nd the apostle alone,
needs to be free.

If before long sickly minds fancied that they interpreted his thought in
making the union of the sexes an evil, and all that concerns the
physical activity of man a fall; if unbalanced spirits borrowed the
authority of his name to escape from all duty; if married persons
condemned themselves to the senseless martyrdom of virginity, he should
certainly not be made responsible. These traces of an unnatural
asceticism come from the dualist ideas of the Catharists, and not from
the inspired poet who sang nature and her fecundity, who made nests for
doves, inviting them to multiply under the watch of God, and who imposed
manual labor on his friars as a sacred duty.

The bases of the corporation of the _Brothers and Sisters of Penitence_
were very simple. Francis gave no new doctrine to the world; what was
new in his message was wholly in his love, in his direct call to the
evangelical life, to an ideal of moral vigor, of labor, and of love.

Naturally, there were soon found men who did not understand this true
and simple beauty; they fell into observances and devotions, imitated,
while living in the world, the life of the cloister to which for one
reason or another they were not able to retire; but it would be unjust
to picture to ourselves the _Brothers of Penitence_ as modelled after
them.

Did they receive a Rule from St. Francis? It is impossible to say. The
one which was given[20] them in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV. is simply the
recasting and amalgamation of all the rules of lay fraternities which
existed at the end of the thirteenth century. To attribute this document
to Francis is nothing less than the placing in a new building of certain
venerated stones from an ancient edifice. It is a matter of facade and
ornamentation, nothing more.

Notwithstanding this absence of any Rule emanating from Francis himself,
it is clear enough what, in his estimation, this association ought to
be. The Gospel, with its counsels and examples, was to be its true Rule.
The great innovation designed by the Third Order was concord; this
fraternity was a union of peace, and it brought to astonished Europe a
new truce of God. Whether the absolute refusal to carry arms[21] was an
idea wholly chimerical and ephemeral, the documents are there to prove,
but it is a fine thing to have had the power to bring it about for a few
years.

The second essential obligation of the Brothers of Penitence appear