Out of all these evils and sufferings was born, like a sweet flower on a heap of rubbish, the Spirit of modern Charity.
The Church had taken over to herself the whole of Mediæval charity. Did a citizen desire to help the poor, he gave money for the purpose to the Church. If a poor man wanted help, it was not to a merchant that he went, but to a monastery.
For charity, that is, for pity, for almsgiving, the world has always felt the most profound respect. The most popular of mediæval saints was the hard and austere Bishop of whom the world remembered that he had once divided his cloak with a beggar. There were six churches dedicated to St. Martin in the City of London alone.
And when the friars first came over, and men, wondering, saw that they did not lock themselves up in their cloister to pray for the world like the other Religious, but that they went about among the people ministering, comforting, preaching, consoling; that they found no den too revolting, no disease too loathsome, no criminal too base, for their ministrations; then, indeed, there was an outburst of gratitude, of joy, of respect, of awe for men so saintly. They were considered the veritable children of God.
But it was not to be thought that the poor sinners outside the monastery should imitate their example. Nay, St. Francis, their founder, had himself separated his Order from the world, they were called out from the rest of humanity, they were kept separate by vows of celibacy, poverty, obedience. Modern charity as yet did not exist, as we now understand it, only the respect for charity as an ecclesiastical institution.
I believe that the early followers of St. Francis perceived the weak point of this separation from the world. We can hear one wiser than the rest saying, “There is danger that the early zeal may decline. All things human have in them the germs of decay; if there comes a time when our brethren shrink from the task they have undertaken, if their vows become a sham, their prayers a form, their work a pretence and a profession, then it would have been better for the world had St. Francis never existed, because we shall have taken from the layman the duty of personal service and killed it by our own neglect.”