When he suppressed ecclesiastical disorders it was less for love of good than for hatred of evil; it was the judge who condemns or threatens, himself always supported by the law, not the father who weeps his son's offence. This priest did not comprehend the great movement of his age--the awakening of love, of poetry, of liberty. I have already said that at the opening of the thirteenth century the Middle Age was twenty years old. Innocent III. undertook to treat it as if it were only fifteen. Possessed by his civil and religious dogmas as others are by their educational doctrines, he never suspected the unsatisfied longings, the dreams, unreasoning perhaps, but beneficent and divine, that were dumbly stirring in the depths of men's hearts. He was a believer, although certain sayings of the historians[8] open the door to some doubts on this point, but he drew his religion rather from the Old Testament than from the New, and if he often thought of Moses, the leader of his people, nothing reminded him of Jesus, the shepherd of souls. One cannot be everything; a choice intelligence, an iron will[9] are a sufficient portion even for a _priest-god_; he lacked love. The death of this pontiff, great among the great ones, was destined to be saluted with songs of joy.[10] His reception of Francis furnished to Giotto, the friend of Dante, one of his most striking frescos; the pope, seated on his throne, turns abruptly toward Francis. He frowns, for he does not understand, and yet he feels a strange power in this mean and despised man, _vilis et despectus_; he makes a real but futile effort to comprehend, and now I see in this pope, who lived upon lemons,[11] something that recalls another choice mind, theocratic like his own, sacrificed like him to his work: Calvin. One might think that the painter had touched his lips to the Calabrian Seer's cup, and that in the attitude of these two men he sought to symbolize a meeting of representatives of the two ages of humanity, that of Law and that of Love.[12] A surprise awaited the pilgrims on their arrival in Rome: they met the Bishop of Assisi,[13] quite as much to his astonishment as to their own. This detail is precious because it proves that Francis had not confided his plans to Guido. Notwithstanding this the bishop, it is said, offered to make interest for them with the princes of the Church. We may suspect that his commendations were not very warm. At all events they did not avail to save Francis and his company either from a searching inquiry or from the extended fatherly counsels of Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo[14] upon the difficulties of the Rule, counsels which strongly resemble those of Guido himself.[15]