The Rich Little Poor Man

...The treasures which are priceless, precisely because they cost nothing, were the things he held dear...

...A glance through the advertising columns of any weekly or monthly will supply the dubious with all the evidence to this effect an honest mind can require...

...His heart leapt up when he looked at flame...

...Salesmanship, using as it does the arguments that are known to be most immediately effective, is no bad barometer to popular character...

...He kept the spirit of love alive in an age of injustice and violence...

...For what Francis preeminently did was to take the sting out of poverty and the ugliness it brings in its train...

...On October 4, 1926, seven hundred years will have passed since the little poor man of Umbria closed his eyes upon the world, to open them upon a realm where the values which his brief life had been spent in asserting assumed their real and eternal values...

...What Mr...

...The sun was the eye of God...

...Every living and growing thing for the Saint of Assisi is a prodigy, a symbol, a masterpiece...

...His will was that 'the great should mingle with the lowly, the wise with the simple...

...that a bond of love should bring far neighbors close together.' And he accomplished his miracle...

...The evil worked by this unhallowed subscription to false values becomes apparent when society is called upon for an expression of indignation as regards some particularly flagrant act of greed and monopoly—some spectacular application of the spirit of acquisitiveness on a big scale...

...Francis unearthed a pure vein of life, hitherto hidden from men's eyes...

...The message of universal love that he breathed rather than preached, embraced everything, great and small, gracious things or unseemly things alike...

...But for one who can turn his back upon the struggle, and defeat its exorbitant demands by a retrenchment of his own requirements for happiness, a thousand must fight on, with little heart for the fight, consoling themselves for the happiness that has been put out of their reach by such a Thebaide, as, God be thanked, every man may erect in his own heart...

...To ascribe one besetting vice to each epoch is poor and unscientific history...

...Men like Columbus and Dante Alighieri wore it next their body as a protective against their dominant passion...

...William James has identified as our great racial failing the "fear of poverty,'' and has shown, conclusively as was his wont, how, even among those who refuse consistently to bow the knee to Mammon, this fear and respect for alien values is cheating us of a heritage of joy and pleasure that might be ours for the asking...

...Everything is bearable when everything is felt as passing...

...To him," says Misciatelli, "the meanest of living creatures taught their lesson of humility...

...Occasional rebels make their gesture of dissent, and withdraw to garrets and cellars...

...In every age the Decalogue —regarded from the point of view of its infractions— has received pretty fair and equable treatment at the hands of the world...

...Piero Misciatelli, one of the most eloquent of the Saint's modern panegyrists, puts the case very well when he tells us that Francis taught men how in the midst of poverty they might be rich—and offered as compensation to those who had few earthly goods, all the treasures of the poets and the saints...

...Spring-water inebriated him with its beauty...

...What was the secret of this Umbrian apostle...

...It is to such harassed souls, far more numerous than the obliterations of our modern day allow men to guess, that the message of Francis comes home with its full force and consolation...

...or if they are very lucky, to as much of the countryside as acquisitiveness has left unspoiled...

...Were he living today there is not the slightest doubt he would intone a canticle to little brother steam and little brother turbine...

...It must be evident that any particular set of circumstances, inherent in the spirit of any particular age, which tends to depress the virtue, adds enormously to the volume and distribution of the vice...

...The occasion will be worthily observed in New York by the assembling of delegates from all over the world, representing the famous Third Order which was the Saint's great legacy to the world...

...When so many bankers and bond-houses, advocates of thrift and foresight, apostles of the sound mind in a sound body, peddlers of superficial culture to be culled from printed scrap-books of the world's wisdom, authorities on social usages and broadcasters of uplift, discard the many worthy motives that might suggest themselves and address the acquisitive instinct alone—when bigger payrolls, better jobs, higher social consideration and more leisure to "enjoy the good things of life" make up the vision that they hold before eyes of youthful "prospects"—it is evident that, in the minds of the very shrewd and instructed men who write these things, there is no doubt upon which side of its instincts the present generation is most accessible...

...Its infiltrations are so stealthy, it has so eminent a faculty for vitiating and turning to its own ends instincts in themselves respectable, that it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line that will leave vice on one side and virtue on the other...

...The remedy he proposed was simple, but deadly hard to achieve...

...What he asked for was a faith transformed into action...

...Below it, all falls into ruin and decay...

...For, then as now, human wills reared the obstacle that prevents the intellect from regarding truth, steadily and whole...

...Everything the poor man sees around him enforces the bitter lesson of failure, the sense almost of being a creature living in another age...

...It is doing our present age no injustice to see in it a quite remarkable and universal subscription to the evil principle of covetousness...

...The god of "getting on" need regard no sanctuary as inviolable when all are secured to him in advance...

...The most deadly indictment that can be brought against our present mechanical and material age, is not so much that it has rendered money necessary in order for life to be enjoyed—this has always been so more or less—but that it has made the getting of money a necessity if life is to be endured...

...Nevertheless, if there are not besetting sins in each generation, there are at least what might be called overtopping ones...

...Too often the indignation is not forthcoming because the faculty that supplies it has been deadened by familiarity with the same spirit evidenced in petty and trivial aspects...

...He had the rapture in every phase of life, so long as it be innocent of moral offense, that only comes to the man who realizes fully the transient nature of his pilgrimage...

...Although the actual celebration is still some months ahead, this does not seem a bad moment, coming, as it does, so soon after the day on which the world chooses to close one yearly instalment of its effort and to label it with the date it will bear through history, for us to regard the lesson of Saint Francis and speculate how it comes about that a life, which inverted all the values by which men assess success or failure, has never ceased to exercise an attraction which seems to grow stronger instead of weaker the further the age recedes from its ideals...

...Sinclair Lewis has so eloquently and justly termed "the holy simplicities of all the world" are put out of the poor man's reach today because the rich man, and the man who would be rich, adjudge them worthless...

...Concealing its ugly face under the mask of a good many reputable and unassailable impulses, progress, social betterment and what not, the desire to "get," to possess and amass, threatens to become the mainspring of social life...

...and because it is the standards that the rich and covetous erect which govern production...

...But that covetousness is omnipresent, and that its work in supplying unworthy motives for acts in themselves innocent and even meritorious, threatens to amount to a positive undermining of the national integrity, is as plain as daylight...

...There was never the slightest hatred in his heart, even for the things that righteousness seems to give us license to hate...

...What stands out in Francis's life is the entire absence of a sense of personal possession, an entire contentment with the proprietary rights he shared in common with his fellow mortals...

...The harsh Franciscan cord became a symbol of royalty in the escutcheon of kings...

...Ancient wisdom furnishes us with a catalogue of capital sins and capital virtues which roughly balance one another...

...A level of material achievement is drawn, quite arbitrary, and in no way essential to human happiness, since generations of men have been happy without it...