ever regarded
with disdain or disgust the poverty of the mendicant orders, adopted
for the sake of Christ; but in all parts of the world took them into
the kindly arms of our compassion, allured them by the most friendly
familiarity into devotion to ourselves, and having so allured them
cherished them with munificent liberality of beneficence for the sake
of God, becoming benefactors of all of them in general in such wise
that we seemed none the less to have adopted certain individuals with a
special fatherly affection. To these men we were as a refuge in every
case of need, and never refused to them the shelter of our favour,
wherefore we deserved to find them most special furtherers of our
wishes and promoters thereof in act and deed, who compassing land and
sea, traversing the circuit of the world, and ransacking the
universities and high schools of various provinces, were zealous in
combatting for our desires, in the sure and certain hope of reward.
What leveret could escape amidst so many keen-sighted hunters? What
little fish could evade in turn their hooks and nets and snares? From
the body of the Sacred Law down to the booklet containing the fallacies
of yesterday, nothing could escape these searchers. Was some devout
discourse uttered at the fountain-head of Christian faith, the holy
Roman Curia, or was some strange question ventilated with novel
arguments; did the solidity of Paris, which is now more zealous in the
study of antiquity than in the subtle investigation of truth, did
English subtlety, which illumined by the lights of former times is
always sending forth fresh rays of truth, produce anything to the
advancement of science or the declaration of the faith, this was
instantly poured still fresh into our ears, ungarbled by any babbler,
unmutilated by any trifler, but passing straight from the purest of
wine-presses into the vats of our memory to be clarified.

But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the cities and places
where the mendicants we have mentioned had their convents, we did not
disdain to visit their libraries and any other repositories of books;
nay, there we found heaped up amid the utmost poverty the utmost riches
of wisdom. We discovered in their fardels and baskets not only crumbs
falling from the masters' table for the dogs, but the shewbread without
leaven and the bread of angels having in it all that is delicious; and
indeed the garners of Joseph full of corn, and all t