Erasmus dreamed once—so he writes to Charles Utenhove—that St. Francis came to thank him for chastising the Franciscans. The Founder had not the scrupulous stage-costume of his degenerate followers: his brown frock was of undyed wool; the hood was not peaked, but merely hung behind to cover the head in bad weather; the cord was a piece of rope from a farmyard; the feet were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata there was as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the Franciscans. Obedience, poverty, chastity, humility, simplicity, charity—where had flown these “six wings of the seraph”?
_Eheu fugaces!_ ’Tis the story of all founders, of all orders. St. Francis at his supreme moment of renunciation had not even the brown frock of Erasmus’s dream. In the market-place of Assisi he stood in his shirt. And he desired to die even more naked, as Thomas of Celano and the “Legenda Trium Sociorum” testify. The first Franciscans were simple souls kindled by his love and ecstasy, “the minstrels of the dear Lord.” They bore revilement and scourging; dragged along by their hoods, they never ceased to proclaim Peace. They lay a-cold in caves, with hearts careless of the morrow; they served in lepers’ houses. And above all they worked; begging was only to be a last resort, and never was money to be asked for. “Beware of money,” says the “Regula.”
Brother Elias of Cortona, the immediate successor of St. Francis, is said to have lived like a prince, with valets and horses, and he readily got the Pope to sanction a device by which he obtained all the money he wanted _per interpositas personas_. Nor did the Master’s teaching fare better at the hands of the more faithful faction—the Observants whom the Conventualists persecuted—for the rule of Absolute Poverty was applied without the genial concessions and exceptions he knew how to make; and under the guidance of the caustic and canonical Antony of Padua the ancient _gaudentes in Domino_ hardened into slaves of the letter, while the more mystic degenerated into anchorites who retired to the mountains to save their own souls.
Nothing can point the tragedy of St. Francis’s success more vividly than his own homely words in his “Testamentum.” “And they who came to take up this life gave up whatever they might have to the poor and were content with a single tunic, patched inside and out (if they wished), together with a girdle and drawers: and we would have no more. We clerks said the office like other clerks; the lay-brothers said the Lord’s Prayer. We gladly abode in poor and forsaken churches, and were simple folk and subject to all. And I used to work with my hands, and I desire to work, and my earnest wish is that all the brethren should work at some decent employment.”