Erasmus dreamed once—so he writes to Charles Utenhove—that St. Francis came to thank him for chastising the Franciscans. The Founder had not the scrupulous stage-costume of his degenerate followers: his brown frock was of undyed wool; the hood was not peaked, but merely hung behind to cover the head in bad weather; the cord was a piece of rope from a farmyard; the feet were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata there was as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the Franciscans. Obedience, poverty, chastity, humility, simplicity, charity—where had flown these “six wings of the seraph”?

Eheu fugaces! ’Tis the story of all founders, of all orders. St. Francis at his supreme moment of renunciation had not even the brown frock of Erasmus’s dream. In the market-place of Assisi he stood in his shirt. And he desired to die even more naked, as Thomas of Celano and the “Legenda Trium Sociorum” testify. The first Franciscans were simple souls kindled by his love and ecstasy, “the minstrels of the dear Lord.” They bore revilement and scourging; dragged along by their hoods, they never ceased to proclaim Peace. They lay a-cold in caves, with hearts careless of the morrow; they served in lepers’ houses. And above all they worked; begging was only to be a last resort, and never was money to be asked for. “Beware of money,” says the “Regula.”

Brother Elias of Cortona, the immediate successor of St. Francis, is said to have lived like a prince, with valets and horses, and he readily got the Pope to sanction a device by which he obtained all the money he wanted per interpositas personas. Nor did the Master’s teaching fare better at the hands of the more faithful faction—the Observants whom the Conventualists persecuted—for the rule of Absolute Poverty was applied without the genial concessions and exceptions he knew how to make; and under the guidance of the caustic and canonical Antony of Padua the ancient gaudentes in Domino hardened into slaves of the letter, while the more mystic degenerated into anchorites who retired to the mountains to save their own souls.

Nothing can point the tragedy of St. Francis’s success more vividly than his own homely words in his “Testamentum.” “And they who came to take up this life gave up whatever they might have to the poor and were content with a single tunic, patched inside and out (if they wished), together with a girdle and drawers: and we would have no more. We clerks said the office like other clerks; the lay-brothers said the Lord’s Prayer. We gladly abode in poor and forsaken churches, and were simple folk and subject to all. And I used to work with my hands, and I desire to work, and my earnest wish is that all the brethren should work at some decent employment.”

Only a century later Dante’s eulogy of the Founder (“Paradiso,” Canto XI) is qualified by the remark that so few of his followers cleave to his teachings that “a little stuff may furnish out their cloaks.” And three centuries later the spectacle which these Fratri Minori represented to Erasmus was that of arrogant mendicants, often of loose morals, begging with forged testimonials, haunting the palaces of the rich, forcing themselves into families, selling the Franciscan habit to wealthy dying sinners as a funeral cloak to cover many sins. His little sisters, the swallows and the doves, fluttered over St. Francis’s tomb, but from it issued the hawks and the vultures. An old, old moral, though humanity will never learn it.

Saint Francis was Francis Saint. The Lady Poverty “who for eleven hundred years had remained without a single suitor” found in him a spouse faithful unto death. His soul went out in fraternity to all the wonderful creation, in joyous surrender to pain and tribulation: even Death was his sister. To found an Order of St. Francis is to count upon a succession of St. Francises. As well found an Order of Shakespeare, a phalanstery of Da Vincis.

In religion no less than in literature or art the Master is ever a new individual—“Natura lo fece e ruppe il tipo”—but followers ever think to fix the free-blowing spirit. Alas! saints may be summarised in a system, but the system will not produce saints. Academies, churches, orders can never replace men; they too often serve to asphyxiate or assassinate such as appear. St. Dominic, the sterner founder of the other mendicant order, was not more fortunate in creating an apostolic succession of Poverty than his friend and contemporary; and as for his precursor, St. Bruno, contrast his marble image in the Certosa, gazing agonisedly at a crucifix, with the mosaics of agate, lapis-lazuli, amethyst, and cornelian worked over the altars by eight generations of the Sacchi family, or with the Lucullian feasts which the Carthusians could furnish forth at the bidding of the Magnificent Lodovico. St. Bruno retreated to the desert to fast and pray, and the result was Chartreuse. If he now follows the copious litigation he may well apprehend that his order has modified its motto and that for “Stat crux dum volvitur orbis” you should read “Stat spiritus.”

Benedictine, too, is a curious by-product of the first of all the Western orders, and the one by which England was converted to Christianity. How pleased the founder of Monte Cassino must be to see a British bishop sipping Benedictine!

Religion has not, indeed, lacked saints aware of the tendency of followers to substitute the forms for the realities and the leader for the spirit. There was Antoinette Bourignon, with her love for the free flowing of the Holy Ghost and her hatred of the Atonement theory, but in the absence of forms her sect had not sufficient material framework to maintain itself by. If the Quakers still survive, it is because they have erected something into a system, if only colour-blindness. But the twaddle which is talked at Quaker meetings when an old bore is played upon by the spirit, turns one’s thoughts longingly to a stately liturgy, independent on the passing generation. Humanity is indeed between the devil and the deep sea. Institutions strangle the spirit, and their absence dissipates it.

Even if by miracle a Church remains true to the spirit of its founder, this is a fresh source of unspirituality, for his spirit may be outgrown. An excellent definition of what a Church should be was given some years ago by a writer in the Church Quarterly: “A National Church, elastic enough to provide channels for fresh manifestations of spiritual life, yet anchored to the past.” But where is such a Church to be found? “Anchored to the past”—yes, that condition is more than fulfilled. But spiritual elasticity? The Church Quarterly reviewer has the face to pass off his definition as that of the Church of England, and to say that such a National Church “might have saved the United States from many of those grotesque, and worse than grotesque, features which have at various times disfigured their spiritual life.” But the Church of England has notoriously failed in elasticity—even the Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to make it express his view of the Athanasian Creed. And, far from its anchoring the spiritual life of the English people, they have violently torn themselves away from it in secessions of Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, &c. &c. As to its preserving them from grotesque religious features, the aberrations of English sectarianism fully equal those of America, when the difference of geographic area is considered and the absence of supervision over great spaces. Sandemanians, Walworth Jumpers, Joanna Southcottians, Seventh Day Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, Christadelphians, Peculiar People—such are a few of the British aberrations, some of which have counted distinguished followers. The bequests to foster even the Southcott mania were treated as sacred by the Court of Chancery. Jump-to-Glory-Jane is an English type put into poetry by an English poet. The sect to which Silas Marner belonged, with its naÏve belief in drawing lots—the practical equivalent of the sortilege of the Pagan soothsayer—was not made in America. It was England which Voltaire ridiculed for its one sauce and its endless sects. The great scale of America magnifies the aberrations. But even Mormonism, Dowieism, and Christian Science have solid achievements to their credit. Salt Lake City is a paradise built over a desert reclaimed by Mormon labourers, Zion City is a handsome town without drinking-palaces, and Christian Science has made more advances in the last generation than Christianity made in its first two centuries, numbering as it does its temples and its teachers by the thousand. There is at least life behind these grotesqueries, while in the Established Churches there is asphyxiation by endowments.

Endowments—there is the secret of stagnation. It is an unhappy truth that man tends to become a parasite on his own institutions. Humanity is a Frankenstein that is ridden by its own creations. Its Churches, with their cast-iron creeds and their golden treasure-heaps, are the prisons of the soul of the future. The legal decision in the great Free Church fight serves as what Bacon calls an “ostensive instance” of this elemental truth, bringing out as it does that the legal interpretation of a Church involves, not the elasticity so glibly vaunted by the Church Quarterly reviewer, but absolute inelasticity. A tiny minority of ministers is able, for a time at least, to hold millions of money and hundreds of buildings, because the vast majority has elected, in a spirit of brotherly love, to join another body from which it is separated by a microscopic point. There can, at this rate, never be development in a Church. The faintest divergence from old tradition may justify the hard-shell orthodox in claiming all the funds and regarding the innovators as deserters of their posts and properties. All Church funds are indissolubly connected with the doctrines to which they were first tacked on, and changes in doctrine involve forfeiture of the belongings in favour of those who have had the fidelity or the shrewdness to cling to the original dogma. How much change is necessary to alter a creed is a delicate problem, known in logic as of the Soros order. For every day brings it subtle increments or decrements, and a dogma of imperishable adamant has not yet appeared in human history. Every dogma has its day. The life of a normally constituted truth is, according to Ibsen, twenty years at the outside, and aged truths are apt to be shockingly thin. Thus the danger which threatens all Churches—the danger of having to buy their ministers—is raised to infinity if the money is thus to be tied up by the dead hand of the past. A premium is placed upon infidelity and mustiness. There is no Church or religious body in the world which is not weighted with pecuniary substance, from Rome to the Order we have been considering, founded for the preachment of Absolute Poverty. The continuity of policy which the Church Quarterly applauds becomes a mere continuity of property, if progress is to be thus penalised. Nor are the Dissenting bodies immune from this pecuniary peril. A Calvinist chapel in Doncaster that was gravitating to the New Theology has found itself closed pro tem. under its trust deed of 1802.

The remedy for this clogging of spiritual life is clear. It was always obvious, but when Property is in danger one begins to consider things seriously.

Every Church and sect must be wound up after three generations. The time-limit needs elucidation.

The first generation of a Church or a heresy—the terms are synonymous, for every Church starts as a heresy—is full to the brim of vitality, fire, revolt, sincerity, spirituality, self-sacrifice. It is a generation in love, a generation exalted and enkindled by the new truth, a generation that will count life and lucre equally base beside the spreading of the new fire. The second generation has witnessed this fervour of its fathers, it has been nourished in the warmth of the doctrine, its education is imprinted with the true fiery stamp. It is still near the Holy Ghost. In the third generation the waves radiated from the primal fire have cooled in their passage through time; the original momentum tends to be exhausted. Now is the period of the smug Pharisees profiting by the martyrdoms of their ancestors, babbling rhetorically—between two pleasures—of their fidelity to the faith of their fathers. If the third generation of a Church can get through with fair spiritual success, it is often only because of a revival of persecution. But the third generation is absolutely the limit of the spiritual stirring. In the fourth generation you shall ever find the young people sly sceptics or sullen rebels, and the Vicar of Bray coming in for high preferment. Here, then, is the limitation dictated by human nature. The life of a Church should be wound up by the State. The birth of a heresy must be free to all, and should be registered like the birth of a child. It would expose its adherents to no disadvantages, either religious or political. But after three generations it must be wound up.

Of course, it should be perfectly open for the Church to reconstitute itself immediately, but it should do this under a new name. If it started again afresh, the compulsory winding-up would have acted as a species of persecution and thoroughly revitalised the content of the particular credo. The third generation would have strained every sinew to realise their faith and bring it home to the young and fourth generation. The latter, ere re-establishing the Church, would have rediscovered its truth, and thereby given it fresh momentum to carry it through another three generations. This simple system would allow children to continue the faith of their fathers from conviction instead of compulsion, and, by terminating the right to property, would save posterity from the asphyxiation of benefactions.

The life of a generation is computed by biological statisticians at thirty-three years. Three generations would thus make ninety-nine years. A century brings such changes in thought and things that the excerpts from the Times of a hundred years ago read like the journalism of another planet.

The bequests by which eleven old gentlewomen of a certain parish, that has been swept away, receive groats of an abolished currency, on a day that has disappeared from the calendar, to perpetuate the memory of a benevolent megalomaniac, would, on a similar principle, be limited to the natural run of a century. It is enough to be allowed a dead finger in the pie of proximate posterity; “a century not out” must never be written over any human will or institution.

If this time-limit seems a trifle harsh, apply it, dear reader, not to your own creed, but to something esoteric, like the doctrine of the Dalai Lamas of Tibet, which has for so many centuries paralysed a priest-ridden Asiatic population. Do you think this theory of reincarnation deserved a longer run than three generations?

“Dieses Prunkschiff ist ein rechtes InventariËnstÜck, woran man sehen kann, was die Venetianer waren, und sich zu sein dÜnkten.”

Goethe: ItaliÄnische Reise.