It is impossible to enumerate here all the works attributed to Joachim. Some served their avowed object with great success, being powerful instruments in the anti-papal polemic and sustaining the revolted Franciscans in their hope of an approaching triumph. Among the most widely circulated were the commentaries on Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel, the _Vaticinia pontificum_ and the _De oneribus ecclesiae_. Of his authentic works the doctrinal essential is very simple. Joachim divides the history of humanity, past, present and future, into three periods, which, in his _Expositio in Apocalypsin_ (bk. i. ch. 5), he defines as the age of the Law, or of the Father; the age of the Gospel, or of the Son; and the age of the Spirit, which will bring the ages to an end. Before each of these ages there is a period of incubation, or initiation: the first age begins with Abraham, but the period of initiation with the first man Adam. The initiation period of the third age begins with St Benedict, while the actual age of the Spirit is not to begin until 1260, the Church--_mulier amicta sole_ (Rev. xii. 1)--remaining hidden in the wilderness 1260 days. We cannot here enter into the infinite details of the other subdivisions imagined by Joachim, or into his system of perpetual concordances between the New and the Old Testaments, which, according to him, furnish the prefiguration of the third age. Far more interesting as explaining the diffusion and the religious and social importance of his doctrine is his conception of the second and third ages. The first age was the age of the Letter, the second was intermediary between the Letter and the Spirit, and the third was to be the age of the Spirit. The age of the Son is the period of study and wisdom, the period of striving towards mystic knowledge. In the age of the Father all that was necessary was obedience; in the age of the Son reading is enjoined; but the age of the Spirit was to be devoted to prayer and song. The third is the age of the _plena spiritus libertas_, the age of contemplation, the monastic age _par excellence_, the age of a monachism wholly directed towards ecstasy, more Oriental than Benedictine. Joachim does not conceal his sympathies with the ideal of Basilian monachism. In his opinion--which is, in form at least, perfectly orthodox--the church of Peter will be, not abolished, but purified; actually, the hierarchy effaces itself in the third age before the order of the monks, the _viri spirituales_. The entire world will become a vast monastery in that day, which will be the resting-season, the sabbath of humanity. In various passages in Joachim's writings the clerical hierarchy is represented by Rachel and the contemplative order by her son Joseph, and Rachel is destined to efface herself before her son. Similarly, the teaching of Christ and the Apostles on the sacraments is considered, implicitly and