He does not offer sacrifice like the priest of the past time; he sacrifices himself, and carries in his body all the woes of humanity.
The more beautiful are these words from the mystical point of view, the less do they correspond with what is expected in a Rule; they have neither the precision nor the brief and imperative forms of one.

The transformations which they were to undergo in order to become the code of 1223 were therefore fatal when we consider the definitive intervention of the Church of Rome to direct the Franciscan movement.
It is probable that this rough draft of a Rule, such as we have it now, is that which was distributed in the chapter of Whitsunday, 1221.

The variants, sometimes capital, which are found in the different texts, can be nothing other than outlines of the corrections proposed by the provincial ministers.

Once admit the idea of considering this document as a rough draft, we are very soon brought to think that it had already undergone a rapid preliminary revision, a sort of pruning, in which ecclesiastical authority has caused to disappear all that was in flagrant contradiction with its own projects for the Order.
If it is asked, who could have made these curtailments, one name springs at once to our lips--Ugolini.

He criticised its exaggerated proportions, its want of unity and precision.