Sometimes they will draw away with them hundreds of imitators, to the solitudes of Clairvaux, of the Chartreuse, of Vallombrosa, of the Camaldoli; but even when they are a multitude they are alone; for they are dead to the world and to their brethren.

Each cell is a desert, on whose threshold they cry O beata solitudo.
O sola beatitudo.
The book of the Imitation is the picture of all that is purest in this cloistered life.
But is this abstinence from action truly Christian?
No, replied St.Francis.He for his part would do like Jesus, and we may say that his life is an imitation of Christ singularly more real than that of Thomas a Kempis.
Jesus went indeed into the desert, but only that he might find in prayer and communion with the heavenly Father the inspiration and strength necessary for keeping up the struggle against evil.

Far from avoiding the multitude, he sought them out to enlighten, console, and convert them.
This is what St.Francis desired to imitate.

More than once he felt the seduction of the purely contemplative life, but each time his own spirit warned him that this was only a disguised selfishness; that one saves oneself only in saving others.
When he saw suffering, wretchedness, corruption, instead of fleeing he stopped to bind up, to heal, feeling in his heart the surging of waves of compassion.

He not only preached love to others; he himself was ravished with it; he sang it, and what was of greater value, he lived it.
There had indeed been preachers of love before his day, but most generally they had appealed to the lowest selfishness.