From the CFSF list. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if my students could say the same about me?"

"What gave [Francis] extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the Sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him, in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document...He treated the whole mob of men as a mob of Kings."

-- G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (1923)