“THERE was a man in the city of Assisi, by name Francis, whose memory is blessed, for that God, graciously presenting him with blessings of goodness, delivered him in His mercy from the perils of this present life, and abundantly filled him with the gifts of heavenly grace.”

So speaks Saint Bonaventura of the noble character of the holy man of Assisi, whose figure arises before us as we tread the streets of the town of his birth. For Assisi is a place of pilgrimage, filled with fragrant memories of that saint of whom even the heterodox speak with loving reverence. St Francis stands distinct in an age of fanatic religious zeal, as an example of tolerance, a lover of mercy, and a practical follower of the teaching of Christian benevolence.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III. offered indulgences to the faithful who would unite in a crusade against the Albigensian heretics of Languedoc. For twenty years blood was shed plentifully in this war upon heresy; for twenty years the hounds of persecution were let loose on the hated enemies of papal absolutism. “Kill all; God will know,” was the answer of the Pope’s legate during this massacre, when asked by the crusaders how they could recognise the heretics. While Languedoc and Provence were ravaged by the truculent persecutors, and fires were lighted to burn the bodies of men, women and children, St Francis lived in Assisi, preaching humanity and good will. There is no testimony that he protested expressly against the Albigensian crusades; but we know from his life and his writings that he detested cruelty and violence, and never directly counselled persecution.

In “The Golden Legend” we read that “Francis, servant and friend of Almighty God, was born in the city of Assisi, and was made a merchant in the twenty-fifth year of his age, and wasted his time by living vainly, whom our Lord corrected by the scourge of sickness, and suddenly changed him into another man, so that he began to shine by the spirit of prophecy.”

Putting on the rags of a beggar, St Francis went to Rome, where he sat among the mendicants before St Peter’s. Then began the miraculous cures of lepers whose hands he kissed, and his many works of charity and healing. He extolled “holy poverty,” and called poverty his “lady.” When he saw a worm lying on the path, the compassionate saint removed it, so that it should not be trodden on by passers-by. The birds he called his brothers and sisters; he fed them, bade them sing or keep silence, and they obeyed him. All birds and beasts loved him; and he taught the birds to sing praises to their creator. St Francis was perhaps the first eminent Christian who showed pity and love for the lower animals. In the morass of Venice, he came upon a great company of singing-birds, and entering among them, caused them to sing lauds to the Almighty.

St Francis taught asceticism to his followers, but it was the asceticism of joy rather than of grief and pain. The saint had in him the qualities of poet and artist as well as of pious mystic. He lived for a time the life of the luxurious, and found it profitless and hollow; he passed through the ordeal of the temptations that beset a young man born of wealthy parents.

“The more thou art assailed by temptations, the more do I love thee,” said the blessed St Francis to his friend Leo. “Verily I say unto thee that no man should deem himself a true friend of God, save in so far as he hath passed through many temptations and tribulations.”

Flung into the prison of Perugia, he rejoiced and sang, and when the vulgar threw dirt upon him and his friars, he did not resent their rudeness.

Trudging bare-footed through Umbria, scantily clothed, and subsisting upon crusts offered by the charitable, St Francis set an example of the holiness of poverty which impressed the peasants and excited their veneration for the preacher and his gospel.

He worked as a mason, repairing the decayed Church of St Damian, and preached a doctrine of labour and industry, forsaking all that he had so that he might reap the ample harvest of Divine blessing. In winter the saint would plunge into a ditch of snow, that he might check the promptings of carnal desire. He refused to live under a roof at Assisi, preferring a mere shelter of boughs, with the company of Brother Giles and Brother Bernard. A cell of wood was too sumptuous for him.

As St Francis grew in holiness there appeared in him the stigmata of Christ’s martyrdom. In his side there was the wound of the spear; in his hands and feet were the marks of the nails. St Bonaventura relates that after his death, the flesh of the saint was so soft that he seemed to have become a child again, and that the wound in the side was like a lovely rose.

He died, according to this historian, in 1226, on the fourth day of October. His remains were interred in Assisi, and afterwards removed to “the Church built in his honour,” in 1230.

After the canonisation of the holy St Francis many miracles happened in Italy. In the church of his name in Assisi, when the Bishop of Ostia was preaching, a huge stone fell on the head of a devout woman. It was thought that she was dead, but being before the altar of St Francis, and having “committed herself in faith” to him, she escaped without any hurt. Many persons were cured of disease by calling upon the blessed name of the Saint of Assisi, and mariners were often saved from wrecks through his intervention.

St Francis lived when the fourth Lateran Council gave a new impetus to persecution, by increasing the scope and power of the inquisition. This gentlest of all the saints was surrounded by a host of influences that made for religious rancour, and yet he preached a doctrine of love, and was, so far as we can learn, quite untouched by the persecuting zeal that characterised so many of his sainted contemporaries. It is with relief, after the contemplation of the cruelty of his age, that we greet the tattered ascetic of Assisi, as, in imagination, we see him pass up the steps of the house wherein Brother Bernard was a witness of his ecstasy.

The little city of Assisi stands on a hill; a mediÆval town of a somewhat stern character meets the eye as we approach it. Outside the town is a sixteenth-century church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, which will interest by reason of the Portinucula, a little chapel repaired by St Francis. It was around this church that the first followers of the saint lived in hovels with wattled roofs. Here was the garden in which the holy brother delighted to wander, and to watch his kindred the birds, and here are the rose bushes without thorns, that grew from the saint’s blood.

Entering Assisi, we soon reach the Church of San Francisco, in which is the reputed tomb of St Francis. This is not a striking edifice, but its charm is in the pictures of Giotto. Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience are the subjects of these frescoes. Ruskin copied the Poverty, and made a long study of these works. The picture symbolises the Lady of Poverty, the bride of St Francis, who is given to him by Christ. This is one of Giotto’s chief pictures. Chastity is a young woman in a castle; she is worshipped by angels, and the walls of the fortress are surrounded by men in armour. In another fresco St Francis is dressed in canonical garb, attended by angels, who sing praise to him. It is said that Dante suggested this subject to Giotto.

The frescoes of Simone, in a chapel of the lower church, are of much interest to the art student. They are richly coloured and very decorative, and have been considered by some authorities as equal to the works of Giotto at Assisi. Simone was a painter of the Sienese School, and according to Vasari, he was taught by Giotto. His “Annunciation” is a rich work, preserved in the Uffizi Palace at Florence.

The twenty-eight scenes in the history of St Francis are in the upper church, and in these we see again Giotto’s noblest art in the harmonious grouping and the fluidity of his colour.

The Cathedral of San Rufino is a handsome church. Here St Francis was baptised, and in this edifice he preached.

The father of the saint was a woollen merchant, and his shop was in the Via Portica. The house still stands, and may be recognised by its highly decorated portal. This was not the birthplace of St Francis, for the Chiesa Nuova, built in 1615, covers the site of the house.

In the Church of St Clare you are shown the “remains” of Saint Clare, in a crypt, lying in a glass case.

When Goethe was in Assisi, the building that interested him more than any other was the Temple of Minerva, built in the time of Augustus.

“At last we reached what is properly the old town, and behold before my eyes stood the noble edifice, the first complete memorial of antiquity that I had ever seen.... Looking at the faÇade, I could not sufficiently admire the genius-like identity of design which the architects have here as elsewhere maintained. The order is Corinthian, the inter-columnar spaces being somewhat above the two modules. The bases of the columns, and the plinths seem to rest on pedestals, but it is only an appearance.” Goethe concludes his description: “The impression which the sight of this edifice left upon me is not to be expressed, and will bring forth imperishable fruits.”