porary events. There was to be a new era, a great judgment 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 monastic 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 movement, 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 outcome of an ascetic desire for heaven, but an expression of

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