social and political dangers which threatened it.
Wesley and Francis are not far removed. The Saint of Epworth was almost as ardent a devotee of poverty as the Saint of Assisi. If he did not absolutely strip himself, he gave away immensely more. He, too, had a passion for the souls of men, all of St. Francis' pity for the poor, and he won a wealth of reverence and love. He was a far wiser man, living in a more rational age. But he was not only extraordinarily competent. He knew, too, his own competence. There is a wildflower grace of the childlike in St. Francis that we miss in the far more intelligent and commanding figure of Wesley.
Primitive Methodism had much of the enthusiasm and devotion and joyousness of the Franciscan brotherhood. Francis' friars and Wesley's helpers had a common unworldliness, joyousness, and passion for the souls of men. But even as the Franciscan movement diverged from the ideals of St. Francis, so Methodism soon developed on lines of its own. It has preserved much of the evangelical fervor and the practical helpfulness of its original inspiration. Considered in its direct and indirect effects, its union of evangelicalism, mysticism, and practical kindliness, there has been no other Christian movement which has combined such a measure of purity with such vastness of influence. In genuine Christian influence it has surpassed even the Reformation. Modern Christianity (and there is a distinguishable modern Christianity) is of all forms that Christianity has assumed the nearest to the Christianity of Jesus, and in its fashioning the Methodist Revival has been the chief agency. Yet Methodism has not realized the ideals of its human founder. It did not perpetuate his unworldliness. It failed, as R. W. Dale pointed out, to the great loss of Christendom, to develop the ethical implications of his great doctrine of perfect love. It cherished his memory and his organization, but it refused to inherit his dread and hatred of riches. Its very thrift and industry and morality have been its undoing. It became, in great measure, like Protestantism in general, a bourgeois religion, eminently suited for people who want to get on in the world. Its chief abhorrence has never been of social inequality and injustice but of the wasteful frivolities and vices, dancing, card-playing, theatre-going, and, pre-eminently, intemperance. The Report already cited shows, however, a new spirit at work in the Methodism of Canada, a spirit in which Wesley would rejoice, and it is not in Canadian Methodism only that it is at work.
A still closer resemblance obtains between the Franciscan order and the Salvation Army than between the former and Methodism. No two movements, perhaps, so widely apart in time and methods are so closely akin. Poverty, humility, obedience, love are the dominant features of them both.
Francis is a more winsome figure than General Booth but incomparably less intelligent and efficient. Francis awakened a great religious revival but probably wrought little improvement on the face of Europe--on its ferocity, chronic warfare, sensuality, oppression of the poor. The Salvation Army has redeemed countless victims of poverty and vice. It has probably proved itself the most effective agency in all history for the salvation of the down and out.
The Order and the Army have the same limitations.
1. Both are too exclusively inward and individualistic. They do not deal adequately with conditions and causes, the Franciscan movement not at all, the Salvation Army very timidly. The weakest element in the latter is its willingness to accept gifts from even those who have made their wealth out of the degradation of men and women, and its seeming reluctance to engage in any drastic social reforms which might dry up such bounty. It is content with ambulance work, and even the most devoted and heroic ambulance work will never stop the war.
2. Both, too, are sectional; fitted only for the few, the enthusiasts. Each has cared for the saint; neither has made provision for the ordinary man. Christian perfection, in the thought of Francis and of General Booth, is for the man who withdraws from the ordinary work of the world, turns away from its culture, crucifies a thousand human instincts, breaks all the strings of the human lute but one. Both movements organized by these great saints are eccentric, abnormal. Neither is workable on a catholic, or universal, scale. Both sectionalize the holy life.