Leo, the saint's favourite disciple and companion on Mount Alverno at the time, which describes the circumstances of the stigmatization; Elias of Cortona, the acting superior, wrote on the day after his death a circular letter wherein he uses language clearly implying that he had himself seen the Stigmata, and there is a considerable amount of contemporary authentic second hand evidence.
But his task in the south was doubtless rather that of an organizer, and a kind of circular letter has come down to us which was addressed by Patrick, Auxilius and Iserninus, to all the clergy of the island.
Many of the Massachusetts revolutionary documents, including the famous "Massachusetts Resolves" and the circular letter to the legislatures of the other colonies, are from his pen; but owing to the fact that he usually acted as clerk to the House of Representatives and to the several committees of which he was a member, documents were written by him which expressed the ideas of the committee as a whole.
The predominance of this somewhat recondite teaching gave to these epistles even more the character of treatises, which in the case of Ephesians is further enhanced by the fact that it is probably a circular letter addressed not to a single church but to a group of churches.
And the objections to Ephesians are considerably reduced when it is taken as a circular letter.
