At best his business was to be the salt of the earth, and it
behoved him to be much more upon his guard that the salt should not
lose his savour, than that the earth should be sweetened. The Friar
was an itinerant evangelist, always on the move. He was a preacher of
righteousness. He lifted up his voice against sin and wrong. "Save
yourselves from this untoward generation!" he cried; "save yourselves
from the wrath to come." The Monk, as has been said, was an
aristocrat. The Friar belonged to the great unwashed!
Without the loss of a day the new apostles of poverty, of pity, of an
all-embracing love, went forth by two and two to build up the ruined
Church of God. Theology they were, from anything that appears,
sublimely ignorant of. Except that they were masters of every phrase
and word in the Gospels, their stock in trade was scarcely more than
that of an average candidate for Anglican orders; but to each and all
of them Christ was simply _everything_. If ever men have
preached Christ, these men did; Christ, nothing but Christ, the Alpha
and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
They had no system, they had no views, they combated no opinions,
they took no side. Let the dialecticians dispute about this nice
distinction or that. There _could_ be no doubt that Christ had
died and risen, and was alive for evermore.
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