every necessity; that insolence of bearing on his part is only the natural expression of innate, hereditary superiority.

It is in some ways even more natural in the man of an inferior caste, who has his self-respect to gain. For, to him, to be a Hindu at all, though he be not a high-caste man, is to possess a connatural sanctity, as compared with the rest of the world, which the sense of unholiness would contradict. And yet, being unclean ceremonially to men of higher castes, he needs the more to bolster himself up by refusing to admit any sinfulness which is not innate in him physically.

One must indeed have lived among Hindus to appreciate the spiritual revolution, the bouleversement of religious prepossessions, represented by the words of the Baptist, when he warned the Jews of his day that their claim to be children of Abraham would not stand them in stead before God; that religion and natural parentage were for the future to be divorced from one another; that personal holiness, in fact, was a moral, not a physical matter.

Yet the distinction is absolutely vital if a true sense of sin is to be developed-how vital, we may easily remind ourselves by remembering the disastrous results which follow, for morality and religion, when the doctrine of original sin, as held by orthodox Christians, is grossly exaggerated or distorted. To insist upon inbred sinfulness as an inheritance entailed upon the race, and to forget the saving clause, how it constitutes, in actual practice, a natural downward trendhow, in its essence, it is no mere status, no mere imputation to the children of sins committed by their fathers-even this exaggeration and disproportion in stating a truth of the Gospel results in a blunted moral sense, in a distorted view of the Atonement, in making the restoration of man a merely forensic substitution, a matter of vicarious righteousness, not of personal and spiritual renewal.

But let holiness and unholiness alike be regarded as a matter of inheritance; let such sense of sinfulness as there is be associated with the belief in metempsychosis, be only the present working out of misdeeds committed, and forgotten, in innumerable previous incarnations, and it is plain

that the consciousness of sinfulness, as a Christian understands the words, must be simply non-existent.

This moral and practical element, this preclusion of a real sense of sinfulness works in, we cannot doubt, with the underlying philosophical assumptions upon which we have insisted so fully, to form a constituent element in the weird fascination of Pantheism, an element more intelligible perhaps to the mind of an ordinary Englishman than its attractiveness when regarded in the abstract. Give up my personal identity-regard myself as an impersonal manifestation of the Unconscious, the Unconditioned! Put thus, the Monistic hypothesis may seem to ourselves to be unthinkable, too absurd to need any refutation. But offer it on the moral side; make it a refuge for a conscience half awakened, not yet sufficiently in earnest to throw itself, crushed with selfabasement, into the arms of a forgiving Creator; do away with the consciousness of guilt without calling for the pain, the humiliation, entailed by acknowledging it to oneself; let it appeal to that instinct of self-righteousness which, alas! is so much more connatural to us than the genuine sense of sin; and it needs no words, we think, to exhibit its terrible fascination. It supplies a perfect armour of self-complacency to those who have been brought up in it from childhood, who have not drunk in from the first, as a constituent element in religion, the thought of being sinners by nature, of being in essential opposition to the Holiness of a personal God.

Such, then, in briefest outline, are a few of the characteristics developed in the Hindu people by the system in which they have been brought up; such the damnosa haereditas entailed on them by æons of caste-the character equally homogeneous with the system under which it has developed.

First, a searching intellectual scepticism about everything which presents itself to be believed; a scepticism originating, it is true, in an abstract system of Monism, but lending itself all too readily to practical dislike of responsibility, to acquiescence in established conditions, apart from troublesome scruples as to whether they are defensible or not; a scepticism displaying itself most markedly in total indifference to truthfulness about matters of everyday life.

Next, a general deficiency of stamina pervading the whole moral being; an indifference to right and wrong, born and bred of a system of morality which turns upon caste obligation as its only possible fulcrum; with no reliance on principle, no principles on which to rely; backed by no Categorical Imperative, but varying quite indefinitely with the conventions of different castes; with all the inevitable enfeeblement which comes to conscience and will where there is no distinguishing line between moral and positive obligation, between physical and spiritual status, between ceremonial and moral purity; a feebleness fairly represented by the difference between the vertebrate creature, with its internal skeleton of bone, and the pulpy, invertebrate crustacean, with its external skeleton of shell.

The methods for dealing with these strange conditions will be the subject of our next article.

ART. VI. THE THIRD ORDER OF ST. FRANCIS.

1. Regula Antiqua Fratrum et Sororum de Paenitentia seu Tertii Ordinis Sancti Francisci. Nunc primum edidit PAUL SABATIER. (Paris, 1901.) (Opuscules de Critique Historique, fasc. i.)

2. Collection d'Etudes et de Documents sur l'Histoire religieuse et littéraire du Moyen-âge. Vol. I. Speculum Perfectionis seu Sancti Francisci Assisiensis Legenda antiquissima, auctore Fratre Leone. Edited by P. SAbatier. (Paris, 1898.) II. Fratris Francisci Bartholdi Tractatus de Indulgentia S. Mariae de Portiuncula. Edited by the same, 1899. III. Frère Elie de Cortone. By Dr. E. LEMPP, 1901. IV. Actus B. Francisci et Sociorum ejus, Edited by P. SABATIER, 1902.

3. Floretum B. Francisci Assisiensis. Edited by the same. (Paris, 1902.)

4. Analecta Franciscana sive Chronica aliaque varia documenta ad historiam fratrum minorum spectantia. Edita a patribus Collegii S. Bonaventurae. Ad Claras Aquas (Quaracchi). Vols. I.-III., 1885 sq.

5. Leggenda di San Francesco scritta da tre suoi Compagni. Edited by MARCELLINO DA CIVEZZA and TEOFILO DOMENICHELLI. (Rome, 1899.)

6. Acta Sanctorum for October. Vol. II.; and other volumes. 7. Bullarium Franciscanum. Edidit JOANNES HYACINTHUS SBARALEA. 4 vols. (Rome, 1759.)

8. Annales Minorum. By LUCAS WADDING. Edited by M. FONSECA. Vols. I.-III. (Rome, 1731, &c.)

9. Vetera Humiliatorum Monumenta. By HIER. TIRABOSCHI. 3 vols. (Milan, 1767).

10. Vie de S. François d'Assise. By PAUL SABATIER. Paris (25th edition, 1902). English translation by L. S. HOUGHTON. (London, 1894.1)

11. Die Anfänge des Minoritenordens und der Bussbruderschaften. By KARL MÜLLER. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1885.)

12. Compte Rendu du quatrième Congrès scientifique international des Catholiques tenu à Fribourg (Suisse), 1897. Quatrième Section. At p. 182 'Les Origines de L'Ordo de Poenitentia,' by F. P. MANDONNET, Ord. Pr. (Paris, 1898.)

13. Third Orders. By J. G. ADDERLEY and C. L. MARSON, Curates. (London, 1902.)

AT the Chapter-General of the order of Friars Minor held at Narbonne in 1260 St. Bonaventura, who then held the office of Minister-General, was commissioned to write a new and authoritative Life of their founder, St. Francis, to take the place of the various and diverse Lives which were then in existence. He at once set to work on his task, which was carried out with great care and thoroughness; and the completed Life, a veritable concordantia discordantium, was presented to the Chapter-General which met at Pisa in 1263. The following year they met at Paris, and the following extraordinary ordinance was there put forth :

'Item, the Chapter-General ordains on obedience that all the legends of the Blessed Francis formerly made shall be destroyed, and

1 For purposes of convenience the English translation has been made use of. It is, however, very unsatisfactory, and possesses no index.

where any shall be found outside the Order the brethren are to endeavour to make away with (amovere) them, since the legend which has been composed by the General was compiled by him from the mouth of those who were almost always with the Blessed Francis ; and all that they could certainly know and all that is proved have been diligently entered therein.'1

The result of this step was as disastrous as might have been expected. The earlier Lives, and other contemporary or nearly contemporary documents, rich in their diversity and their naturalness, and invaluable because of their unstudied simplicity, were set aside and as far as possible obliterated, their place being usurped by this one Life. And the 'Seraphic Doctor,' great as were his powers as a scholastic theologian, was no fit biographer for St. Francis. He was as precise and formal in all his ideas as his subject was natural and spontaneous; and the explicit and flowing Legenda Major, composed according to the accepted literary canons of the day, is but a poor substitute for the ingenuous earlier narratives. All the vivacity, the glow, the poetry, is gone. St. Francis is toned down, so far as possible, into a merely conventional saint. The miracles are no longer the natural outpouring of a unique personality, but mere strange marvels, for the most part at once stereotyped and unconvincing. It would be impossible to rob the Saint of Assisi of all his charm, but much of it is gone. Above all, instead of the story of a man who longed to make every simple human life as holy as his own, we are presented with the story of the founder of an Order.

Under any circumstances such a re-shaping would have been disastrous enough; but in this case there is yet more to be said. As all students of his life are aware, the followers of St. Francis soon fell into two sharply divided classes, the Zelanti and the Liberali, the former of whom laid all possible stress upon their Master's love of poverty, and the simple naturalness of the life to which they had been called; while the latter, representing in this the aspirations of the age, sought to develop the organization of the order in every possible way. After a period of strife a moderate party came

1 Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. 395, note 2.