Those children of the crusade also perished for an unknown ideal, false no doubt; but is it not better to die for an unknown and even a false ideal than to live for the vain realities of an utterly unpoetic existence?
In the end of time we shall be judged neither by philosophers nor by theologians, and if we were, it is to be hoped that even in this case love would cover a multitude of sins and pass by many follies.
Certainly if ever there was a time when religious affections of the nerves were to be dreaded, it was that which produced such movements as these.

All Europe seemed to be beside itself; women appeared stark naked in the streets of towns and villages, slowly walking up and down, silent as phantoms.[17] We can understand now the accounts which have come down to us, so fantastic at the first glance, of certain popular orators of this time; of Berthold of Ratisbon, for example, who drew together crowds of sixteen thousand persons, or of that Fra Giovanni Schio di Vicenza, who for a time quieted all Northern Italy and brought Guelphs and Ghibellines into one another's arms.[18] That popular eloquence which was to accomplish so many marvels in 1233 comes down in a straight line from the Franciscan movement.

It was St.
Francis who set the example of those open-air sermons given in the vulgar tongue, at street corners, in public squares, in the fields.
To feel the change which he brought about we must read the sermons of his contemporaries; declamatory, scholastic, subtile, they delighted in the minutiae of exegesis or dogma, serving up refined dissertations on the most obscure texts of the Old Testament, to hearers starving for a simple and wholesome diet.
With Francis, on the contrary, all is incisive, clear, practical.

He pays no attention to the precepts of the rhetoricians, he forgets himself completely, thinking only of the end desired, the conversion of souls.

And conversion was not in his view something vague and indistinct, which must take place only between God and the hearer.