The Coming of the Friars | Page 9

to
their missionary plans; they met with little favour, and vanished from
the scene. But they too declaimed against endowments--they too were
to live on alms. The Gospel of Poverty was "in the air."
In 1219 the Franciscans held their second general Chapter. It was
evident that they were taking the world by storm; evident, too, that their
astonishing success was due less to their preaching than to their
self-denying lives. It was abundantly plain that this vast army of fervent
missionaries could live from day to day and work wonders in
evangelizing the masses without owning a rood of land, or having
anything to depend upon but the perennial stream of bounty which
flowed from the gratitude of the converts. If the Preaching Friars were
to succeed at such a time as this, they could only hope to do so by
exhibiting as sublime a faith as the Minorites displayed to the world.
Accordingly, in the very year after the second
Chapter of
the Franciscans was held at Assisi, a general
Chapter of
the Dominicans was held at Bologna, and there the profession of
poverty was formally adopted, and the renunciation of all means of
support, except such as might be offered from day to day, was insisted
on. Henceforth the two orders were to labour side by side in
magnificent rivalry--mendicants who went forth like Gideon's host with
empty pitchers to fight the battles of the Lord, and whose desires, as far
as the good things of this world went, were summed up in the simple
petition, "Give us this day our daily bread!"
* * * * * * *
Thus far the friars had scarcely been heard of in England. The
Dominicans--trained men of education, addressing themselves mainly
to the educated classes, and sure of being understood wherever Latin,
the universal medium of communication among scholars, was in daily

and hourly use--the Dominicans could have little or no difficulty in
getting an audience such as they were qualified to address. It was
otherwise with the Franciscans. If the world was to be divided between
these two great bands, obviously the Minorites' sphere of labour must
be mainly among the lowest, that of the Preaching Friars among the
cultured classes.
When the Minorites preached among Italians or Frenchmen they were
received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the
people; and in the vulgar speech of the people--rugged, plastic, and
reckless of grammar--the message came as glad tidings of great joy.
When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they
signally failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any rate,
was denied, even to such faith as theirs. They were met with ridicule.
The rabble of Cologne or Bremen, hoarsely grumbling out their grating
gutturals, were not to be moved by the most impassioned pleading of
angels in human form, soft though their voices might be, and musical
their tones. "Ach Himmel! was sagt er?" growled one. And
peradventure some well-meaning interpreter replied: "Zu suchen und
selig zu machen." When the Italian tried to repeat the words his
utterance, not his faith, collapsed! The German-speaking people must
wait till a door should be opened. Must England wait too? Yes! For the
Franciscan missionaries England too must wait a little while.
But England was exactly the land for the Dominican to turn to.
Unhappy England! Dominic was born in the same year that Thomas a
Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral; Francis in the year
before the judgment of the Most High began to fall upon the guilty king
and his accursed progeny. Since then everything seemed to have gone
wrong. The last six years of Henry the Second's reign were years of
piteous misery, shame, and bitterness. His two elder sons died in arms
against their father, the one childless, the other, Geoffrey, with a baby
boy never destined to arrive at manhood. The two younger ones were
Richard and John. History has no story more sad than that of the
wretched king, hard at death's door, compelled to submit to the
ferocious vindictiveness of the one son, and turning his face to the wall
with a broken heart when he discovered the hateful treachery of the
other. Ten years after this Richard died childless, and King John was
crowned--the falsest, meanest, worst, and wickedest king that ever sat

upon the throne of England. And now John himself was dead; and
"Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child!" for Henry the Third
was crowned, a boy just nine years old.
For eight years England had lain under the terrible interdict; for most of
the time only a single bishop had remained in England. John had small
need to tax the people: he lived upon the plunder of bishops