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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.
In its first beginnings the Franciscan movement was essentially moral, not theological, still less intellectual. The absence of anything like dogma in the sermons of the early Minorites was their characteristic.
Whether Wolf believed it or not, Father Hamberger, whom he surely remembered as Prior of the Minorites, and who at that time enjoyed universal esteem, had taken a wife, and the rest of the monks had followed the iniquitous example. Many other priests had married if it suited them, and, instead of the cowl, wore secular garments.
No! it was not grandeur or riches or honour or learning that were wanted above all things not these, but Goodness, Meekness, Simplicity, and Truth. The love of money was the root of all evil. The Minorites were right. When men with a divine fervour proclaim a truth, or even half a truth, which the world has forgotten, there is never any lack of enthusiasm in its acceptance.
The insurgents broke into the convents of the Minorites and Preaching Friars, and slaughtered all the monks whom they recognized as French. Even the altars afforded no protection; tears and prayers were alike unheeded; neither old men, women, nor infants were spared.
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