[wood] an URSULINE EPIC la 



she learnt to write. Before this she had been dependent on the secre- 

 taries who willingly came to her from every walk of life. She became 

 an ambassador in bonds for the Pope. She went to Pisa and Lucca to 

 persuade these towns not to Join an anti-papal league. For the same 

 purpose she went to Florence, where a Papal Legate was flayed alive, and 

 where she just missed martyrdom herself in 1378, to a regret as poig- 

 nant as Togo felt because Tsushima denied him a victorious death. She 

 was sent as an Envoy Bxtraordinar}' to and from the Papal Court, on what 

 were practically international affairs; and at Avignon in 1376 she cer- 

 tainly became a self-appointed Minister Plenipotentiary, and gained her 

 ends by sheer moral suasion. This alone fixes her historical position 

 firmly within mediaeval times. It would almost be a modem parallel if 

 the Tzar Alexander II. had sent Father Jolin of Kronstadt to check- 

 mate Lord Beaconsfield at the Congi-ess of Berlin, and if Father John 

 had nominated himself into the chair for the two Peace Conferences at 

 Hague. 



By the irony of fate she failed only in world-politics. She bent all 

 her energies, she literally gave her very life, in a vain attempt to unite 

 Italy and the rest of Christendom round the universal Church, centred 

 in Eome and reformed from within. She did, indeed, do more than 

 anyone else to bring back Gregory XI. from Avignon; and Urban VL 

 began with a fury of reform. But the one had the velvet glove without 

 the gauntlet, and the other the gauntlet without the velvet glove. Be- 

 sides, the times were hopelessly out of course for the nice re-adjustment 

 of temporal and spiritual affairs from the obsolescent mediaeval point 

 of view. She was too late and too early for the work on which she had 

 set her heart. She was too late, because the age of St. Francis was the 

 last when any such scheme would have had a chance of acceptance 

 throughout all Christendom. She would have made an excellent Fran- 

 ciscan in all departments of woman's aid, from the revivalizing tours 

 wil^ the saint — which did, witliin the Church, what Methodists and 

 Salvationists have since done outside it — to the royal interview between 

 " Beatus ^gidius '' and St. Louis, whom she would have found a far 

 more kindred spirit than the other King of France to whom she wrote. 

 She was too early, because no Luther had yet aroused Loyola and 

 Theresa to lead a counter-reformation in that part of Christendom which 

 was naturally Eoman Catholic by temperament and circumstances. And, 

 in her own generation, she could have little affinity with the intellectual 

 Joachites, the followers of the holy Joachim da Fiore, who thought the 

 Church had not always been the same, and that it should develop dynami- 

 cally in adaptation to the needs of a changing world. The Joachites 

 were, in fact, empirical evolutionists, and not favoured by the upholders 



