There is something saddening, though not really strange, in the failure even of the most attractive elements in medieval Christianity to better the world. To read of the life and teaching of St. Francis of Assisi is to come as it were in the presence of a really elemental force of goodness. His namesake of Sales was a persecutor; but the founder of the Franciscan order seems free of that taint. In him the ecstasy of pietism seems purified of that correlative of fanatic malignity which so constantly dogs it in the literature of ancient Christianity, from the epistles of Paul to the treatises of Augustine. We hear of his love for all animals, of his seldom-failing goodwill to men, and his sweet contentment in humble contemplation. Yet when we study him in relation to his age there fronts us the startling fact that while his active career is almost exactly synchronous with the horrible Albigensian crusades, there is no trace in the records that he was even saddened by them. They ought to have darkened for him the light of the sun; but not once does he seem to have given even a deprecating testimony against them. In him, the flower of medieval Christianity, loyalty to the faith seems to have annulled some of the most vital modes of moral consciousness. So again with the influence of such a religious classic as the Imitatio Christi, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, but probably the work of several hands, in different countries and centuries. Many men and women must have supposed themselves to live by it; and its influence seems wholly for peace and self-surrender. Yet it would be hard to show that it ever restrained any corporate tendency of a contrary kind, or ruled the corporate life of a single religious sect. The truth is that its message was for a life of isolation, as that of the ideal monk in his cell. Seclusion and not social life, mystic contemplation and not wise activity, duty to God and not duty to man, are its ideals. It was in a manner the Christian counterpart of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or the Enchiridion of Epictetus--a manual of the higher or inner life, making Christianity do for medieval men what Stoicism could do for pagans in the decadent Roman empire. But Stoicism, by Christian consent, made for good government; and there is no trace of any such result from the Imitatio. The model Christian monarch, St. Louis of France, lived in an earlier age; and even he was a fanatic where heresy was concerned, and a promoter of religious wars.