In the lifetime of their founders the fundamental laws of poverty were observed in all their intended purity. But soon thereafter, being men under their rough habits, and susceptible to the ambition that is man’s, upon the acquisition of power followed the acquisition of wealth. Their founders had accomplished a renascence of the original spirit of Christianity. But soon this began to undergo modification, and to respond to worldly influences, until the history of the friars-mendicant repeats and mirrors the history of Christianity itself. In a measure as they spread through Christendom, so they acquired convents, lands, and property as they went. The personal poverty of each brother remained, it is true; they still went abroad barefoot and coarsely garbed, “without staff, or bag, or bread, or money,” as their rule decreed. Individually they kept the vow of privation; but considered collectively their poverty “remained outside the convent gate,” as Gregorovius says, echoing what Dante had said before him.[17] For the service of the Church the friars-mendicant became a splendid army, and an army, moreover, whose maintenance made no draught upon the pontifical treasury, since, by virtue of their mendicancy, the orders were entirely self-supporting. And whilst both orders, magnificently organized, grew extremely powerful, the Dominicans became formidable through their control of that Inquisition whose early stirrings had inspired St. Dominic to his task. His aim had been to found a preaching order whose special mission should be the overthrow of heresy wherever found. The brethren were to combat it, employing their eloquence on the one hand to induce the heretic to abjure his error, on the other to inflame the faithful against him, so that terror should accomplish what might not be possible to persuasion. It may be that this mission which they had made specially their own, as their founder ordained, peculiarly fitted the Dominicans to assume the government of an ecclesiastical establishment whose aim was identical. It was this order of St. Dominic that was to erect the grim edifice of the Holy Office, and to develop and assume entire control of the terrible machinery of the Inquisition. Their persuasion was to be the ghastly persuasion of the rack; their eloquence was to be the burning eloquence of the tongues of material flame that should lick their agonizing victims out of existence. And all for the love of Christ! * * * * * Although it might be difficult to show--as has been attempted--that Domingo de Guzman himself was actually the first ordained Inquisitor, nevertheless as early as 1224, within three years of his death, the Inquisition in Italy and elsewhere was already entirely in the hands of the Dominicans. This is shown by a constitution promulgated at Padua in February of that year by the Emperor Frederic II. It contains the following announcement: