From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his “Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies such as the Manichean. It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian and a child of his time, it is not surprising that he sometimes seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister, to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but “our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s warders.”