usade as
victoriously as she came out of her struggle with Provence.

St. Francis regarded science with indifference. "Every demon," he said,
"has more scientific knowledge than all men on earth put together. But
there is something a demon is incapable of, and in it lies the glory of
man. A man can be faithful to God." With those words he had inwardly
overcome tradition and theology, and direct knowledge of the divine had
dawned in his soul. He even forbade his brethren to own copies of the
Scriptures. God in the heart--that was the core of his doctrine. With
all his wonderful intuition he was absolutely innocent of the pride of
ignorance; he really felt himself smaller than the smallest of
men--unlike the bishops and popes who called themselves the servants of
the servants of God, without attaching the least meaning to it. How
characteristic of his simple mind was his passionate insistence on the
respectful handling of the vessels used at holy Mass, because they were
destined to receive the body of the Lord. And yet he hardly knew
anything of the symbolic transmutation of bread and wine--he accepted
the miracle without a thought, like a child.

In the year 1219, St. Francis took part in a Crusade. While the battle
of Damietta was raging, he went into the camp of the Saracens and
preached before the Sultan, who received him with respect and sent him
back unharmed. According to the legend, he then went to Bethlehem and
Jerusalem, where the Sultan, touched by his personality, gave him access
to the sacred shrines. To Francis this pilgrimage to the Holy Land had a
profound meaning, for to him Christianity meant the imitation of Christ.

Although he lived on bread himself, and poverty was his chosen lady, he
regarded the asceticism of the early Middle Ages as futile and rejected
it. The fire of life burned in him so ardently that he gave no thought
to the morrow, and literally followed the admonition of the Gospels: "So
likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he
cannot be My disciple." We read in the _Fioretti_ (perhaps the oldest
popular collection of poems in existence) that he expressly prohibited
asceticism as a principle; an idea too foreign to the spirit of the age
to have been an invention. He also disapproved of the secluded monastic
life, then the universal ideal of the _vita contemplativa_, and
insisted on his followers living in the world, radiating love and
sustaining life by the