The Coming of the Friars | Page 8

less concerned with the hideous
atrocities of the Albigensian war. During that dark period of his career
he was brought every day face to face with heresy and schism. From
infancy he must have heard those around him talk with a savage
intolerance of the Moors of the South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo
nearer home. Now his eyes were open to the perils that beset the
Church from sectaries who from within were for casting off her divine
authority. Wretches who questioned the very creeds and rejected the
Sacraments, yet perversely insisted that they were Christian men and
women, with a clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and
Cardinals or the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and
immortal souls, all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose
word doth eat as doth a canker." Dominic "saw that there was no man,
and marvelled that there was no intercessor."
It was not ungodliness that Dominic, in the first instance, determined to
war with, but ignorance and error. These were to him the monster evils,
whose natural fruit was moral corruption. Get rid of them and the
depraved heart might be dealt with by-and-by. Dominic stood forth as
the determined champion of orthodoxy. "Preach the word in season, out
of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort"--that was his panacea. His success
at the first was but small. Preachers with the divine fervour, with the
gift of utterance, with the power to drive truth home--are rare. They are
not to be had for the asking; they are not to be trained in a day. Years
passed, but little was achieved.
Dominic was patient He had, indeed, founded a small religious
community of sixteen brethren at St. Ronain, near Toulouse--one of
these, we are told, was an Englishman--whose aim and object were to
produce an effect through the agency of the pulpit, to confute the

heretics and instruct the unlearned. The Order, if it deserved the name,
was established on the old lines. A monastery was founded, a local
habitation secured. The maintenance of the brotherhood was provided
for by a sufficient endowment; the petty cares and anxieties of life were
in the main guarded against; but when Innocent the Third gave his
formal sanction to the new community, it was given to Dominic and his
associates, on the 8th of October, 1215, as to a house of Augustinian
Canons, who received permission to enjoy in their corporate capacity
the endowments which had been bestowed upon them. [Footnote: So
"La Cordaire, vie de S. Dominique" (1872), p. 120. It was, however, a
very curious community, as appears from "Ripolli Bullarium
Praedicat:" I.i.]
In the following July Innocent died, and was at once succeeded by
Honorius the Third. 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.
How soon the Dominicans gave in their adhesion to the distinctive
tenet of the Minorites will never now be known, nor how far St. Francis
himself adopted it from others; but a conviction that holiness of life had

deteriorated in the Church and the cloister by reason of the excessive
wealth of monks and ecclesiastics was prevalent everywhere, and a
belief was growing that sanctity was attainable only by those who were
ready to part with all their worldly possessions and give to such as
needed. Even before St. Francis had applied to Innocent the Third, the
poor men of Lyons had come to Rome begging for papal sanction