porary events. There was to be a new era, a great judg-
ment on the Church, a golden age for all the world. The
enthusiasm for poverty which characterized these radical
movements before the Reformation and which seems strange
to us, gets its real significance as a religious protest against
social iniquity. The great institutions of the Church had
accumulated enormous landed wealth, and were fat with
rents and profits. The higher clergy had secured special
privileges, exemptions, and governmental powers, till they
were brazen with despotic spirit. The vow of poverty
which every monk took had in many cases become a mere
sham, for it admitted him to membership in a wealthy mo-
nastic corporation and enabled him to live in idleness on the
labor of others. When Saint Francis of Assisi wedded the
Lady Poverty and refused property for his order as well as
for the individual monk, he tried to make parasitic wealth
and power impossible for himself and his friends. This
most famous and beloved saint of the Middle Ages was
the great friend and ideal of the common people, a very
incarnation of Christian democracy. In its infancy, before
the Church twisted it and wrested it to its own taste and use,
the Franciscan movement was charged with an almost
revolutionary social sympathy. ¹ The Waldensian move-
ment, originating a few years before, was animated by a
similar spirit. These men washed their hands of rent and
profit, and went to share the life of the people. They
headed a social and religious quest for simplicity, sincerity,
honesty, and fraternity. In some of these movements
none was allowed to hold a government office, because he
would thereby become a tool of cruelty and judicial murder
and torture. They all held the communistic ideals about
property. Wherever voluntary poverty was not the out-
come of an ascetic desire for heaven, but an expression of

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