d at your hermitage benumbed with cold
and hunger. If you read these lines, read here my gratitude and also a
little admiration. You are not all saints, but nearly all of you have
hours of saintliness, flights of pure love.

If some pages of this book give you pain, turn them over quickly; let me
think that others of them will give you pleasure, and will make the name
you bear, if possible, still more precious to you than it now is.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The mendicant orders were in their origin a true
_International_. When in the spring of 1216 St. Dominic
assembled his friars at Notre Dame de la Prouille, they were
found to be sixteen in number, and among them Castilians,
Navarese, Normans, French, Languedocians, and even English and
Germans.

Heretics travelled all over Europe, and nowhere do we find them
checked by the diversity of languages. Arnold of Brescia, for
example, the famous Tribune of Rome, appeared in France and
Switzerland and in the heart of Germany.

[2] The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book
for that of the priest; it is a change of dynasty and nothing
more. As to the majority of those who to-day call themselves
free-thinkers, they confuse religious freedom with irreligion;
they choose not to see that in religion as in politics, between
a royalty based on divine right and anarchy there is room for a
government which may be as strong as the first and a better
guarantee of freedom than the second. The spirit of the older
time put God outside of the world; the sovereignty outside of
the people; authority outside of the conscience. The spirit of
the new times has the contrary tendency: it denies neither God
nor sovereignty nor authority, but it sees them where they
really are.

[3] _Nemo ostendebat mihi quod deberem facere, sed ipse
Altissimus revelavit mihi quod deberem vivere secundem formam
sancti Evangelii._ Testamentum Fr.

[4] The wealthiest monasteries of France are of the twelfth
century or were enlarged at that time: Arles, S. Gilles, S.
Sernin, Cluny, Vezelay, Brioude, Issoire, Paray-le-Monial. The
same was the case in Italy.

Down to the year 1000, 1,108 monasteries had been founded in
France. The eleventh century saw the birth of 326 and the
twelfth of 7