I am
sent to you with the good God's answer." There was less than a step
between accepting him as the interpreter of their vague yearnings and
embracing him as the ambassador of Heaven to themselves.
St, Francis was hardly twenty-eight years old when he set out for
Rome, to lay himself at the feet of the great Pope Innocent the
Third, and to ask from him some formal recognition. The pontiff, so
the story goes, was walking in the garden of the Lateran when the
momentous meeting took place. Startled by the sudden apparition of an
emaciated young man, bareheaded, shoeless, half-clad, but--for all
his gentleness--a beggar who would take no denial, Innocent
hesitated. It was but for a brief hour, the next he was won.
Francis returned to Assisi with the Papal sanction for what was,
probably, a draught of his afterwards famous "Rule." He was met by
the whole city, who received him with a frenzy of excitement. By this
time his enthusiasm had kindled that of eleven other young men, all
now aglow with the same divine fire. A twelfth soon was added--he,
moreover, a layman of gentle blood and of knightly rank. All these
had surrendered their claim to everything in the shape of property,
and had resolved to follow their great leader's example by stripping
themselves of all worldly possessions, and suffering the loss of all
things.
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