The people despised the clergy, and were favourably disposed to every reformer; at the same time they were entirely under the sway of a superstitious awe of the administrators of mysterious magic which, by appropriate practices, or by means of presents, could be turned to advantage.  The fetichism of relics flourished everywhere; a sufficient number of pieces of the Cross of Christ were sold and worshipped to furnish trees for a big forest—­to say nothing of the bones of numerous saints with which many monasteries, more especially French monasteries, did a lucrative trade.  Even at the time this traffic repelled the finer intellects; in A.D. 1200, Guibert, the abbot of Novigentum, preached against the cult of the saints and the worship of relics, adducing all the well-known arguments which to this day, however, have proved insufficient to overcome the evil.  In Guibert’s words, “It was an abominable nuisance that certain limbs should be detached from the body, thereby defying the law that all bodies must turn to dust.  How can the bones of any man be worth framing in gold and silver,” he asked, “when the body of the Son of God was laid beneath a miserable stone?” He exhorted the people to turn from the visible and obvious to the invisible.  He maintained that the worship of relics was opposed to true religion because “not until the disciples were bereaved of the bodily presence of Christ could the Holy Ghost descend upon them.”  He even rejected the prevalent, entirely materialistic, view of a life after death, and dared to suggest that the torments of hell should be interpreted spiritually.  “The eternal contemplation of the Lord is the supreme bliss of the righteous; who could dare to deny that the misery of the damned consists in the eternal bereavement of the face of the Lord?”

Religion had been lost; what should have been a vital force had become as far as the most learned were concerned a knowledge of historical events.  Many saw in a return to evangelical simplicity and love the only remedy; but it was the life, not the preaching of a man, which once again was vouchsafed to the world as a great example.  “Nobody has shown me what I should do; but the Most High Himself has commanded me to live according to the Gospels.”  Francis of Assisi accepted the accounts of the life of Christ with the utmost naivete; he neither searched for an allegorical meaning (as the theologians did), nor did he subordinate the man Jesus to the divine principle of the logos (in the manner of the great mystics).  To him the imitation of Christ meant a ministry of love; he did not conceive religion as dogma and the political power of a hierarchy, but as a state of the heart.  This is a characteristic which he shares with Eckhart, the great recreator of European religion, although he was fundamentally alien to him.  St. Francis never uttered a single hostile word against tradition or the clergy; he never inveighed against the corruption of morals and religious indifference,