HERE ENDETH THE TREATISE CONCERNING THE LADY POVERTY AND OUR SERAPHIC FATHER, THE BLESSED FRANCIS. This Work was done in the Month of July, after the Death of the Blessed Francis, in the Year One thousand two hundred and twenty-seven after the Incarnation of OUR LORD and SAVIOUR, JESUS CHRIST. ON THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EVANGELICAL POVERTY BY FATHER CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C. THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EVANGELICAL POVERTY “This is the sublimity of most high Poverty which has made you, beloved brethren, heirs and kings of the Kingdom of Heaven.”[27] Thus wrote St Francis of Assisi when he gave his disciples the Rule which obliged them to “serve the Lord in poverty and humility.” It is easy to recognise in these words the note of exultation and achievement which made St Francis the most inspiring personality in Mediæval Christendom, and which gives to his name, even to-day, a singular power over the imagination of the Christian World. Clad in his peasant’s dress, and with no possessions of his own in the world save his soul and body,[28] he is nevertheless the man rich in all things that are of vital interest, the clear spiritual vision, the perfect joy, the encompassing sympathy, which gathers all palpitating life into its own. Francis _lived_, if ever a man lived. His was the liberty of soul which finds the joy of life in all Creation. Artificial stimulus and transient excitement could add nought to the Joy that was his. To him the sky and the earth, the sun and the flowers, the fields and all living things, spoke with articulate speech of the life that is in them. As for his fellow-men, their life was his life. He had come to pass beyond the bounds of his own personality, and to enter into that spiritual communion with all living things, whereby man escapes from his own limitations, and the world lives in him as he in the world. And above all, and yet in all, he beheld the ever blessed God, the Author of all life that is. To Francis, God was ever present in the Creation, the Life behind all life. “The Heavens show forth the Glory of God, and the Firmament declareth the Work of His Hands.” The intimate relationship binding creation to its Creator was to him an abiding perception; he could not think of Earth apart from Heaven, nor of finite man apart from the Infinite God. Whatever was good and beautiful was to him an indication of the Divine Goodness and Beauty, a portal of the Eternal Kingdom; and with keen spiritual intuition he discovered the good and the beautiful, where men of lesser sensibility would only find the commonplace and the material. “To them that love God, all things work together unto Good;”[29] the truly spiritual man discovers the imprint of the Divine Life along all the highways and byways of Creation: just as the poet’s eye discovers beauty in the woodland through which the ordinary wayfarer passes unheeding.