I bless all my brothers, all those who are already in the Order and all those who will enter it until the end of the world! And, as a sign of this blessing that I give them, and in memory of me, I leave them this testament: namely, that they must always love one another, as I have loved them and still love them, and that they must all love and honor our mistress, Lady Poverty, and that they must always faithfully obey the prelates and priests of Holy Mother Church. (Testament of Saint Francis)

Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)
Son of a wealthy merchant, he broke with the world and founded the order of Friars Minor in 1209

“From that cavern [of Saint Francis], that was a furnace of glowing gratitude and humility, there came forth one of the strongest and strangest and most original personalities that human history has known. He was, among other things, emphatically what we call a character; almost as we speak of a character in a good novel or play. He was not only a humanist but a humorist; a humorist especially in the old English sense of a man always in his humour, going his own way and doing what nobody else would have done. […] Francis of Assissi was slight in figure with that sort of slightness which, combined with so much vivacity, gives the impression of smallness. He was probably taller than he looked; middle-sized, his biographers say; he was certainly very active and, considering what he went through, must have been tolerably tough. He was of the brownish Southern colouring, with a dark beard thin and pointed such as appears in pictures under the hoods of elves; and his eyes glowed with the fire that fretted him night and day. […] Saint Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental pantheism. […] He did not call nature his mother; he called a particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister. If he had called a pelican his aunt or an elephant his uncle, as he might possibly have done, he would have still meant that they were particular creatures assigned by their Creator to particular places; not mere expressions of the evolutionary energy of things. That is where his mysticism is so close to the common sense of the child. A child has no difficulty about understanding that God made the dog and the cat; though he is aware that the making of dogs and cats out of nothing is a mysterious process beyond his own imagination. […] The popular instinct of Saint Francis, and his perpetual preoccupation with the idea of brotherhood, will be entirely misunderstood if it is understood in the sense of what is often called camaraderie; the blackslap[ping sort of brotherhood.] [What Saint Francis encouraged] was a camaraderie actually founded on courtesy. Even in that fairy borderland of his mere fancies about flowers and animals and even inanimate things, he retained this permanent posture of a sort of deference. […] When he was about to preach in a wood full of the chatter of birds, he said, with a gentle gesture, “Little sisters, if you have now had your say, it is time that I also should be heard.” And all the birds were silent; as I for one can very easily believe. […] He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. […] He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realize that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist.”

Chesterton (1874-1936)
Writer, journalist