Once the true beauty of St. Francis’s life was recognized, his followers increased rapidly and no longer had to fear insult or injury when they begged. Crowds, indeed, collected to hear them preach and to bring them offerings. Some Franciscans settled in France and Germany, and others went to England during the reign of Henry III and lived amid the slums of London, Oxford, and Norwich, wherever it seemed to them that they could best serve ‘Lady Poverty’. St. Francis himself before he died had been puzzled and almost alarmed by the popularity he had never courted, and he confessed sadly that, instead of living the lives of Saints, some of those who professed to follow him were ‘fain to receive praise and honour by rehearsing and preaching the works that the Saints did themselves achieve’. He was right in his fear for the future. Rules are a dead letter without the spirit of understanding that gives them a true obedience; and the secret of his joyous and unassuming self-denial Francis could only bequeath to a few. Preaching, not for the sake of helping man and glorifying God, but in order to earn the wealth and esteem their founder had held as dross--this was the temptation to which the ‘Grey Brethren’ succumbed, even within the generation that had known St. Francis himself. Avarice and self-satisfaction, following their wide popularity, soon led the Franciscans into quarrels with the other religious Orders and with the lecturers of the Universities and the secular clergy. These looked upon the ‘Mendicants’ as interlopers, trying to thieve congregations, fees, and revenues to which they had no right. ‘None of the Faithful’, says a contemporary Benedictine sourly, ‘believe they can be saved unless they are under the direction of the Preachers or Minorites.’ The power of the Franciscans, as of the Dominicans, was encouraged by the majority of Popes, who, like Innocent III, recognized in their enthusiasm a new weapon with which to defend Rome from accusations of worldliness and corruption. In return for papal sympathy and support the Friars became Rome’s most ardent champions, and in defence of a system rather than in devotion to an ideal of life they deteriorated and accepted the ordinary religious standard of their day. Once more a wave of reform had swept into the mediaeval Church in a cleansing flood, only to be lost in the ebb tide of reaction. Yet this ultimate failure did not mean that the force of the wave was spent in vain. St. Francis could not stem the corruption of the thirteenth century; but his simple sincerity could reveal again to mankind an almost-forgotten truth that the road to the love of God is the love of humanity.