It is a most curious and remarkable story that is made by these interconnected heresies, more especially of the thirteenth century, and by others like them. In the midst of the Ages of Faith individual emotional outpourings or intellectual speculations would lead to strange results of fanaticism or dogma. There were indeed some that were mainly sensual in origin, but others betokened an earnest desire for a new heaven and a new earth and demanded a moral progression in human affairs not visible in existing human society. Such an aspiration is implicit in all the strange theories connected with ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ and in all the ideas of the Spiritual Franciscans, their offshoots and their companion sects. How much of such aspiration, such opinions could the mediæval Church absorb within herself? It was ever doubtful. It would have been impossible to predict beforehand upon which side would eventually be found many of the remarkable men referred to in this chapter—Francis, John of Parma, Bonaventura, Marsiglio of Padua, William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Amaury, Master Eckhart. The pope who condemned the Spiritual Franciscans might easily have regarded Francis himself as a heretic. Fortunately for herself the Church, while repudiating doctrines which were obviously unchristian, those that were the mere frenzies of the ignorant and the demented, succeeded in absorbing a large measure of the enthusiasm and the thought of the age, incorporated the mendicant orders, produced the scholastic philosophy. Nevertheless there were abroad in the mediæval world moral and intellectual ferments, yearnings for regeneration and guesses at truth which found within her fold no satisfaction. _Note._—In O. Holder-Egger’s (complete) edition of Salimbene (_Monumenta Germaniae Historica_, vol. xxxii, Hanover and Leipzig, 1905-13) the most important references to Joachitism are on pp. 231-41, 292-4, 455-8. CHAPTER IV AVERRHOÏST INFLUENCES