Thus the whole creation poured into the Soul of Francis an unceasing stream of spiritual life, and with the inflowing life came joy--joy unutterable; and sorrow too. For life as it is, has no joy altogether separate from pain. There is tragedy in the purest romance, death even where there is life. And so the “joyous troubadour of God” sorrowed much because of the shadow that lay across the sunshine. To him personally life was joy, such was his liberty of spirit; but it was not so to all men. Many are they to whom life is sorrow; they walk as in a dark valley with but the twilight around them; nay, at times with no light at all, but only darkness, and their souls are starved for lack of light and warmth; even when in their ignorance or despair they seek pleasure in the immediate objects of sense around them. For these he sorrowed with the sorrow of Christ weeping over Jerusalem. It was a sorrow which kept him at long vigils when the world lay asleep, praying for mercy for the souls of men. Yet this sorrow could not destroy the essential joy of life which was his in a super-eminent degree. He sorrowed as many a man and woman sorrows over a friend who is deprived of the happiness which is their own. Truly was Francis a “King and heir of the Kingdom,” if Kingship means sovereign possession; for he found what is best in life and had it as his own, nought else than the very joy of life. Francis himself has told us how this joy of life came to him with the absolute renunciation of what the world at large holds most dear--wealth, place, and power. In renunciation he found spiritual freedom, and with it joy. No man is truly joyous whose joy does not spring from his own soul, or from that inalienable possession of the world which comes of spiritual communion with what is good and true in it, and therefore Eternal. The joy which is dependent upon the possession of the merely visible and material can never reach the inmost spirit of man, even were such possession not, at best, uncertain and of its nature transitory. Nay, the joy of life, which springs from man’s own spirit, is impossible to him whose heart is set upon the merely external world. For the spiritual and the material are in the immediate aspect a simple antithesis; so that where the one is, the other cannot be. “You cannot serve God and mammon.” You cannot satisfy your nature with the transitory, and yet retain an appetite for the Eternal. Consequently, he who would be free and retain a relish for the life of the Spirit, must beware of the lust of the earth, and keep a detached heart towards what is of its nature unspiritual.