in the western church. In 1210 he had eleven followers, who lived with him in a solitary cell in Assisi, and whom he sent out from time to time, two by two, to preach in the surrounding country. He had now conceived the design of founding a new order, and he drew up for himself and these eleven a "rule," which he took to Rome to submit to the approbation of Pope Innocent III. He proposed for the members of the new society the humble name of Fratres Minores; and the two main provisions of the rule were—that the brethren should live to preach, and that they should beg to live. The pope at first gave only an oral sanction to the rule, but this was sufficient to obtain for it a footing in the church. In 1212 the members were despatched in pairs into different parts of Italy, and the order was joined by numerous recruits in Perugia, Cortona, Pisa, Florence, and other cities. Its first convent was erected in Cortona. Inspired with fervent zeal for the extension as well as the revival of the church, Francis sent six of the brethren as missionaries to the infidels of Morocco; but they all perished in the enterprise. Nothing daunted, he resolved to repair to Africa himself, and proceeded as far as Spain on his way; but he was prevented by illness from persevering in the attempt. Meanwhile the new brotherhood spread rapidly in Italy. In the fourth Lateran synod of 1215, it received an additional oral sanction along with the somewhat similar new order of St. Dominic; and in 1216 it held its first general congregation, which was attended by Cardinal Hugolino, who was afterwards Pope Gregory IX. At this congregation it was determined to send brethren as missionaries into all lands. In 1219, when the next congregation met, the number of members who attended is said to have amounted to five thousand (though this is probably an exaggeration), and new missionaries were sent forth, not only into Spain, France, England, Germany, Hungary, and Greece, but also into Egypt and other parts of Africa. St. Francis himself set off to the East, where he was for some time kept a prisoner by the Saracens. In 1223 he succeeded in obtaining for the order from Pope Honorius III. the formal and definitive sanction of the church. He died on the 6th of October of the following year at Assisi, not long after the alleged miracle of the infliction on his body of the wounds of Christ; and as early as 1228 he was canonized by Gregory IX. In twenty-four years after his death his order numbered two hundred thousand friars, distributed into twenty-three provinces, and occupying eight thousand monasteries.—P. L.
FRANCIS de Borgia, Saint, third general of the order of jesuits, duke of Gandia, born at the town of that name in the province of Valencia, Spain, in 1510. He rose to distinction at the court of Charles V., and was created viceroy of Catalonia; but on the loss of his wife, Leonor de Castro, in 1546, he resolved to forsake all worldly pursuits in order to enter the order of the jesuits. The emperor granted permission, and the pope, Paul III., allowed him to retain his title and administer his estates until his children should be grown up. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order, well aware of the important services which a man of his rank might render, intrusted to him the mission of establishing seminaries throughout the peninsula. He visited Charles V. in his retirement, and it is said was intrusted by that monarch with a secret embassy to Portugal, with a view to the union of the two kingdoms. In 1565, on the death of Lainez, the second general of the order, he succeeded to the vacant post, and though possessed of less ability than his two predecessors, he administered the affairs of the order in such a way as greatly to consolidate its power. He founded a noviciate of the order at Rome; he organized and extended its missions; he improved its methods of instruction, and preserved a severe discipline among the members. In his personal habits he was ascetic to an extreme degree. He was sent in 1565, by Pope Pius V., to the courts of Spain, Portugal, and France, to incite the several governments to resist the growing power of the Turks, but unsuccessfully. He returned ill to Rome, and died there Ist October, 1572. He has written several ascetic works in Spanish, which have been translated into Latin by Alphonso Deza, the jesuit. There are several lives of Francis of Borgia—by A. Schotte, Rome, 1596; by Ribadeneyra, Madrid 1605; and by V Cepari, Rome, 1624. He received canonization in 1625.—F. M. W.
FRANCIS de Sales, was born at Sales, the chateau of his family, near Annecy in Savoy, on the 27th August, 1567. He at first studied law, but in 1593 became a priest of the Roman catholic church. Born and dwelling near scenes where protestantism had recently achieved the most mighty triumphs, Francis de Sales devoted himself with the most ardent zeal and the most strenuous effort to the conversion of protestants. Herein, we are assured by Roman catholic writers, he was eminently successful. He had even the ambition to convert the patriarch of protestantism, Theodore Beza, himself. Beza, in several conferences at Geneva, received Francis courteously; but the conferences were, as they might have been expected to be, resultless. In 1602 Francis was appointed bishop of Geneva—a title, however, and an office giving no control over the immediate Genevese district. The same year he went to Paris, and preached at the court of Henry IV. with immense acceptance. At Dijon he made in 1604 the acquaintance of madame de Chantal, a somewhat fanatical personage, co-operating with whom he subsequently founded the religious order of Visitation. Henry IV. wished to attract Francis de Sales into France by an offer of the highest dignities, but Francis persistently refused to be tempted. His visits, however, to Paris were renewed. In 1608 appeared his "Introduction to a Holy Life," which went through numerous editions, and is still a Roman catholic manual of devotion. His "Treatise on the Love of God," published in 1614, was received with still louder and more general applause. As writer, as preacher, as a founder of religious orders, as an apostle of mercy equally indefatigable, Francis began to decline in strength at a comparatively early age. He had gone to meet the duke of Savoy at Avignon; and in returning he fell ill at Lyons, where he died on the 22nd November, 1622. The contemporary of Montaigne, Francis de Sales has been compared to that great writer for originality of style and charm of diction. But, from his mystical tendencies and evangelical fervour and simplicity, it would be more correct to compare him to Fenelon. Neither of these men, in spite of reputed saintliness and real charity, rose to a true notion of tolerance. Hence, notwithstanding abounding benevolence, the inconsistencies into which both were betrayed. The relations of madame de Chantal to Francis de Sales resembled those of Madame Guyon to Fenelon; and enemies were as ready to calumniate in the one case as in the other. The collected works of Francis de Sales have frequently been republished, and selections from them are common. He is affectionately and reverently called by the Roman catholics Saint Francis de Sales; and no doubt, from the beauty of his character, the opulence of his genius, his insinuating and invincible unction, he is one of the men of whom the Roman catholic church has most reason to be proud.—W. M—l.
FRANCIS of Paula, the founder of the order of the Eremites of St. Francis, or Fratres Minimi, was born in 1416, at Paula in the kingdom of Naples. His parents named him after St. Francis of Assisi, to whose intercession they ascribed his long wished-for birth; and at twelve years of age he was sent into the Franciscan monastery of St. Mark in Calabria. Even as a child he had manifested strong likings for a solitary, ascetic life, and in the monastery he went beyond all the friars in the severity of his obedience to the rule of his patron saint. After his year of probation was over, his parents took him on pilgrimage to Rome, Assisi, and other holy places, and before he was fourteen he settled himself in a solitary rock-cave on the seashore, where he gave himself up entirely to spiritual exercises, subsisting upon herbs and roots, and the offerings of the pious peasants who were attracted by the sight of his extraordinary devotion. He soon found himself at the head of a number of recluses, who came to him for guidance in spiritual life, and who built for themselves a chapel and a cell in the neighbourhood of his cave. In 1436 the archbishop of Cosenza sanctioned the erection of a cloister and church for what was already become a new and numerous order, to which its founder gave the name of the Eremites of St. Francis, and which aspired to go beyond even the Franciscan rule in strictness and severity. Francis himself slept upon the hard ground, never ate till after sunset, and often only every second day, and then frequently limiting himself to bread and water. The rigours of the new rule, however, did not prevent the formation of many establishments of Franciscan Eremites. The fame of the holy founder was spread over Europe, and monasteries of his order sprang up in France, Spain, and Germany. In 1474 his statutes were confirmed by Pope Sixtus IV. Alexander VI., who afterwards confirmed them in a somewhat altered form, changed the name of the
