s
as uttering the Sermon on the Mount all at one time. In the same way, in
the narratives concerning the relations between St. Francis and Ugolini,
we find ourselves every moment shut up in no-thoroughfares, coming up
against contradictory indications, just so long as we try to refer
everything to two or three meetings, as we are at first led to do.

With a simple act of analysis these difficulties disappear and we find
each of the different narratives bringing us fragments which, being
pieced together, furnish an organic story, living, psychologically true.

From the moment at which we have now arrived, we must make a much larger
place for Ugolini than in the past; the struggle has definitively opened
between the Franciscan ideal--chimerical, perhaps, but sublime--and the
ecclesiastical policy, to go on until the day when, half in humility,
half in discouragement, Francis, heartsick, abdicates the direction of
his spiritual family.

Ugolini returned to Rome at the end of 1217. During the following winter
his countersign is found at the bottom of the most important bulls;[32]
he devoted this time to the special study of the question of the new
orders, and summoned Francis before him. We have seen with what
frankness he had declared to him at Florence that many of the prelates
would do anything to discredit him with the pope.[33] It is evident the
success of the Order, its methods, which in spite of all protestations
to the contrary seemed to savor of heresy, the independence of Francis,
who had scattered his friars in all the four corners of the globe
without trying to gain a confirmation of the verbal and entirely
provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.--all these
things were calculated to startle the clergy.

Ugolini, who better than any one else knew Umbria, Tuscany, Emilia, the
March of Ancona, all those regions where the Franciscan preaching had
been most successful, was able by himself to judge of the power of the
new movement and the imperious necessity of directing it; he felt that
the best way to allay the prejudices which the pope and the sacred
college might have against Francis was to present him before the curia.

Francis was at first much abashed at the thought of preaching before the
Vicar of Jesus Christ, but upon the entreaties of his protector he
consented, and for greater security he learned by heart what he had to
say.

Ugolini himself was not entirely at ease as to the result o