on his brother the Wind, and his sister the Water. His
last faint cry was a "Welcome, Sister Death!" Strangely as the two men
differed from each other, their aim was the same--to convert the heathen,
to extirpate heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, above all to
carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was to be done by an utter reversal
of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort for the
salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary of the cloister
for the preacher, the monk for the "brother" or friar. To force the new
"brethren" into entire dependence on those among whom they laboured their
vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality; the "Begging Friars" were
to subsist solely on alms, they might possess neither money nor lands, the
very houses in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by
others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance
swept before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders,
the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered
in a few years round Francis and Dominic; and the begging preachers, clad
in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of rope round their waist, wandered
barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and
Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor.

[Sidenote: The Friars and the Towns]

To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious
revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and most
ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his
fees. Burgher and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction
they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's ritual or the
scriptural pictures and sculptures which were graven on the walls of its
minsters. We can hardly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed
the itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story
brought religion into the fair and the market place. In England, where the
Black Friars of Dominic arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in
1224, both were received with the same delight. As the older orders had
chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at
Dover before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ignorance
of the road the first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between
Oxford and Baldon, and fear