Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

208 ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI.
authority of their spiritual guides. Men would be think
ing about the deepest problems of life under the monarch s
crown, the soldier s helmet, the scholar s cap, as well as
under the monk s cowl ;
nor would the peasant be quite
shut out from interest in what king, soldier, and scholar
felt had come within their sphere. On many subjects
which till then had been the exclusive concern of church
men, the appeal would be thenceforth to the secular
judgment, and unless the Church could win the homage of
the secular intellect to her presentation of truth, there was
some likelihood that she would sink down into a mere
directress of devotion. Truth must come out of the schools
and frequent the forum ;
the Church must throw herself
into the thick of the intellectual and moral controversies
which this breaking forth of the secular life into freedom
and honour would inevitably generate, and must either hold
her own by superior intellectual power, or else retire from
the headship of the movement, and leave the secular spirit
in the world of political, intellectual, and martial strife,
to run into extravagance at will. If all that was most
spiritual in the Church should continue to withdraw itself
and hide itself in the cloister from all contact with the
world, very plainly the world and the Church would cease
to comprehend and to act upon each other, and civilisation
would miss that inestimable advantage which their close
relation and interpenetration alone would secure. A new
idea of saintliness, or rather a new form of it, and a
new view of its relation to the world, were imperatively
demanded. We shall see how these were supplied.
M. Michelet says, in his rapid brilliant way of disposing
of the characteristics of an era, that Innocent III. used
the Mendicant Orders to prop up the tottering Church.
That seems to imply in Innocent an altogether clearer
discernment of the special character of a time, than any