explicitly, as transitory, as representing that passage from the _significantia_ to the _significata_ which Joachim signalizes at every stage of his demonstration. Joachim was not disturbed during his lifetime. In 1200 he submitted all his writings to the judgment of the Holy See, and unreservedly affirmed his orthodoxy; the Lateran council, which condemned his criticism of Peter Lombard, made no allusion to his eschatological temerities; and the bull of 1220 was a formal certificate of his orthodoxy. The Joachimite ideas soon spread into Italy and France, and especially after a division had been produced in the Franciscan order. The rigorists, who soon became known as "Spirituals," represented St Francis as the initiator of Joachim's third age. Certain convents became centres of Joachimism. Around the hermit of Hyères, Hugh of Digne, was formed a group of Franciscans who expected from the advent of the third age the triumph of their ascetic ideas. The Joachimites even obtained a majority in the general chapter of 1247, and elected John of Parma, one of their number, general of the order. Pope Alexander IV., however, compelled John of Parma to renounce his dignity, and the Joachimite opposition became more and more vehement. Pseudo-Joachimite treatises sprang up on every hand, and, finally, in 1254, there appeared in Paris the _Liber introductorius ad Evangelium aeternum_, the work of a Spiritual Franciscan, Gherardo da Borgo San Donnino. This book was published with, and as an introduction to, the three principal works of Joachim, in which the Spirituals had made some interpolations.[1] Gherardo, however, did not say, as has been supposed, that Joachim's books were the new gospel, but merely that the Calabrian abbot had supplied the key to Holy Writ, and that with the help of that _intelligentia mystica_ it would be possible to extract from the Old and New Testaments the eternal meaning, the gospel according to the Spirit, a gospel which would never be written; as for this eternal sense, it had been entrusted to an order set apart, to the Franciscan order announced by Joachim, and in this order the ideal of the third age was realized. These affirmations provoked very keen protests in the ecclesiastical world. The secular masters of the university of Paris denounced the work to Pope Innocent IV., and the bishop of Paris sent it to the pope. It was Innocent's successor, Alexander IV., who appointed a commission to examine it; and as a result of this commission, which sat at Anagni, the destruction of the _Liber introductorius_ was ordered by a papal breve dated the 23rd of October 1255. In 1260 a council held at Arles condemned Joachim's writings and his supporters, who were very numerous in that region. The Joachimite ideas were equally persistent among the Spirituals, and acquired new strength with the publication of the commentary on the Apocalypse.