Had Francis not been a saint he would certainly have been one of his country’s greatest poets.[150] Different minds will probably estimate differently the loss and gain. As a poet he produced the ‘Canticle of the Sun’; as an ascetic, the Franciscan Order. Now it is fair to point out that this, like other Orders of his church, must not be judged by what it is like in times when it is surrounded by watchful and by no means adorant eyes. A Catholic religious Order in a Catholic country naturally lives and moves in an atmosphere of veneration. To preserve this atmosphere pure from the sceptical thought which, from the monastic point of view, would vitiate it so dangerously, is naturally a prime object of every religious community; hence the bigotries, superstitions, and tyrannies of which these communities have so often been the sources or agents, from the days of Hypatia to the days of Dreyfus. Such communities, developing themselves under such circumstances, cannot attract many men of intellect and character to join them. They rapidly deteriorate, and European literature from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Erasmus shows us the repute in which they come to be held by the uncloistered intellect. A false ideal may stimulate, but it poisons. St. Francis, dreaming that he serves God by making himself blind to God’s world through a course of pitiless austerities,[151] produces an Order whose licence in one generation after his death has become a scandal to Christendom.[152] Let us turn now to the theory of asceticism as conceived by the humane and rational spirit of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus—to my mind the greatest ethical thinker of antiquity—has a valuable and carefully reasoned chapter on the subject in his Dissertations. In reading this after, let us say, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, one seems to pass from the drugged atmosphere of a mediæval church to the free air and sunlight of the world. The ascetic, or Cynic as he was called in Stoic phraseology, is painted for us as a man who adventures himself to the extreme limit of abnegation, not from any mystic sentiment of the holiness of pain and poverty, but simply to help himself and others to realize the soul’s independence of external things. It was a cardinal doctrine of Stoicism (as it was of the Christianity of Christ) that the things which a man wrought and thought, the things under the control of his will, were the only things that really mattered. What happened to a man from outside was, indeed, of great importance in regard to how he dealt with it; in itself it was of none; it was like a ball in a game which you have to do your best to catch, knowing well that you do so not for the sake of the ball but of the game. Such was the Stoic view of life, and the Cynic represented not the perfected Stoic, not an ideal towards which all should tend—for the ideal was that of citizenship and well-ordered social life—but simply the method of