a lay monk as a model
for 20th century Christians who long to devote their lives to uplifting
their fellow-men? Did he not note the artificiality of asceticism--the
waste of energy that comes with fasts and mortification of the flesh and
morbidly pious excitement? When asked these questions by his followers
he replied that he did not mean to preach asceticism as a rule for all;
but that in individual cases like Benedetto's, for instance, it was a
psychological necessity. Herein Signor Fogazzaro certainly discloses his
profound knowledge of the Italian heart--of that heart from which in
its early medieval vigour sprang the Roman religion, with its message
of renunciation. Even the Renaissance and the subsequent period of
scepticism have not blotted out those tendencies that date back more
than a thousand years: so that today, if an Italian is engulfed in a
passion of self-sacrifice, he naturally thinks first of asceticism as
the method. Among Northern races a similar religious experience does
not suggest hair shirts and debilitating pious orgies (except among
Puseyites and similar survivals from a different epoch); it suggests
active work, like that of General Booth of the Salvation Army.

No one can gainsay, however, the superb artistic effects which Signor
Fogazzaro attains through his Saint's varied experiences. He causes to
pass before you all classes of society,--from the poorest peasant of
the Subiaco hills, to duchesses and the Pope himself,--some incredulous,
some mocking, some devout, some hesitating, some spell-bound, in the
presence of a holy man. The fashionable ladies wish to take him up and
make a lion of him; the superstitious kiss the hem of his garment and
believe that he can work miracles, or, in a sudden revulsion, they
jeer him and drive him away with stones. And what a panorama of
ecclesiastical life in Italy! What a collection of priests and monks and
prelates, and with what inevitableness one after another turns the cold
shoulder on the volunteer who dares to assert that the test of religion
is conduct! There is an air of mystery, of intrigue, of secret messages
passing to and fro--the atmosphere of craft which has hung round the
ecclesiastical institution so many, many centuries. Few scenes in modern
romance can match Benedetto's interview with the Pope--he pathetic
figure who, you feel, is in sad truth a prisoner, not of the Italian
Government, but of the crafty, able, remorseless cabal of cardina