So eccomi back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many years, and here is the same bland Franciscan—or his brother—to show me the same tiny monastery garden with the same rusty rose-bushes and tell me the same story of how its native thorns and briars turned into thornless roses with blood-specked leaves after St. Francis had rolled in them to subdue the flesh, and the same anecdote of the neophyte who refused to plant cabbages with their roots upward and was rejected by the saint as insufficiently simple and obedient, and I ask the same question as to the botanic results of planting cabbages topsy-turvy and receive the same beaming reassurance that they waxed to prize dimensions, while a blight fell on those whose roots had, with worldly-wise presumption, been planted in earth. And I am shown the same little hut which the saint occupied, with the same unnatural ecclesiastic vaulting and the same unnatural oratory above it, and I go again into the same Lilliputian church (twenty-two feet by thirteen) beloved of St. Francis, with its rude plaster and its wooden benches and its plain brass lamps, and receive the same shock at the thought of its asphyxiation beneath the giant grandeur of S. Maria of the Angels, that spreads over it like a golden eagle brooding a street sparrow. And from the door of this dear little Portiuncula I glean the same glad tidings that Pope Gregory XIII at the instance of the most illustrious Cardinal Sforza has conceded to every faithful Christian who will say (or pay for) a mass at its altar, the grace of liberating a soul from Purgatory. And I am given the same illuminated leaflet about St. Francis, with the same specimen of ensanguined rose-leaf—precisely like that which grows in my own garden—and I pay the same lira on the same spot where St. Francis, who called coins “flies,” had some of these pests, innocently offered by a worshipper, thrown out upon asses’ dung. The only change since my last visit is that a fig-tree has been planted “by request” in remembrance of the old tree in which Sister Grasshopper sang with the saint for eighty days.

And this “by request” is a vivid reminder that the Franciscan legend is flourishing more and more, like the topsy-turvy cabbage, and that shoals of pleasure-pilgrims, richly clad, come by carriage or motor to maunder over “the little poor man of Assisi,” to gloat upon the cord of his tunic, stored up in a cupboard, and to gain an appetite for lunch by rhapsodising over the cell in which he fasted. Yes, the lover of poverty and of the brute creation has brought a good deal of money to the little hill-town, and no small sum of labour and lashings to its horses, and it is not surprising that the region round the poor little abandoned church of S. Maria in Portiuncula has grown up in the last quarter of a century into a big suburb, with eating- and lodging-houses, or that the successors of the saint who in his horror of property tried to tear down the chapter-house built for him, and who left even his cell because somebody referred to it as St. Francis’s, have within the last ten years been able to enrich their vast basilica with three elaborate carven doors and an iron railing, not to mention the horrible modern fresco with six angels like ballet-girls hovering without the chapel where St. Francis died.

As I leave this musty S. Maria of the Angels and mount on this divine spring day towards the sunny hill-top where Assisi proper sits rock-hewn, with its towers, domes, and castles, and see beneath me the wonderful rolling Apennines, and the windings of white roads and silver streams, and around me the grey-green of olives and the bridal white of cherry-trees, and above me the cloud-galleons sailing in the great spaces of sky, a remark of the bland brother comes back to me with added significance. “We do not know where St. Francis’s heart is,” he said, grudgingly conceding that the rival church on high possessed his body. The fancy takes me, as I toil up to this tomb, that St. Francis’s heart refused to be buried in a church, is here out of doors, at one with the spring and the sunshine.

And even more symbolic sounds to me the bland brother’s boast that the colossal church built over the poor little Portiuncula is on the model of St. Peter’s. Canonisation is a process that normally lasts centuries; our King Alfred’s is not yet complete. But twenty months after his death Francesco Bernardone was hustled into formal saintship. The Pope crushed him by a loving embrace, and over his beloved doll’s house of a church was erected a copy of St. Peter’s! And far above, on the rival ridge of Assisi, as if to give a culminating irony to the symbolism, and as if one great church built over his body did not suffice to keep him down, a second church of S. Francesco has been built on the top of the first, and beneath these two churches, each supplied with its frescoed falsifications by the school of Giotto, the little brother of the poor who demanded only to lie among the criminals on the “Infernal Hill” was safely buried.

And yet not so safely but that his spirit has begun to penetrate through all the layers of stone and legend. Perhaps it has escaped through that portal of the upper church which, incautiously thrown open to illumine the painted miracles, tempers the austere gloom and the drone of ceaseless psalm-saying from below with a revealed greensward and a piping of birds. But one cannot imagine that his spirit has gone to occupy that large red throne between two yellow armchairs which the fresco depicts as the vision of his appointed seat in heaven, or that fiery chariot with which to bedazzle the brethren left behind. These twenty-eight wall frescoes, like the four triangular allegories on the ceiling below, hold little of the true St. Francis (notwithstanding that they are all drawn from Franciscan literature), and the least spiritual and the most mythical portions of the legend, the demons flying over Arezzo, or St. Francis hovering in the air while praying, figure on equal terms with his real activities, while the picture of his offering the Soldan the ordeal of fire is an imaginative amplification even of the literature. Setting aside all the fatuous monastic miracles, and the more tedious anecdotes of the Franciscan legend—and it must be remembered that the earliest dated manuscript of the Fioretti comes a hundred and sixty-four years after the death of St. Francis—we are yet able to extricate from it a kernel of personality sufficient to account for its genesis and growth, and it is this St. Francis who has at length burst through the three churches devoted to keeping him down and made his appeal to the modern mind. Yet the modern mind might easily misread itself into the mediÆval mystic.

Despite his marriage to Lady Poverty, St. Francis was far from a conscious rebel against the glories of the Vatican. He was too humble-minded to be anything but a meek acceptant of the established Church and the ruling ritual. But there was in his literal translation into life of the Sermon on the Mount, the germ of a dangerous schism—a germ which duly developed into a sect of “Spirituals” for whom the Gospel of Assisi was the Eternal Evangel destined to supersede the Christianity of the Vatican—and it is not an accident that his followers, despite their popularisation of the idea of Papal infallibility, gravitated more to the Ghibelline cause than to the Guelph, and were, later on, formally condemned as heretics by John XXII. This unstatesmanlike Pope was not only ignorant that persecution is the seed of the sect, but he undermined the doctrine of his own Papal infallibility by thus reversing the bull of Nicholas III confirming their order. He alleged that Nicholas had framed it without his Cardinals, but the more logical Minorite Brothers contended that the contradiction of his predecessors proved him no true Pope, but a usurper. John and his successors retorted with the Holy Inquisition, and the Franciscans were burnt in stacks or tortured to death in dungeons; “martyrs,” says DÖllinger, “to the doctrine of Papal infallibility and the rule of poverty.” And such is the comedy of Catholicism.

One wonders sometimes what St. Francis would have made of himself, had Christianity never come his way. His own genius would never have created the melancholy dogmas of the mediÆval Church. There is neither Christ nor Atonement in his Canticle to the Sun—his most characteristic utterance. The Christianity he absorbed from his environment makes but a hybrid composite with his essential personality. There is thus no real unity in his spiritual being, no real reconciliation between his theory of utter abnegation and unworthiness, and his cheerful mystic oneness with the material universe and all its creatures. That everything God has created is laudable except one’s self, and that all matter is sacramental except one’s own body, is scarcely a congruous creed. And he followed his Christianity for the most part with a prosaic literality that showed that here he was but a passive receiver, as in his pharisaic prohibition against the brethren’s practice of soaking pulse the evening before it was eaten, on the ground that this meant taking thought for the morrow. Not to soak it, is precisely taking thought, since it is concentrating attention on a triviality. But in his tender mystic universalism on the other hand he was a master, a creator. “Our Brother the Sun,” “Our Sister the Moon,” “Our Sister, Water,” “Our little Brothers and Sisters, the Birds,” “Our Sister, the Death of the Body”—these are the mintings of an original genius, not that tame subservience to texts which limited his wardrobe because of certain words in St. Matthew. And the originality of this genius consists, curiously enough, in the spontaneous reproduction of Hindu optimism and universality in a Western. How Hindu this thought is appears vividly from the story in the “Speculum Perfections,” that when St. Francis’s drawers caught fire about the knee, he would not put it out nor harm his brother Fire. From this point of view Hell would only be brother Fire enjoying himself. Yet we find St. Francis engaged all his life in thwarting the fraternal appetite. St. Francis would have been a greater man, had he been less of a Christian.

His distinctively Christian sayings are indeed comparatively poor. One scans the record almost in vain for any flash of the irony or sublimity of Jesus. The profoundest remark of the Fioretti—“everything, good or bad, that a man does, he does to himself”—belongs to brother Giles who, one is not surprised to find, left a book of Verba Aurea. Occasionally a superb transcendence of ritual as in St. Francis’s remark that so far from not eating meat when Christ’s nativity fell on a Friday, “the very walls should eat flesh on such a day, or if they cannot should at any rate be greased outside,” recalls the flouter of Pharisaism, and we catch the voice of an authentic master in his exposition of a passage of Ezekiel to a peace-loving doctor of divinity perturbed about the text: “If thou proclaim not to the wicked man his wickedness, I will require his soul at thy hand.” It was by the brightness of his own life and the perfume of his fame, said St. Francis, that the servant of God proclaimed their wickedness to the wicked. That was not precisely the method of Jesus, and herein St. Francis is more Christian than Christ. Nevertheless, if one had not his Hindu utterances to supplement his Christian, there would be little to distinguish the skinny black-eyed little strolling preacher from the numberless narrow-browed ascetics of the Church except his childishly dramatic delivery, his success in founding an Order and his redeeming weakness for talking bad French. It is that strange animism of his which gives him his hold upon us, which, not content with reading a soul into the bird, the fish, the grasshopper and the wolf, extends with half-savage, half-childish personalisation to fire and water, and even to wood and stone, nay to the very letters of the alphabet, so that he will not erase a letter even when he has set it down in error. Behind this divination of life in all things must have lain an exquisite sensibility, and it was thus his unfortunate fate to be supremely alive to beauty—even in woman—yet to be driven by his creed to the worship of sorrow, abnegation and self-inflicted pain, though even from these his subtle nervous system could snatch a rare moment of ecstasy, for so delicately was he strung that the mere words “the love of God” set up a sweet vibration like a plectrum striking a lute. How indeed should the gay knight, whom his comrades elected “King of the fools,” change his sensitive skin, merely because he turned to be “God’s fool?” If he now found his joy in the ecstasy of mystic communion and absolute abnegation, the joy was still at his core, and however he might afflict his body, with a sub-conscious sense of setting a model to his weaker brethren, it was impossible for him to subdue his sun-worship, or not to delight in the ripple of water, and the grace of birds and flowers and women. And herein he differs from the Buddha with whose life-story and tenderness for all creation he has so much in common, but to whom this world is merely a mistake to be endured till the nullity of Nirvana is attained. Even the pseudo-Christian theory of this vale of tears is not so pessimistic as Buddhism, for the lachrymose vale is merely the prelude to a mountain of bliss, and Schopenhauer’s attempt to pair Christianity with Buddhism overlooked that the Buddhist saint lives to die and the Christian dies to live. Kuenen showed much deeper insight when he pointed out that Buddha does not value purity and renunciation as virtue—he is “beyond good and evil”—but as the best means of escape from life. But for St. Francis the world is not a vale of tears. Indeed the conception of a world of sorrow is contradicted by the sorrowful lives of the saints. For abnegation is pointless if there is no happiness to be surrendered. The pathos of the life of St. Francis lies precisely in his exquisite capacity for terrestrial happiness, and in his daily crucifixion of every natural desire at the bidding of a vicious theory of virtue, to which a natural want means something created by God in order to be thwarted, and which makes a vice of every necessity. Fortunately he had from his Hindu side the saving grace of joyousness, and could rebuke the saturnine visage of professional sanctity and even—towards the end—his own barbarity to that brotherly ass, his body.

His disciples, whose affinities with him were so imperfect that his most devoted biographer is the author of the “Dies IrÆ,” attempt indeed to harmonise the two halves of his personality by the mediation of texts. If he loves even the humble worm, it is because “he had read that word concerning the Saviour: ‘I am a worm and no man,’” and if he treads reverently on the stone, it is not from some mystic sense of a stone-life or some sacramental sense of a divine immanence, but “for love of Him who is called the Rock.” That his delight in water should be traced to its baptismal uses, and his prohibition against cutting down the whole of a tree to a reverence for the material of the cross, was, of course, inevitable. Nor is it impossible that St. Francis occasionally glossed himself over to himself, and it is quite probable that his special tenderness for the hooded lark was due to its quasi-monkish cowl, and that his comparative coldness to the ant reposed upon its providing for the morrow. For it was his tragedy to be torn between a blithe personal revelation of the divine and a stereotyped tradition of sorrow, to constrict his spiritual genius to a cut-and-dried scheme of salvation, and to be crucified on a second-hand cross. The stigmata which are the best proof of his hyperÆsthesia are likewise the best evidence of his spiritual plagiarism and his comparative failure. For to be crucified is not to be Christ. Jesus did not set out to be crucified, but to do his and his Father’s work. Crucifixion came in the day’s work, but was its interruption, not its fulfilment. The true imitation of Christ is to do one’s work though men crucify one. But deliberately to seek crucifixion—even crucifixion of one’s natural desires—is to imitate the accident, not the essence. A still greater perversion is it to brood upon the crude insignia of the Passion till auto-hypnotism works miracles in the flesh.

The followers of St. Francis pushed the plagiarism so far as to adumbrate a parallel legend, with a descent into Purgatory and a John of the Chapel who fell away and hanged himself, and by the latter end of the fourteenth century the parallel was made precise and perfect in the Liber Conformitatum of Bartolommeo of Pisa. But the copy is only superficially true to the original. There is nothing in the story of the great GalilÆan to justify the perpetual self-torture of St. Francis in his morbid quest of perfect humility and sinlessness. On the contrary, Jesus speaks with so god-like an assurance of righteousness that it has become one of the chief arguments for his divinity, as it is the chief stumbling-block to the efficacy of his example. For if God was made not man but superman, we can no more emulate this superman’s goodness than his power of creating loaves and fishes in a crisis. Only if Jesus were not God is his example valuable. But man or superman, he did not sap his energies by brooding on his own vileness. Buddhism, with all the apathy that its pessimism engenders, is healthier here, since (according to the MahÂviyÛhassutta) the Muni, the Master of renunciation, never blames himself.

I sympathise cordially with the perplexities of Brother Masseo, who, according to the “Analecta Franciscana,” lost his naturally cheerful countenance under the difficulty of believing himself viler than the vicious loafer; and who, when this peak of humility was by grace attained, found himself in fresh despondency before the new Alp that rose on the horizon. “I am sad because I cannot get to the point of feeling that if any one cut off my hands or feet or plucked my eyes out, though I had served him to the best of my power, still I could love him as much as I did before, and be equally pleased to hear him well spoken of.” Poor Masseo! Why should this worthy brother, a man, according to the Fioretti, of great eloquence and belonging to the inner circle of St. Francis, waste his time and spoil his valuable cheerfulness over such hypothetic absurdities? The humour of the last clause is worthy of Gilbert.

It is in face of such a heautontimorumenos as poor Brother Masseo that I revolt against all this strained ethics, this gymnast virtue demanding years of training to force the soul into some unnatural posture which it can only sustain at best for a few seconds. I could weep over all this wasted goodness when I think of the wrongs crying out for justice, the voice of lamentation that rises daily from the wan places of the world. How much there is for Hercules to labour at without standing on his head and balancing the seven deadly virtues on his toes! The beauty of holiness is often put on the same level as the holiness of beauty, as a self-sufficient ideal. But even as false ideals of beauty may impose themselves, so may false ideals of holiness. The static sanctity of a Stylites has long been relegated to those false ideals, and even a St. Francis cannot be accepted as a model for to-day, though a few satiated souls may yearn after abnegation as the last luxury of the spirit. There is much barren Æsthetic admiration wasted upon religious maxims which it is admitted would overturn society if acted upon; and it is questionable, therefore, whether there is any real beauty in these, any more than in jewelled watches that will not go. Even when a rare saint acts upon them, they seem to produce spiritual sickliness rather than spiritual health. There is, perhaps, a finer beauty of holiness in the life of a wise and good man of the world with a sense of humour, than in the life of an ecstatic and underfed saint, whose very notion of the Fatherhood of God lacks the reality and fulness that come from paternity.

There are few things in literature more touchingly simple than those adventures in search of holiness, that picaresque novel of the spirit, known as “The Little Flowers of St. Francis.” These gentle souls, who wander without food or knapsack, under the tutelage of the seraphic saint, through the enchanting valleys and hills of unspoiled thirteenth-century Italy, and adventuring in even more glamorous regions hold strange parleyings with the Soldan of Babylon, have upon them a morning light of innocence and that perfume of holiness which can never fail to justify the Master’s exposition of Ezekiel. If anything could add to the sweetness of the idyll, it is the spiritual loves of St. Francis and St. Clara. And yet our adoration of St. Francis must not blind us to the questionable aspects of the chronicle. “I may yet have sons and daughters,” he replied deprecatingly to one who proclaimed him blessed and holy. What a caricature of true ethics! Even the poverty for which he was “so greedy” is impossible if everybody is greedy for it, and the abnegation he practised he could not have preached. Otherwise when he tossed his own tunic to a shivering beggar, he should have inspired the beggar to toss it back to his now shivering self, and so ad infinitum. That game of tunic-tennis with nothing ever scored but “love” would have been true Franciscanism, but also its reductio ad absurdum. I do not wonder that Goethe smiled at the “Heiliger” of Assisi, for neglecting to visit whose shrine he was nearly arrested as a smuggler.

Yes, the bland brother does well to babble of the cabbage planted with its leaves in the ground. For he has blundered into the very essence of the Master’s teaching: this topsy-turvydom, these roots in the air, are the secret of St. Francis’s success. There is a tendency to blame our paradoxists, to deride their inversions as mechanical. But St. Francis is an inversion incarnate, a paradox in flesh and blood. While with other men Property is a sacred concept, a fetish guarded by a mesh of laws, he refuses to own anything and even disposes with blasphemous levity of other people’s property. Theft he daringly defines as not to give something to anybody who has greater need of it than oneself. He hated Property, not as the Socialist hates it who covets its communalisation, but as something in itself evil. These practical inversions of his have the same excuse as those of the literary paradoxist. Nothing less than this violent antithesis will suffice to shake men’s notions from the rigor mortis that overtakes even true ideas, or to offset the exaggeration which gradually falsifies them. One false extreme must be met by another, if the happy mean is to be struck.

Pray do not imagine I would endorse Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the popular platitude that truth always lies midway between two extreme views. On the contrary, truth is often the most violent and extreme of all possible propositions and right action the most violent and extreme of all possible forms of conduct. But the system of St. Francis needed as much contradiction from the world of common sense as the world of common sense needed from it. In so far as it was Christian, it was an imitation of early Christianity, minus the time-limit which justified its model. But the right course of action when the world is about to come to an end will not necessarily be the right course if the world is indefinitely to be continued in our next. In such a world the system of St. Francis is an impossibility, if only because it would bring the world to an end by lack of population. And if it really succeeded, it would bring itself to an end even before the world, for in the absence of owners there would be none to receive alms from, none to bake that bread which St. Francis naÏvely regarded as coming by grace as simply as water. This absolute avoidance of money resembles, indeed, nothing so much as banking, which is possible only if the bulk of the investors do not ask for their money at the same time. It is on the certainty of his failure that the success of a saint reposes. His disciples will never be more than a miserable minority and so he will seem recuperative and not destructive to society. The exaggeration of his holiness will mitigate the materialism of the average man. Dives will not give up his dinner but he will drop a crumb for Lazarus and another for the saint, and perhaps eat only salmon and trout on Fridays. It is this reflection that he incarnates for the race an ideal of perfection, imperfect though it be in its impossibility, that reconciles me to the saint, as the reflection that the Church Fathers were engaged in fashioning that ideal reconciles me to their meticulous morality, in a world so given over to slaughter, sensuality and every abomination of injustice that their fine shades and their notion of an impassable infinity between right and the smallest wrong appear ludicrously disproportionate and academic.

The saint on this theory is a scapegoat, a victim on the altar of human selfishness; he does, suffers, or gives up, too much because most other persons do, suffer, or give up, too little. He is sacrificed to the balance of things, or as St. Paul put it, he is the leaven to the lump. Yet things would overbalance were he too successful, and too much leaven would spoil the lump.

If there is within St. Francis an unresolved discord between Hinduism and Christianity, still more jarring is the outer discord between Nature and Christianity which he tried so heroically to harmonise. Don Quixote tilting at windmills is a practical figure beside St. Francis trying to Christianise bird and beast. The consciously grotesque pathos of Cervantes is surpassed by the unconsciously grotesque pathos of the chronicles of St. Francis. The struggle for existence in Nature—the angler’s hook and the birdcatcher’s snare—can hardly be glossed over by sermons to the birds and the fishes. Doubtless St. Francis had—as some sinners have to-day—a strange power of fascination over the lower creatures, but the butcher was not eliminated because St. Francis occasionally bought off a lamb or a turtle-dove. We know too little of the psychology of wild beasts to deny that he tamed the Wolf of Agobio—though it is permissible to doubt the civil contract with Brother Wolf which in Sassetta’s fanciful picture is even drawn up by a notary; nor is the stone record of the miracle you may read to-day on the faÇade of that little church in Gubbio which was set up three centuries later, nor even the skull of Brother Wolf himself, found—according to a lady writer on Gubbio—“precisely on the spot pointed out by tradition as the burial-place of the beast,” and “now in the possession of a gentleman at Scheggia,” as convincing a testimony as she imagines “to the indubitable truth of the tradition, and to the superhuman power of love towards every living creature.” Love has no such power to turn lions and wolves into civil contractors or vegetarians. There is a battle of beneficent and sinister forces in the universe, which Persian speculation has always recognised frankly, but which Hebraic and Hindu systems, by their higher synthesis of Love or Good, unconsciously whittle away into a sham fight, or at best a tournament; a play of God with His own forces. ’Tis Docetism writ larger. But whether the fight be sham or real, the universe is not run on a Franciscan system, and it is this which makes the pathos and the grotesquerie of the saint’s attempts to equate the macrocosm with his autocosm. Yes, St. Francis is as nobly mad as Don Quixote. Nay, towards the end, where the cavalier of Christ, broken by disease in the prime of his years—disease of the spleen, disease of the liver, disease of the stomach, disease of the eyes—macerated by senseless privations, a mere substratum for poultices and fomentations and cauterisations, scarcely even washing himself for fear of ostentating the stigmata, still sings songs of praise so blithely as to scandalise his companions’ sense of death-bed decency, we touch a more Quixotic pathos than anything in Cervantes.

And these legends of his pious influence over the cicala and the swallow and the wolf, this tench that plays around his boat, this pheasant that haunts his cell, this falcon that wakes him for matins during his fast in the mountain, these birds that fly off in four companies like a cross after devoutly digesting his sermon, all make for the comity of creation, especially in Italy, where animals have no souls, only bodies that may be ill-used: indeed, St. Francis—with his disciple St. Antony of Padua—contributes to Christianity that missing note of respect for the animal creation which Hinduism expresses “in the great word Tat-twam-asi (This is thyself!).” And here at least modern thought is with St. Francis and his Hindu universalism. The evolution theory is usually considered a depressing doctrine, yet it has its stimulating aspects. For though we may doubt if St. Francis converted the wolf, we cannot doubt that Nature Christianised it, or at least some creature as low and savage. For from some gibbering ferocious brute there did, in the process of the suns, emerge a seraphic, selfless being with love for all creation. The wolf, in fact, became St. Francis; a more notable conversion than any in the missionary books.

But what did St. Francis become? Here the record is not so stimulating; here begins degeneration, devolution. Before he died he was an idol and the nominal centre of vast organisations, lay as well as monastic, female as well as male, and in this success lay his defeat. LachrymÆ rerum inhere even more in success than in failure. The portrait of St. Francis by Ribera which may be seen at Florence—a melancholy monk with his eyes turned up, holding a skull—was no sadder caricature of the blithe little man who swept out dirty churches with a broom than these gigantic and infinitely quarrelsome organisations were of his teaching.

A great man may either influence humanity by his solitary work or he may found an institution. The institution (if adequately financed) will live, but with himself squeezed out of it—for worship at a safe height. The squeezing out of St. Francis from Franciscanism began even before his death—the Papacy pressing from without and his own vicars from within. That very sensible fear of Brother William of Nottingham—evidently a practical Briton—that superfluities would grow up in the Order as insensibly as hairs in the beard, was more than verified. The dangerous rule of Absolute Poverty was relaxed, scholastic learning was reinstalled in its armchair, a network of rules replaced the rule of the spirit, and the little brotherhood that had lain on straw and tattered mattresses in the Portiuncula swelled and split into Conventualists and Observants, the majority established in magnificent monasteries. St. Francis lamented the degeneration of the brethren, though he characteristically refused to punish it. And when he was quite squeezed to death there began a fight for his body—holy body-snatching was a feature of the Middle Ages—and that vile enemy of the soul which he had battled against all his life took his place as the centre of the cult. Perugia, holding by force the body of St. Giles, removed from Assisi the only possible rival of his relics. His very poultice is still preserved as an object of edification.