The patriarch of Israel, asleep near Bethel, had already divined this: the God who passes by tells his name only to those who stop him and do him violence to learn it.

He blesses only after long hours of conflict.
The gospel has found an untranslatable word to characterize the prayers of Jesus, it compares the conflict which preceded the voluntary immolation of Christ to the death-struggle: _Factus in agonia_.[6] We might say of his life that it had been a long temptation, a struggle, a prayer, since these words only express different moments of spiritual activity.
Like their Master, the disciples and successors of Christ can conquer their own souls only through perseverance.

But these words, empty of meaning for devout conventicles, have had a tragic sense for men of religious genius.
Nothing is more false, historically, than the saints that adorn our churches, with their mincing attitude, their piteous expression, that indescribably anaemic and emaciated--one may almost say emasculated--air which shows in their whole nature; they are pious seminarists brought up under the direction of St.Alphonso di Liguori or of St.Louis di Gonzagua; they are not saints, not the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force.
We have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of Francis--his relations with diabolical powers.

Customs and ideas have so profoundly changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and his relations with men, that it is almost impossible to picture to oneself the enormous place which the thought of demons occupied at that time in the minds of men.
The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in the endeavor to tempt men and cause them to fall into his snares.

Even in the sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no more doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery, conjurations, or possessions.[7] Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness, whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to a higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel.
They found it in the conflict of the demons with God.
The devil is the prince of the demons, as God is the prince of the angels; capable of all transformations, they carry on to the end of time terrible battles which will end in the victory of God, but meantime each man his whole life long is contended for by these two adversaries, and the noblest souls are naturally the most disputed.
This is how St.Francis, with all men of his time, explained the disquietudes, terrors, anguish, with which his heart was at times assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general his soul was bathed.