• * * * * Mr. Seymour van Santvoord has
written a pleasant little
book upon Saint Francis, " the Christian exemplar," as he calls him, his principal object being apparently to draw the moral of the Franciscan life and to contrast it with the materialism- of to-day. He finds the first great quality of the saint in the entire sincerity with which he lived up to his ideals. Compared with many recent books of this kind,
van Santvoord's has, at any rate, the negative virtue
of abstaining from attacks upon the Church, which many writers accuse of perverting the Franciscan movement, while Utterly failing to see that compromise with the world was for the so-rapidly-expanding Order an indispensable con- dition for survival, as a certain measure of discipline and direction was for the avoidance of the grave dangers of schism and heiesy, which so seriously afflicted society in those days. When our author goes into particular details he is not always accurate, one example being his translation of the Praises of the Creatures, which contains all the old errors, consequent upon the romantic belief that Saint Francis called the elements " his brothers " and the lavish insertion of possessive pronouns, where they do not exist in the original. It is needless to say that when Saint Francis wrote " Brother Sun," " Sister Water," and so forth, he used the words Brother and Sister in a titular sense, namely, as Brothers in an Order, and did not claim that they' were in any way related to himself. But the book does not pretend to be a biography ; it should be regarded as a loving tribute to the Saint.
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