IQ THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS. the first was grass, the second grain in the ear, the third will be the ripened wheat ; the first was water, the second wine, the third will be oil. Finally, the first belongs to the Father, creator of all things, the second to the Son, who assumed our mortal clay, the third will belong to the pure Holy Spirit.* It is a very curious fact that while Joachim's metaphysical subtleties respecting the Trinity were ostentatiously condemned as a dangerous heresy, no one seems at the time to have recognized the far more perilous conclusions to be drawn from these apoca- lyptic reveries. So far from being burned as heretical, they were prized by popes, and Joachim was honored as a prophet until his audacious imitators and followers developed the revolutionary doc- trines to which they necessarily led. To us, for the moment, their chief significance lies in the proof which they afford that the most pious minds confessed that Christianity was practically a failure. Mankind had scarce grown better under the Xew Law. Vices and passions were as unchecked as they had been before the com- ing of the Redeemer. The Church itself was worldly and carnal ; in place of elevating man it had been dragged down to his level ; it had proved false to its trust and was the exemplar of evil rather than the pattern of good. To such men as Joachim it was impos- sible that crime and misery should be the ultimate and irremedi- able condition of human life, and yet the Atonement had thus far done little to bring it nearer to the ideal. Christianity, therefore, could not be a finality in man's existence upon earth; it was merely an intermediate condition, to be followed by a further de- velopment, in which, under the rule of the Holy Ghost, the law of love, fruitlessly inculcated by the gospel, should at last become the dominant principle, and men, released from carnal passions,
- Joachimi Concordiae Lib. i. Tract, ii. c. 6 ; it. 25, 26, 33; v. 2 21 60 65
66, 84. The Commission of Anagni in 1255 by a strained interpretation of a passage in the Concordia (n. i. 7) accused Joachim of having justified the schism of the Greeks (Denifle, Archiv f. Litt.- u. K. 1885, p. 120). So far was he from this that he never loses an occasion of decrying the Oriental Church, especiallv for the marriage of its priests (e. g., v. 70, 72). Yet when he asserted that Antichrist was already born in Rome, and it was objected to him that Babylon was assigned as the birthplace, he had no hesitation in saying that Rome was the mystical Babylon.— Rad. de Coggeshall Chron. (Bouquet, XVIII. 76).
