As, with your face towards Spello, you follow the windings of the Via
Francesca, you will find the little church of St. Damian's on the slope
of the hill outside the city walls. It is reached by a few minutes' walk
over a stony path, shaded with olive-trees, amid odors of lavender and
rosemary. 'Standing on the top of a hillock, the entire plain is visible
through a curtain of cypresses and pines which seem to be trying to hide
the humble hermitage and set up an ideal barrier between it and the
world.' Francis was particularly fond of this wooded walk and of the
sanctuary to which it led. In pensive moments, when it was more than
usually evident to him that, with all his merriment, he had not yet
discovered the fountain of true gladness, he turned his face this way.
The crucifix at St. Damian's--which is still preserved in the sacristy
of Santa Chiara--has features peculiarly its own. It differs from other
images of the kind: 'In most of the sanctuaries of the twelfth century,
the Crucified One, frightfully lacerated, with bleeding wounds, appears
to seek to inspire only grief and compunction; that of St. Damian, on
the contrary, has an expression of unutterable calm and gentleness;
instead of closing the eyelids in eternal surrender to the weight of
suffering, it looks down in self-forgetfulness, and its pure, clear gaze
says, not "_See how I suffer!_" but "_Come unto Me!_"'
That, at any rate, is what it said to Francis on that memorable day.
With an empty and a hungry heart he kneeled before it. 'O Lord Jesus,'
he cried, 'shed Thy light upon the darkness of my mind!' And then an
extraordinary thing happened. The Saviour to whom he prayed was no
longer an inanimate image; but a living Person! 'An answer seemed to
come from the tender eyes that looked down on him from the Cross,' says
Canon Adderley. 'Jesus heard his cry, and Francis accepted the dear Lord
as his Saviour and Master. A real spiritual union took place between him
and his Divine Lord. He took Him for better for worse, for richer for
poorer, till death and after death, for ever.' 'This vision marks,'
Sabatier says, 'the final triumph of Francis. His union with Christ is
consummated; from this time he can exclaim with the mystics of every
age, "My beloved is mine and I am His." From that day the remembrance of
the Crucified One, the thought of the love which had triumphed in
immolating itself, became the very center of his religious life, the
soul of his soul. For the first time, Francis had been brought into
direct, personal, intimate contact with Jesus Christ.' 'It was,' Canon
Adderley says again, 'no mere intellectual acceptance of a theological
proposition, but an actual self-committal to the Person of Jesus; no
mere sentimental feeling of pity for the sufferings of Christ, or of
comfort in the thought that, through those sufferings, he could secure a
place in a future heaven, but a real, brave assumption of the Cross, an
entering into the fellowship of the Passion of Christ, a determination
to suffer with Him and to spend and be spent in His service.'
Francis never forgot that moment. His whole soul overflowed with the
intensity of his affection for his Saviour. To the end of his days he
could never think of the Cross without tears; yet he never knew whether
those tears were prompted by admiration, pity, or desire.
When he arose and left the little sanctuary, he felt, as Bunyan's
pilgrim felt, that he had lost his load, and lost it for ever.
But he felt that he had assumed another. He had taken up the Cross. He
had devoted himself to its service. '_God forbid_,' he cried, '_that I
should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the
world is crucified unto me and I unto the world._' When, five centuries
later, Isaac Watts surveyed the wondrous Cross on which the Prince of
Glory died, his contemplation led to the same resolve:
Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.
And so, once more, without knowing the words, Francis sang in his soul
that song of consecration.
'_I looked and looked and looked again!_' say Francis and Spurgeon, six
centuries apart.
'_It was very surprising to me that the sight of the Cross should thus
ease me of my burden!_' say Francis and Bunyan, with four centuries
between.
'_Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast save in the death of Christ my
God!_' cry Francis and Isaac Watts, undivided by a chasm of five hundred
years.
In the presence of the Cross all the lands are united and all the ages
seem as one.
V
'_God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world._'
In the one cross Francis saw--as Paul did--three crucifixions.
He saw on the Cross _his Lord crucified for him_.
He saw on the Cross _the world crucified to him_.
He saw on the Cross _himself crucified to the world_.
From that hour Francis knew nothing among men save Jesus Christ and Him
crucified. Laying aside the gay clothing of which he was so fond, he
donned a peasant's cloak and tied it at the waist with a piece of
cord--the garb that afterwards became the habit of the Franciscan Order.
He then set out to initiate the greatest religious revival and the
greatest missionary movement of the mediæval ages--the enterprise that
paved the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation. Beginning at his
native town, he journeyed through the classic cities of Italy, unfolding
to all sorts and conditions of men the wonders of the Cross. Although
the hideous sight and loathsome smell of leprosy had always filled him
with unconquerable disgust, he gladly ministered to the lepers, in the
hope that, by so doing, he might impart to them the infinite
consolations of the Cross. Worn as he soon became, he set out to tramp
from land to land in order that he might proclaim through Europe and
Asia the matchless message of the Cross. In his walks through the lonely
woods he loved to proclaim to the very birds the story of the Cross. It
is another link with Bunyan. Bunyan felt that he should like to tell the
crows on the ploughed fields the story of his soul's salvation; but
Francis actually did it. He would sit down in the forest: wait until the
oaks and beeches and elms about him were filled with sparrows and
finches and wrens; and then tell of the dying love of Him who made them.
And, as they flew away, he loved to fancy that they formed themselves
into a cross-shaped cloud above him, and that the songs that they sang
were the rapt expression of their adoring worship. In his long
journeyings he was often compelled to subsist on roots and nuts and
berries. Meeting a kindred spirit in the woods he one day suggested that
they should commune together. His companion looked about him in
bewilderment. But Francis pointed to a rock. 'See!' he said, 'the rock
shall be our altar; the berries shall be our bread; the water in the
hollow of the rock shall be our wine!' It took very little to turn the
thoughts of Francis to the Cross; he easily lifted his soul into
communion with the Crucified. Whenever and wherever Francis opened his
lips, the Cross was always his theme. 'He poured into my heart the
sweetness of Christ!' said his most eminent convert, and thousands could
have said the same. Feeling the magnitude of his task and the meagerness
of his powers, he called upon his converts to assist him, and sent them
out, two by two, to tell of the ineffable grace of the Cross. In
humanness and common sense he founded his famous Order. His followers
were to respect domestic ties; they were to regard all work as
honorable, and to return an equivalent in labor for all that they
received. They were to husband their own powers; to regard their bodies
as sacred, and on no account to exhaust their energies in needless
vigils and fastings. The grey friars soon became familiar figures in
every town in Europe. They endured every conceivable privation and dared
every form of danger in order that, like their founder, they might tell
of the deathless love of the Cross.
Francis himself did not live long to lead them; but in death as in life
his eyes were on the Cross. Fifty of his disciples knelt around his bed
at the last. He begged them to read to him the 19th chapter of John's
gospel--the record of the Crucifixion. 'In living or in dying,' he said,
'_God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ!_'