In 1656 William of St. Amour sent the Pope his treatise _Concerning the Dangers of these Last Times_ (_De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum_), in which he pleaded the cause of the university against the Mendicants, and told some home-truths about the greediness, the lawlessness, and the encroachments of the friars, but in an angry and excited tone, which harmed his cause. Both the assailed orders put forward their ablest men to make answer. For the Franciscans spoke John Fidanza, better known as John Bonaventura, who had come to Paris in the heat of the conflict, and had been delayed, as Thomas was, in obtaining his degree. John was older than Thomas by several years, having been born in 1221. He had been recovered from an apparently mortal illness through the prayers of Francis of Assisi in his third year, and then received the name Bonaventura from the good man’s own lips. He entered the order in his twenty-second year, and studied in Paris under Alexander of Hales and John of Rochelle. The devout humility of the man, and his purity of character, produced as deep an impression upon his teachers as Thomas had produced upon his by the force and keenness of his intellect. Alexander used to say that “in Brother Bonaventura Adam seems not to have sinned.” John was probably the most perfect exemplar of the spirit of Francis of Assisi that was to be seen in the second generation of the order. Not by intellectual force, but by humble ministry to the commonest human needs, by the infection of an all-embracing love and the close imitation of our Lord’s humanity, he would save the world from its wanderings. Thomas and he were the best possible representatives of their respective orders, and it speaks well for both men that their differences only bound them more intimately in friendship. Each reverenced what was strongest in the other. When Thomas asked to see the books by whose help John had acquired his Christian erudition, the Franciscan pointed him to a crucifix, and said that from that he had learned all that he ever knew.