ld get to heaven, and attacked the practice
of almsgiving as something utterly immoral.

The relation between these teachers and the Orders of friars has never
been adequately investigated. We know that the Dominicans and
Franciscans were from their earliest institution sent against them, and
must therefore have been well acquainted with their errors. And, as a
fact, we find rising among the friars a party which seemed no little
infected with the "spiritual" tendency of these very Vaudois. The
Franciscan reverence for poverty, which the Poor Man of Assisi had so
strenuously advocated, had in fact become almost a superstition. Instead
of being, as the saint had intended it to be, merely a means to an end,
it had in process of time become looked upon as the essential of
religion. When, therefore, the excessive adoption of it made religious
life an almost impossible thing, an influential party among the
Franciscans endeavoured to have certain modifications made which should
limit it within reasonable bounds. But opposed to them was a determined,
resolute minority, which vigorously refused to have any part in such
"relaxations." The dispute between these two branches of the Order
became at last so tempestuous that it was carried to the Pope, who
appointed a commission of cardinals and theologians to adjudicate on the
rival theories. Their award was naturally in favour of those who, by
their reasonable interpretation of the meaning of poverty, were fighting
for the efficiency of their Order. But this drove the extreme party into
still further extremes. They rejected at once all papal right to
interfere with the constitutions of the friars, and declared that only
St. Francis could undo what St. Francis himself had bound up. Nor was
this all, for in the pursuance of their zeal for poverty they passed
quickly from denunciations of the Pope and the wealthy clergy (in which
their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract
reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property.
The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods
of argument make wearisome and irritating reading. Most are exceedingly
prolix. After pages of profound disquisitions, the conclusions reached
seem to have advanced the problem no further. Yet the gist of the whole
is certainly an attempt to deny to any Christian the right to temporal
possessions. Michael of Cesena, the most logical and most effectiv