Let us hear what the documents give us, and not seek to do them violence, to wrest from them what they do not tell, what they cannot tell.
They show us Francis distressed for the future of the Order, and with an infinite desire for new spiritual progress.
He was consumed with the fever of saints, that need of immolation which wrung from St.Theresa the passionate cry, "Either to suffer or to die!" He was bitterly reproaching himself with not having been found worthy of martyrdom, not having been able to give himself for Him who gave himself for us.
We touch here upon one of the most powerful and mysterious elements of the Christian life.

We may very easily not understand it, but we may not for all that deny it.

It is the root of true mysticism.[14] The really new thing that Jesus brought into the world was that, feeling himself in perfect union with the heavenly Father, he called all men to unite themselves to him and through him to God: "I am the vine, and ye are the branches; he who abides in me and I in him brings forth much fruit, for apart from me ye can do nothing." The Christ not only preached this union, he made it felt.

On the evening of his last day he instituted its sacrament, and there is probably no sect which denies that communion is at once the symbol, the principle, and the end of the religious life.

For eighteen centuries Christians who differ on everything else cannot but look with one accord to him who in the upper chamber instituted the rite of the new times.
The night before he died he took the bread and brake it and distributed it to them, saying, "TAKE AND EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY." Jesus, while presenting union with himself as the very foundation of the new life,[15] took care to point out to his brethren that this union was before all things a sharing in his work, in his struggles, and his sufferings: "Let him that would be my disciple take up his cross and follow me." St.Paul entered so perfectly into the Master's thought in this respect that he uttered a few years later this cry of a mysticism that has never been equalled: "I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live ...