The rout of an army is nothing in comparison with the overthrow of an idea; and in him an idea had been incarnated, the idea of peace and happiness restored to mankind, by the victory of love over the trammels of material things.
By an ineffable mystery he felt himself the Man of his age, him in whose body are borne all the efforts, the desires, the aspirations of men; with him, in him, by him humanity yearns to be renewed, and to use the language of the gospel, born again.
In this lies his true beauty.

By this, far more than by a vain conformity, an exterior imitation, he is a Christ.
He also bears the affliction of the world, and if we will look into the very depths of his soul we must give this word affliction the largest possible meaning for him as for Jesus.

By their pity they bore the physical sufferings of humanity, but their overwhelming anguish was something far different from this, it was the birth-throes of the divine.

They suffer, because in them the Word is made flesh, and at Gethsemane, as under the olive-trees of Greccio, they are in agony "because their own received them not." Yes, St.Francis forever felt the travail of the transformation taking place in the womb of humanity, going forward to its divine destiny, and he offered himself, a living oblation, that in him might take place the mysterious palingenesis.
Do we now understand his pain?
He was trembling for the mystery of the gospel.

There is in him something which reminds us of the tremor of life when it stands face to face with death, something by so much the more painful as we have here to do with moral life.
This explains how the man who would run after ruffians that he might make disciples of them could be pitiless toward his fellow-laborers who by an indiscreet, however well-intentioned, zeal forgot their vocation and would transform their Order into a scientific institute.
Under pretext of putting learning at the service of God and of religion, the Church had fostered the worst of vices, pride.