The personality and career of St. Francis of Assisi are of profound significance in the history of mediæval Christianity. Their sanctity and spiritual power gave other men, such as Peter Damiani, Bruno, Stephen Harding, Norbert, Bernard, Dominic, a great reputation and authority even in their own lifetime. But Francis stood apart from and above all of them, even Bernard. His intense sincerity, his absolute, unconditional renunciation of all worldly things, the charm and beauty of his character made the man, upon whose body the στίγματα of Christ were said to have been seen, appear to his own day as one different from all other men—indeed so miraculously near to the spirit of his Master as to be hailed by some even as a second Christ. Simple, unlearned, not interested in intellectual matters, making religion an inward matter of spiritual experience, intense conviction of sin and of repentance together with unreserved devotion of life and soul to God in personal service, St. Francis was no organizer, and when the nucleus of an order gathered round him viewed the future with the utmost disquietude, fearing in the very fact of organization a falling away from those ideas of strictest poverty and personal holiness which marked out the Minorites from all other religious associations. Yet if the influence of St. Francis was to survive his death, organization, whatever its drawbacks, was an imperative necessity. This work was carried out by a man of rare energy and constructive powers, Elias of Cortona, with the active support of Gregory IX. Elias did for the Franciscans what St. Paul did for primitive Christianity. But between the spirit of Elias and that of Francis there was a difference equivalent to that between the zeal of a prophet and the skill of a statesman. The Franciscan Order as it came to be, if it gained something by its organization, lost also, as the founder had foreseen. With organization there came indeed recruitment from the ranks of scholarship, and the followers of the unlearned saint of Assisi included in Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura and Roger Bacon men who could take stand with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas himself among the followers of the learned Dominic de Guzman. But there came also with organization temporal influence and worldly wealth, entirely out of harmony with the mind and ideals of Francis, and proving indeed a snare and a temptation to those very clerical abuses against which the whole life of Francis had been a protest.