y other cases, that
St Francis was compared by his disciples to our Saviour. Thus, in a work
published by the Father Bartholomeus of Pisa, and entitled "The Golden
Book of the Conformities of the Life of St Francis with that of Jesus
Christ,"(74) the author maintains that the birth of St Francis was
announced by prophets; that he had twelve disciples, one of whom, called
John Capella, was rejected by him, like Judas Iscariot by our Lord; that
he had been tempted by the devil, but without success; that he was
transfigured; that he had suffered the same passion as our Saviour, though
he never was subject to any persecution or ill-usage, but died quietly, in
1218, amidst his devoted admirers. Other writers pushed even farther the
blasphemous comparison, boasting that St Francis had performed many more
miracles than our Lord, because Christ changed water into wine but once,
whilst St Francis did it thrice; and that instead of the few miraculous
cures mentioned in the Gospels, St Francis and his disciples had opened
the eyes of more than a thousand blind, cured more than a thousand lame,
and restored to life more than a thousand dead.

The greatest miracle, however, that has ever been wrought by St Francis
has taken place in our own days, and its authenticity admits of no doubt
whatever. It is a life of this famous saint, published by M. Chavin de
Malan; and my readers may form an adequate idea of its contents by the
following extract from an admirable article in the "Edinburgh Review" for
July 1847:--"Though amongst the most passionate and uncompromising devotees
of the Church of Rome, M. Chavin de Malan also is in one sense a
Protestant. He protests against any exercise of human reason in examining
any dogma which that church inculcates, or any fact which she alleges. The
most merciless of her cruelties affect him with no indignation, the
silliest of her prodigies with no shame, the basest of her superstitions
with no contempt. Her veriest dotage is venerable in his eyes. Even the
atrocities of Innocent III. seem to this all-extolling eulogist but to
augment the triumph and the glories of his reign. If the soul of the
confessor of Simon de Montfort, retaining all the passions and all the
prejudices of that era, should transmigrate into a doctor of the Sorbonne,
conversant with the arts and literature of our own times, the result might
be the production of such an ecclesiastical history as that of which we
have here a specim