"I speke of many hundred years ago, For now can no man see non elves mo; For now the great charity and prayers Of lymytours and other holy freres That serchen every land and every stream As thick as motis in the sunne-beam, Blessing halls, chambers, kitchens, and bowers, Cities and burghs, castles high and towers, Thorps and barns, shippons and dairies, This maketh that there been no fairies. For there as wont to walken was an elf, There walketh now the lymytour himself In undermeles and in morwenings,[17] And sayeth his matins and his holy things, As he goeth in his lymytacioun."--_Wife of Bath's Tale._ They were, in fact, home missionaries; and the zeal and earnestness of their early efforts, falling upon times when such an agency was greatly needed, produced very striking results. "Till the days of Martin Luther," says Sir James Stephen, "the church had never seen so great and effectual a reform as theirs.... Nothing in the histories of Wesley or of Whitefield can be compared with the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed them, or with the immediate visible result of their labours." In the character of St. Francis, notwithstanding its superstition and exaggerated asceticism, there is something specially attractive: in his intense sympathy with the sorrows and sufferings of the poor, his tender and respectful love for them as members of Christ, his heroic self-devotion to their service for Christ's sake, in his vivid realisation of the truth that birds, beasts, and fishes are God's creatures, and our fellow-creatures. In the work of both Francis and Dominic there is much which is worth careful study at the present day. Now, too, there is a mass of misery in our large towns huge and horrible enough to kindle the Christ-like pity of another Francis; in country as well as town there are ignorance and irreligion enough to call forth the zeal of another Dominic. In our Sisters of Mercy we see among women a wonderful rekindling of the old spirit of self-sacrifice, in a shape adapted to our time; we need not despair of seeing the same spirit rekindled among men, freed from the old superstitions and avoiding the old blunders, and setting itself to combat the gigantic evils which threaten to overwhelm both religion and social order.