Chesterton has rekindled for us the medieval spirit, with its buoyancy, its childlike soul, its pervasive faith, and he has made us see St. Francis in the light of that spirit...

"Mr. Chesterton's portrait is a thing of beauty. We see St. Francis in his humanity, in his boyish freedom from self-consciousness, in his astounding suddenness of action, in his poetic simplicity. He was the earliest of the Italian poets, who talked familiarly with flowers and streams and birds, and even called the wolf his 'brother? With a kind of divine abandon he gave himself up to the service of the poor, happy in possessing nothing. He loved God and all the works of His hands with a love so personal and so absorbing that this cold-hearted age of ours cannot begin to comprehend it.

"To read this fascinating little book is to see something newly appealing in St. Francis-and in Gilbert Chesterton."