_We tell our children some of the very same stories that the wandering story-tellers used to relate to good knights and their fair ladies in the old baronial halls,—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or Puss in Boots,—only the knights and their ladies believed them. There is a pathos in mediæval story; it is a tragedy of misdirected effort (as perhaps all history is), only the mediæval tragedy strikes home. Its actors were people of our own blood and of our own Church—our own people only under delusions from which we have emancipated ourselves. To understand their story we must take them as children and listen with them for the imaginary voices that lead them on._ _A veritable allegory of the Age of Faith was presented on the great stage of history in 1212, when two enormous armies of little boys and girls started from France and Germany singing, to march to the Holy Land; if any of these children turned back, none of them seem to have found their old homes._ _As far as is known to history, one child alone returned as an aged pilgrim, to tell the tale,—how the bones of the children strewed the mountainside; how they had been embarked on unseaworthy vessels to be sold into slavery; how few, how very few, ever reached their goal; how few, how very few, ever remained pure and holy._ _Connected with this tragedy was a horrible pope and a horrible doge, but now they seem but foils to the purity of the children, it was all so long ago. And that the mystic beauty of that little legion may live lyrically in our life, the Twentieth Century has set their pathetic march to music in stately oratorio; for pure aspiration is the melody of melodies, the veritable flower of history._ _A certain childish disinterestedness was the tender grace of the Age of Faith,—“the tender grace of a day that is dead.” It must pass from a broader age; taking all factors duly into account even drives it from serious history its proportion is so inconsiderable._ _The life of Saint Francis, who espoused My Lady Poverty, is one of the sweetest examples of mediæval disinterestedness. Viewed literally, the accounts picture a crazy man preaching to birds and fishes, making a bargain with a wolf and injudiciously mortifying his flesh till he became blind and useless. Viewed by the light of their influence his teachings were revolutionary,—they brought new-found energy and sympathy into the Church; yet, at best, they were only the teachings of Christ, without the Savior’s beautiful sanity. Viewed by the results he brought about, Saint Francis must have been one of the profoundest of men, and yet his wisdom, if he had any, was only that of the heart._