Dominic set out for Rome, and on the 22nd of
December he received from the new Pope a bare confirmation of what
his predecessor had granted, with little more than a passing allusion
to the fact that the new canons were to be emphatically
_Preachers_ of the faith. In the autumn of 1217 Dominic turned
his back upon Languedoc for ever. He took up his residence at Rome,
and at once rose high in the favour of the Pope. His eloquence, his
earnestness, his absorbing enthusiasm, his matchless dialectic skill,
his perfect scholastic training--all combined to attract precisely
those cultured churchmen whose fastidious sense of the fitness of
things revolted from the austerities of St. Francis and the enormous
demands which the Minorites made upon their converts. While Francis
was acting upon the masses from Assisi, Dominic was stirring the dry
bones to a new vitality among scholars and ecclesiastics at Rome.
Thus far we have heard little or nothing of poverty among the more
highly educated _Friars Preachers_, as they got to be called.
That seems to have been quite an afterthought. So far as Dominic may
be said to have accepted the Voluntary Principle and, renouncing all
endowments, to have thrown himself and his followers for support upon
the alms of the faithful, so far he was a disciple of St. Francis.
The Champion of Orthodoxy was a convert to the Apostle of Poverty.
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