Crossing its threshold, Clara doubtless experienced that feeling, at once so sweet and so poignant, of the wife who for the first time enters her husband's house, trembling with emotion at the radiant and confused vision of the future.
If we are not entirely to misapprehend these beginnings, we must remember with what rapidity external influences transformed the first conception of St.Francis.At this moment he no more expected to found a second order than he had desired to found the first one.

In snatching Clara from her family he had simply acted like a true knight who rescues an oppressed woman, and takes her under his protection.

In installing her at St.Damian he was preparing a refuge for those who desired to imitate her and apart from the world practise the gospel Rule.

But he never thought that the perfection of which he and his disciples were the apostles and missionaries, and which Clara and her companions were to realize in celibacy, was not practicable in social positions also; thence comes what is wrongly called the _Tertiari_, or Third Order, and which in its primitive thought was not separated from the first.

This Third Order had no need to be instituted in 1221, for it existed from the moment when a single conscience resolved to practise his teachings, without being able to follow him to Portiuncula.[12] The enemy of the soul for him as for Jesus was avarice, understood in its largest sense--that is to say, that blindness which constrains men to consecrate their hearts to material preoccupations, makes them the slave of a few pieces of gold or a few acres of land, renders them insensible to the beauties of nature, and deprives them of infinite joys which they alone can know who are the disciples of poverty and love.
Whoever was free at heart from all material servitude, whoever was decided to live without hoarding, every rich man who was willing to labor with his hands and loyally distribute all that he did not consume in order to constitute the common fund which St.Francis called _the Lord's table_, every poor man who was willing to work, free to resort, in the strict measure of his wants, to this table of the Lord, these were at that time true Franciscans.
It was a social revolution.
There was then at that time neither one Order nor several.[13] The gospel of the Beatitudes had been found again, and, as twelve centuries before, it could accommodate itself to all situations.
Alas! the Church, personified by Cardinal Ugolini, was about, if not to cause the Franciscan movement to miscarry, at least so well to hedge about it that a few years later it would have lost nearly its whole original character.
As has been seen, the word poverty expresses only very imperfectly St.
Francis's point of view, since it contains an idea of renunciation, of _abstinence_, while in thought the vow of poverty is a vow of liberty.
Property is the cage with gilded wires, to which the poor larks are sometimes so thoroughly accustomed that they no longer even think of getting away in order to soar up into the blue.[14] From the beginning St.Damian was the extreme opposite to what a convent of Clarisses of the strict observance is now; it is still to-day very much as Francis saw it.