eek: ptochos].]

We may see, in fact, without difficulty, that this exaggerated taste
for poverty could not be very lasting. It was one of those Utopian
elements which always mingle in the origin of great movements, and
which time rectifies. Thrown into the centre of human society,
Christianity very easily consented to receive rich men into her bosom,
just as Buddhism, exclusively monkish in its origin, soon began, as
conversions multiplied, to admit the laity. But the mark of origin is
ever preserved. Although it quickly passed away and became forgotten,
_Ebionism_ left a leaven in the whole history of Christian
institutions which has not been lost. The collection of the _Logia_,
or discourses of Jesus, was formed in the Ebionitish centre of
Batanea.[1] "Poverty" remained an ideal from which the true followers
of Jesus were never after separated. To possess nothing was the truly
evangelical state; mendicancy became a virtue, a holy condition. The
great Umbrian movement of the thirteenth century, which, among all the
attempts at religious construction, most resembles the Galilean
movement, took place entirely in the name of poverty. Francis
d'Assisi, the man who, more than any other, by his exquisite goodness,
by his delicate, pure, and tender intercourse with universal life,
most resembled Jesus, was a poor man. The mendicant orders, the
innumerable communistic sects of the middle ages (_Pauvres de Lyon_,
_Begards_, _Bons-Hommes_, _Fratricelles_, _Humilies_, _Pauvres
evangeliques_, &c.) grouped under the banner of the "Everlasting
Gospel," pretended to be, and in fact were, the true disciples of
Jesus. But even in this case the most impracticable dreams of the new
religion were fruitful in results. Pious mendicity, so impatiently
borne by our industrial and well-organized communities, was in its
day, and in a suitable climate, full of charm. It offered to a
multitude of mild and contemplative souls the only condition suited to
them. To have made poverty an object of love and desire, to have
raised the beggar to the altar, and to have sanctified the coat of the
poor man, was a master-stroke which political economy may not
appreciate, but in the presence of which the true moralist cannot
remain indifferent. Humanity, in order to bear its burdens, needs to
believe that it is not paid entirely by wages. The greatest service
which can be rendered to it is to repeat often that it lives not by
bread alone.

[Footnote 1: Ep