Longman's Magazine.

E. P. Larken.

It is not without some deliberation and some feeling that I have engaged to speak to you to-day. Is it not, indeed, somewhat strange to see this audience of English citizens, gathered together to hear a Frenchman talk about an Italian, to hear a Protestant, a Huguenot, glorify one of the most faithful sons of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church?

But in truth this strangeness is only in the outward appearance. You, in summoning me and I in joyfully accepting your summons have acted in the most natural manner in the world. On both sides we have obeyed a mysterious but profound sentiment; a sentiment which is vague and uncertain, but strong as an instinct. We are moved by a feeling of unrest; and by this I do not mean that physical restlessness which on the eve of a thunderstorm or of some great cataclysm takes possession of all men with a sense of oppression and constraint; I mean a moral unrest, far more tragical, which leads us to distrust ourselves, our programmes, our ideals.

At the dawn of the twentieth century a breeze from the Orient has passed over our heads: and, whether we would or no, we have run to fling open the windows of our sects, our chapels or our churches, in order to look down on An address delivered in London.

those who are passing far below us, in order to hear their voices and to make them hear ours; and, like the patriarch long ago, we have heard the mysterious call: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will shew thee."

Ah! how happy we ought to be to be living at this hour. As the dawn is the most interesting of all the hours of the day, so of the periods of history there are none more solemn

than those rare moments when nations pause in trouble and hesitation, when all dreams and all temptations come before them-when they must choose with anguished soul the way in which they will walk. In the life of nations, as of individuals, the finest period is not that of great deeds, but the mysterious period in which those great deeds are prepared, the moment of trial, when in the full strength of his reason and will a man makes his choice.

How great is Christ, as I contemplate Him nailed to the Cross, when His mind remains clear enough to see in His murderers only erring men worthy of pity and not wicked men to be cursed; and when His heart, as pure as His intelligence, has nought but words of love and compassion for those wretched ones. How great He is when

in the evening of His life He institutes the sacrament of love which consecrates the unity of the human race and the equality of all men before God. How great He is as He goes from place to place doing good, or as He preaches the law of the new era. And yet there is one moment when I seem to see Him still greater and more wonderful; and that is the moment when He goes away alone into the wilderness, because He feels that the hour has come to fight the great battle; and there, alone, between those two immensities, the vastness of the desert and the infinitude of His own consciousness, He sees all the temptations pass before Him. At this spectacle artists of genius have felt the pencil fall from their hand; even the sacred writers themselves, raising but one corner of the veil, were unable to speak of those hours of anguish except in the language of symbols.

Now for humanity there has just struck one of those hours of supreme trial which is to determine the future for ages to come. The nationalities, the great families of the peoples, are nearly all established, and each one is now called upon to choose the aims which she will put before her and to which she will devote her strength. Questions of conscience are arising in all the nations of Europe. But lately the tempter was saying to one of them: "Are you not free? Are you not independent? What need have you to ren. der account to your sisters? Those sisters who criticise you so bitterly, are they without reproach? Have they never called evil good, and good evil? You have condemned an innocent man. Why should you admit it? Your reputation and your honor are involved. Be proud and audacious. Here are the false documents; believe them to be authentic. Here are stones; say that these stones are bread. To hesitate

would be to doubt yourself, you can do as you like."

And in all Europe and in the whole world there was unspeakable anguish when a few men whispered in the ear of France, my country, the words of the prophet: "It is not lawful for thee." It was an hour of tragic emotion for the whole world when we learned that the poor victim, torn from his place of punishment, was crossing the ocean.

We have all, both you and I, shed more tears over that one victim than over the thousands of victims in the island of Martinique. And we were right. In the one case it was a catastrophe in the physical world, such as to provoke our pity and our compassion; in the other there was far more involved: there was a question of conscience. The problem to be solved was whether the moral law was not binding on nations as well as on individuals, and whether a nation had any right to lie because it would be useful to her to do so. Our tears were not simply tears of compassion; they were the tears of men who suffer for the ideal.

And France is not the only nation which is passing through this formidable crisis. To each the tempter speaks in different language. He tempts this one with militarism, that with commercialism, another with pride, a fourth with idleness, scepticism or materialism; but for all-all those at least who have arrived at manhood-there are disturbing, agonizing questions which will pledge the future for several generations.

It is easy to understand how thoughts such as these may cause trembling in the decrepit and aged who are apt to mistake silence for order; but to us they bring joy and hope; for we all know ourselves too well to believe that we can have realized the ideal already; we all desire that our sons shall be

nore diligent and more valiant than we are; to us faith is one of the forces of youth and life, the prize whose possession we look for in the future.

In coming to speak to you to-day about St. Francis of Assisi and the Twentieth Century, you will have perceived that it is not my intention to gre utterance to the homage which the opening century is offering him whether in historical criticism, in art or in literature; nor shall I discuss the long theories of that new race of pilgrims the goal of whose journeys is Assisi and Umbria; I do not propose even to lead you to himself, to his personality and to his acts, but I shall endeavor to guide you to those points whither he strove to lead his hearers, when he was on earth-I mean to his ideas and to the principles which inspired his life. We shall try to discover whether those ideas have lost their virtue, whether those principles have ceased to be true and living, or whether, if cast into well-prepared soil, they are not capable of bearing fruit still, like those grains of wheat which after lying for long centuries beside the bodies of the Pharaohs still preserve their germinating powers to-day.

If my time were not limited, I ought to begin by discussing the sources to which we should go in order to find out the truth about St. Francis. This matter is so plain that it may be summed up in a few words. There are two portraits of St. Francis: one that is true; another which is false. The true one is evidently the one based on the writings of Francis himself and of the most intimate of his disciples. Now, many of St. Francis's letters have been preserved to us, and, in addition to them two marvellous works which are a sort of continuation of them: one is the Speculum Perfectionis, The Mirror of Perfection, written by Brother Leo, the companion and confessor of the saint, less than a year af

ter his death; the other is the Sacrum Commercium b. Francisci cum domina Paupertate, the Mystic Marriage of Brother Francis with the Lady Poverty, a work written at the same time and place, and inspired by the same ideal, by Giovanni Parenti, first general of the Franciscan order after St. Francis, who made most admirable but most futile efforts to prevent the shipwreck of his master's idea. The later works are either true, in which case they are simply inspired by these; or else they differ so as to give us a pale and discolored copy only, if not a phantasy or a caricature.

Before going into my subject, or rather in order to plunge you quickly into the heart of the matter, I must read over to you at least part of that admirable chapter of the Fioretti,1 or Little Flowers of St. Francis, on perfect joy, which is a kind of résumé of all the Franciscan teaching. I should like to place it at the opening of this lecture like the prelude which a musician sets at the beginning of his composition in order to show forth the unity and the inspiration of all the parts.

Once, on a cold November day, St. Francis and Brother Leo, his faithful companion, were returning from Perugia to Assisi-from Perugia, the proud, tyrannical city which abused its power by terrifying all the little towns in the neighborhood, Perugia, where the papal court was then residing, and where, in spite of some sympathy, Francis had chiefly to reckon with enmity, enmity of the treacherous and hypocritical kind such as ecclesiastical enmity too often is. The two Brothers Minor walked with difficulty along the muddy road whilst an icy rain chilled them through and seemed to numb all their limbs. They walked apart, in silence, fearing to speak because they divined that if they opened their mouths it would be to utter the words

1 "Floretti," Chap. 8; "Actus," cap. T.

of sorrow and discouragement which were surging up from their hearts. And whilst, in the ever-increasing mist, night was coming down upon them externally, tumultuous waves of anxiety and sadness invaded the heart of Francis. Was not the darkness in which they were walking an image and a symbol of the difficulties which surrounded him in carrying out his plans-difficulties which are not to be grappled with hand to hand, which one cannot even see clearly, which cleverly slip out of sight in order to take on the most divers shapes, which can be divined and which cause suffering almost to death sometimes, but of which one can hardly even speak? And what happened at that moment, when Francis felt that his heart was being assailed by the most subtle of all temptations, the temptation to discouragement, and by the desire for rest, for death, for oblivion? We may suppose that he was very sorry for himself, that he reproached himself for his cowardice and that coming to himself again and to his true nature, he shook off his sadness and his temptations, as he had shaken off the snow on the day of his conversion when he escaped from the ditch where the brigands had thrown him. And he sang. He sang as a poet and preached as a prophet the ideal programme which had been restored to his clear vision; he dictated this page on perfect joy, and we may safely say that it would not be out of place between the Sermon on the Mount and St. Paul's Hymn on Charity. We will read it. But first of all, notice, in this piece about joy, that St. Francis does not feel after it, he does not argue about it; he asserts it, he proclaims it. He proclaims with absolute clearness and simplicity that man is born for happiness and joy. Later on he will talk about suffering and pain, but suffering and pain are only the

rough covering, only the heralds of joy.

St. Francis called to Brother Leo who was a little way in front of him, and, remembering perhaps the compliments which had been paid them that morning by some kindly prelate, he said: "O, Brother Leo, it might come to pass that the Brothers Minor were of irreproachable behavior, that they were models of virtue and very mirrors of holiness, nevertheless, write this down and bear it well in mind yourself that that would not be the perfect joy." Brother Leo was a simple and straightforward man; he had faith in his master; but we can imagine all the same that these words must have surprised him. However, a little further on Francis, whose step was slower with the burden of his thoughts, called to him again: "Brother Leo, supposing the Minor were to give sight to the blind, and the use of their limbs to the paralyzed and crippled, supposing he drove out evil spirits and made the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak; and supposing further that he raised the dead after four days, write this down that even there would not be the perfect joy." Think, if you can, of the astonishment which such words must have produced in the mind of Brother Leo. Were they not a condemnation of almost all the religious societies of his time? And to-day, after so many centuries, does not this saying of St. Francis, when you read all the papers and reviews in which the miracle is held up as the one aim and object of Christian activity, tell me, does not this saying seem as far away an ideal as it was in the thirteenth century?

And Francis called to his companion again: "O, Brother Leo, if the Minor were omniscient, if he knew the languages of all nations and all their books, if he could see clearly into the future and read the consciences of all human beings, write down that that