Perhaps the most winsome and Christ-like figure that Roman Catholicism presents, the loveliest flower in her rich garden of sainthood, is the poverty-loving, utterly lowly and loving, care-free and joyous Francis of Assisi, and perhaps, too, it may be said that no Christian character better deserves the study of Protestants. St. Francis is not an ideal figure; he lacks the balance and sanity of Jesus. Yet, perhaps, of all who have passionately set themselves to reproduce the life of Jesus, St. Francis in his utter humility, his complete unworldliness, and his overflowing tenderness can best bring home to Protestantism its hardness and shrewdness, its worldly-wisdom and its self-complacency. What a far-distant world is the world of the man who renounced all possessions, went about to preach and serve in coarsest, meagrest garb, who despised money and loved poverty, whose sympathies went out to birds and fishes, to Brother Fire and Sister Water, who could captivate robbers and even, it was believed, wild creatures of the woods, and at whose coming the Umbrian cities rang their bells and poured out with branches and flags to greet the mean little man with the shabby grey gown and the rapt, pale, worn face. Let it be granted Protestant countries are more wealthy than Roman Catholic, more progressive, more successful in trade and manufacture, St. Francis gives us a glimpse into the simplicity and childlikeness, humility and romance, that may sometimes find a Roman Catholic atmosphere more genial than a Protestant. Associated with the Franciscan order of tonsured monks and cloistered nuns, there grew up a great society of men and women taking a middle path between the world and the cloister--plainer in dress, abstaining from the dance and the theatre, eschewing all quarrels, praying and fasting more regularly, practising a more systematic beneficence than ordinary Christians. And it is noteworthy that, in 1882 on the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Francis, Pope Leo XIII. in an encyclical declared that the institution of these Franciscan Tertiaries was alone fitted to save humanity from the social and political dangers which threatened it. Wesley and Francis are not far removed. The Saint of Epworth was almost as ardent a devotee of poverty as the Saint of Assisi. If he did not absolutely strip himself, he gave away immensely more. He, too, had a passion for the souls of men, all of St. Francis’ pity for the poor, and he won a wealth of reverence and love. He was a far wiser man, living in a more rational age. But he was not only extraordinarily competent. He knew, too, his own competence. There is a wildflower grace of the childlike in St. Francis that we miss in the far more intelligent and commanding figure of Wesley.