olly divine and entirely personal. The individual conscience
here proclaims its sovereign authority. "No one showed me what I ought
to do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I ought to live
conformably to his holy gospel."

When a man has once spoken thus, submission to the Church has been
singularly encroached upon. We may love her, hearken to her, venerate
her, but we feel ourselves, perhaps without daring to avow it, superior
to her. Let a critical hour come, and one finds himself heretic without
knowing it or wishing it.

"Ah, yes," cries Angelo Clareno, "St. Francis promised to obey the pope
and his successors, but they cannot and must not command anything
contrary to the conscience or to the Rule."[3]

For him, as for all the spiritual Franciscans, when there is conflict
between what the inward voice of God ordains and what the Church wills,
he has only to obey the former.[4]

If you tell him that the Church and the Order are there to define the
true signification of the Rule, he appeals to common sense, and to that
interior certitude which is given by a clear view of truth.

The Rule, as also the gospel, of which it is a summary, is above all
ecclesiastical power, and no one has the right to say the last word in
their interpretation.[5]

The Will was not slow to gain a moral authority superior even to that of
the Rule. Giovanni of Parma, to explain the predilection of the
Joachimites for this document, points out that after the impression of
the stigmata the Holy Spirit was in Francis with still greater plenitude
than before.[6]

Did the innumerable sects which disturbed the Church in the thirteenth
century perceive that these two writings--the Rule and the
Testament--the one apparently made to follow and support the other,
substantially identical as it was said, proceeded from two opposite
inspirations? Very confusedly, no doubt, but guided by a very sure
instinct, they saw in these pages the banner of liberty.

They were not mistaken. Even to-day, thinkers, moralists, mystics may
arrive at solutions very different from those of the Umbrian prophet,
but the method which they employ is his, and they may not refuse to
acknowledge in him the precursor of religious subjectivism.

The Church, too, was not mistaken. She immediately understood the spirit
that animated these pages.

Four years later, perhaps to the very day, September 28, 1230, Ugolini,
then Gregory IX., solemnly interpreted the R