of my soul,
Cleanse my heart and make it whole.'

or in

'Holy Mary, Maid of Flowers,
Lead me to the Heavenly Bowers.'"

And Satan answered:

"Fra Giovanni, the Venetian ladies amuse their leisure and show their
adroitness in fitting a multitude of little pieces of ivory into a box
of cedar-wood, which at the set-off seemed all too small to contain so
many. In the same fashion I will pack ideas into your head that no one
would have dreamed it could ever hold; and I will fill you with a new
wisdom. I will show that, thinking to walk in the right way, you are
straying abroad all the while like a drunken man, and that you are
driving the plough without any heed to draw the furrows straight."

Fra Giovanni humbled himself, saying:

"It is most true I am a fool, and do nothing but what is wrong."

Then Satan asked him:

"What think you of poverty? "--and the holy man replied:

"I think it is a pearl of price."

But Satan retorted:

"You pretend poverty is a great good; yet all the while you are robbing
the poor of a part of this great good, by giving them alms."

Fra Giovanni pondered over this, and said:

"The alms I give, I give to Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose poverty cannot
be minished, for it is infinite. It gushes from Him as from an
inexhaustible fountain; and its waters flow freely for His favourite
sons. And these shall be poor always, according to the promise of the
Son of God. In giving to the poor, I am giving not to men, but to God,
as the citizens pay tax to the Podesta, and the rate is for the City,
which of the money it so receives supplies the town's needs. Now what I
give is for paving the City of God. It is a vain thing to be poor in
deed, if we be not poor in spirit. The gown of frieze, the cord, the
sandals, the wallet and the wooden bowl are only signs and symbols. The
Poverty I love is spiritual, and I address her as _Lady_, because she is
an idea, and all beauty resides in this same idea."

Satan smiled, and replied:

"Your maxims, Fra Giovanni, are the maxims of a wise man of Greece,
Diogenes by name, who taught at their Universities in the times when
Alexander of Macedon was waging his wars."

And Satan said again:

"Is it true you despise the goods of this world?"

And Fra Giovanni replied:

"I do despise them."

And Satan said to him:

"Look you! in scorning these, you are scorning at the same time the
hard-working men who produce them, and so doing, fulfil the or