It is doubtful if the name of Joachim of Flora would ever have been of any more than very transitory importance had it not been for the appearance in 1254 of a work entitled ‘The Eternal Gospel,’ of which he was stated to be the author. No book of that title figures among the authentic works of Joachim, nor did he give that name to any collection of them. It seems that the book which appeared in Paris in 1254 consisted of Joachim’s three principal works—which had none of them been hitherto deemed heretical—with explanatory notes and a lengthy and all-important introduction (_Introductorius in Evangelium Aeternum_). It must have been rather in the notes and introduction than in the text that the heresy lay, in the interpretations put upon Joachim’s apocalyptic effusions rather than in the effusions themselves. The true author, therefore, of the heresies associated with ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ would appear to be the commentator, not the originator. The authorship of the introduction and the glosses was early ascribed to one of two persons—to a certain Gherardo da Borgo San Donnino by the contemporary chronicler Salimbene, to John of Parma by the inquisitor Eymeric in his ‘Directorium Inquisitorum,’ written more than a century later. In any case the author was a Franciscan.[48] And between the conceptions contained in ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ and the Franciscan Order, it will be seen, there was a very close and a very significant connection. We may take it that the compiler of the work which startled the world in 1254—whether it was Gherardo or John of Parma—is to be regarded less as an expounder of the teaching of Joachim of Flora than as an original thinker, either honestly finding a preceptor and a kindred soul in the prophet and simply elaborating his thesis, or else utilizing the apocalyptic utterances of a man who had died in the full odour of sanctity in order to build up a thesis essentially his own on esoteric writings easily susceptible of a new construction. It is sufficient that ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ has direct reference to that section of the Franciscans which was at the time led by John of Parma, and that in the new religion which the work predicts the Friars are to play the leading part as inaugurators. The work is indeed astoundingly revolutionary. In much the same way that Mazzini in his ‘From the Council to God’ proclaimed the emergence of a new religion of Humanity superseding Christianity did ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ proclaim a new religion, that of the Holy Ghost. But whereas condemnation of the Catholic Church was commonplace in the nineteenth century and humanitarian ideas familiar; in the thirteenth century it is rather astonishing to find an admission that Christianity has failed and that a new dispensation is necessary for the salvation of mankind. The text of ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ is the words in the book of the Revelation, ‘And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the