Into these dangerous paths of rebellion the original leaders of the Italian Spirituals were not obliged to enter, as they were released from subjection to the Conventuals, and could afford to remain in obedience to Rome. Angelo da Clarino writes to his disciples that torment and death were preferable to separation from the Church and its head; the pope was the bishop of bishops, who regulated all ecclesiastical dignities; the power of the keys is from Christ, and submission is due in spite of persecution. Yet, together with these appeals are others which show how impracticable was the position created by the belief in St. Francis as a new evangelist whose Rule was a revelation. If kings or prelates command what is contrary to the faith, then obedience is due to God, and death is to be welcomed. Francis placed in the Rule nothing but what Christ bade him write, and obedience is due to it rather than to prelates. After the persecution under John XXII. he even quotes a prophecy attributed to Francis, to the effect that men would arise who would render the Order odious, and corrupt the whole Church; there would be a pope not canonically elected who would not believe rightly as to Christ and the Rule; there would be a split in the Order, and the wrath of God would visit those who cleaved to error. With clear reference to John, he says that if a pope condemns evangelical truth as an error he is to be left to the judgment of Christ and the doctors; if he excommunicates as heresy the poverty of the Gospel, he is excommunicate of God and is a heretic before Christ. Yet, though his faith and obedience were thus sorely tried, Angelo and his followers never attempted a schism. He died in 1337, worn out with sixty years of tribulation and persecution--a man of the firmest and gentlest spirit, of the most saintly aspirations, who had fallen on evil days and had exhausted himself in the hopeless effort to reconcile the irreconcilable. Though John XXII. had permitted him to assume the habit and Rule of the Celestins, he was obliged to live in hiding, with his abode known only to a few faithful friends and followers, of some of whom we hear as on trial before the Inquisition as Fraticelli, in 1334. It was in the desert hermitage of Santa Maria di Aspro in the Basilicata; but three days before his death a rumor spread that a saint was dying there, and such multitudes assembled that it was necessary to place guards at the entrance of his retreat, and admit the people two by two to gaze on his dying agonies. He shone in miracles, and was finally beatified by the Church, which through the period of two generations had never ceased to trample on him, but his little congregation, though lost to sight in the more aggressive energy of the Fraticelli, continued to exist, even after the tradition of self-abnegation was taken up under more fortunate auspices by the Observantines, until it was finally absorbed into the latter in the reorganization of 1517 under Leo X.[66]