TERTIARIES, associations of ,lay folk in connection with the Mendicant Orders. The old monastic orders had had attached to their abbeys confraternities of lay men and women, who were made partakers in all the religious exercises and other good works of the community to which they were affiliated, and they were ex pected in return to protect and forward its interests; but they were not called upon to follow any special rule of life. The institution of Tertiaries arose out of the Franciscan movement. It seems to be certain that St. Francis at the beginning had no intention of forming his disciples into an Order, but only of making a great brotherhood of all those who were prepared to carry out in their lives certain of the greater and more arduous of the maxims of the Gospel. The formation of the Franciscan Order was necessitated by the success of the movement and the wonderful rapidity with which it spread. When the immediate disciples of the saint had be come an order bound by the religious vows, it became necessary to provide for the great body of laity, married men and women, who could not leave the world or abandon their avocatiops, but still were part of the Franciscan movement and desired to carry out in their lives its spirit and teaching. And so, probably in I 221, St. Francis drew up a Rule for those of his followers who were debarred from being members of the order of Friars Minor. At first they were called "Brothers and Sisters of the Order of Pen ance"; but later on, when the Friars were called the "First Order" and the nuns the "Second Order," the Order of Penance became the "Third Order of St. Francis"—whence the name Tertiaries. Immediately on its establishment in 1221 the Third Order spread with incredible rapidity. Everywhere it was con
nected closely with the First Order, and was under the control of the Friars Minor.
In time a tendency set in for members of the Third Order to live together in community, and in this way congregations were formed who took the usual religious vows and lived a fully organ ized religious life based on the Rule of the Third Order with sup plementary regulations. These congregations are the "Regular Tertiaries" as distinguished from the "Secular Tertiaries," who live in the world, according to the original idea. The Regular Tertiaries are in the full technical sense "religious," and there have been, and are, many congregations of them, both of men and of women. In 1883 Leo XIII. caused the rule to be recast and made more suitable for the present day.
There can be little doubt, whatever counter-claims may be set up, that the Third Order was one of St. Francis' creations, and that his Third Order was the exemplar after which the others were fashioned ; but at an early date the other Mendicant Orders formed Third Orders on the same lines, and so there came into being Dominican Tertiaries, and Carmelite, and Augustinian, and Ser vite, and also Premonstratensian, together with a large number of athers.