Each order had its different mission. The Dominicans, the preaching brothers, should persuade the hard of heart, strengthen the failing, console the desolate, warn the erring, and exterminate the heretic. Yet, singularly enough, this most orthodox order, these watch-dogs of the Lord, were to become in Germany a centre of mystical heresies. The order of St. Francis, the Lesser Brothers, had a more tender and ecstatic ideal. They went begging through the world, tending the sick, loving the helpless, preaching to the birds and the fishes, full of a quaint compassionate unworldliness, a holy folly. There were few hearts so hard that, though unshaken by the storms of Dominic, they did not melt before the sweet Franciscan sanctity. And so the two orders traversed the world, twin forces and voices of pity. But the chivalrous and militant pity of Dominic, eager to avenge the outraged Christ continually crucified by infidels, too often took the form of wrath and burnings, while Francis loved the erring with a simple human pity. In return the world bestowed, and still bestows, upon him something of the wondering compassionate reverence which Eastern nations give to the Pure Fool, the man unsoiled by the wisdom of the world and still wrapped round with the simplicity of God. Between them, the two orders were to divide the Christian world. Sanctioned in the same year and under the same hospitable rule of Augustine, they went out triumphantly upon their different missions. Inspired, it is most probable, by the example of the Beguines, they would soon absorb the secular order into their mighty forces. And the real decline of Beguinism begins, not in 1250, when first the secular fraternities became conspicuous for heresy, but on that day of the year 1216 when the learned Dominic and the visionary Francis met and embraced each other in the streets of Rome.
At first the external position of the Beguines and the Beghards appeared in no danger and no disadvantage. Their fraternity had always been a secular fraternity; their condition of pious laymen was one which offered sanctity with independence. The beguinages still thrived and multiplied. In the Low Countries especially, and in Cambray, Strasburg, and Cologne,—places where mysticism has ever been dear, and ecclesiastical authority never a welcome yoke—Beguinism grew apace. But there is no doubt that one great cause which for thirty years averted the ruin of the secular fraternities was the presence in their midst of one of the most remarkable women of her century; a woman who, to the Beguines, was all that St. Elizabeth was to the Franciscans, or that Catherine of Siena should become to the order of St. Dominic. This gifted and singular creature was the prophetess Mechtild of Magdeburg.