But to return to the porch of the Lateran and its devout beggars. On a certain day some eight hundred years ago, the Pope was walking on that green stretch just below it, followed by a silent group of Cardinals and Chamberlains, silent because the Holy Father was evidently thinking hard about some high and important problem. Innocent III was a great and good Pope, but he lived in a turbulent age. During fourteen years of his reign two rivals, Philip and Otto, were rending Europe with their struggles for the supreme honours of the Holy Roman Empire; the Albigensian heresy was holding a hideous carnival of sacrilege, carnage, and obscenity in some of its fairest lands; Rome itself was the scene of ever-recurring battles between the great nobles, who would ride forth in the morning followed by great companies of armed men, on the chance of meeting an enemy or an enemy’s retainer to kill. And with all this there were the vast affairs of the Church to govern, and many spiritual matters to regulate. No wonder that the Pontiff, walking in absorbed silence, and meditating on his course of action, should have been extremely irritated when a company of travel-stained, dusty beggars, disregarding the protestations of the horrified guard of officials, came straight towards him and cast themselves at his feet! He looked down at them in frowning disapproval. What did such conduct mean? Their leader was a pale young man with dark eyes and a face lighted up with a very fire of enthusiasm. Like his companions, he was dressed in a coarse brown robe with a simple girdle, and his bare feet showed many a cut and bruise from which the ragged sandals had not saved them in the long tramp from Assisi down through Umbria and Romagna. For this was the Blessed St. Francis with his “little brothers,” come to ask the Pope for leave to found a new order, the Order of Poverty. And the Pope scarcely answered him. Was it likely that these ragged, ignorant tramps should have been chosen by Divine Providence to found a new family in the Church? Ah, no!—Innocent shook his head, reproved them for their presumption, and ordered them to retire.