Most of us must sympathize with Iscariot; we have so often been in his place, sometimes in spite of ourselves, perhaps. Or if we cannot sympathize with him, at least we must with Brother Elias, that born master of organization, the practical man who saw the beauty of the character of St. Francis, recognised the power of his attractive nature, and wished to turn all to visible use, to build up around him a great society which should be a guide to kings and prelates, a divine strong- hold into which the beauty and the riches of the world should be brought. Elias doubtless felt that St. Francis was too good for this world; he himself dealt with men as men, understanding the worth of compromise, seeing the strength of institutions. The Elias whom most of us know well enough always tends to think of an ideal merely in its relation to institutions actual or possible, while the Francis, for whom we look too often in vain, thinks of the institution only as at best the imperfect embodiment of, or the means to, the ideal, and more often as the hindrance to be overcome on the way, "my brother the ass," who can only be guided with difficulty. It is very easy for us to recognise in a far off time the failure of institutions to realize the ideal that inspired their origin, and we readily admit, in the abstract, the need for the ideal to dominate [p.93] the institution and the danger of the institution running away with the ideal. It is harder to see in our own lives how far we are allowing the machinery to take us from its object, how far that machinery is out of date or out of gear, since we are in the thick of it all, our ears dulled by the roar of the wheels. Assuming that we admit that Iscariot has his right and helpful place, how are we to find it and keep him there? It may help us to understand the danger that follows upon organization, if we make even a partial survey of a group of existing institutions and try to trace the history of some one of them.