rinal reformer before the reformation; but his eyes,
too, were first opened to the doctrinal errors of the Roman
Church by joining in a great national and patriotic movement
against the alien domination and extortion of the Church.
The Bohemian revolt, made famous by the name of John Huss,
was quite as much political and social as religious.
Savonarola was a great democrat as well as a religious
prophet. In his famous interview with the dying Lorenzo de
Medici he made three demands as a condition for granting
absolution. Of the man he demanded a living faith in God's
mercy. Of the millionaire he demanded restitution of his
ill-gotten wealth. Of the political usurper he demanded the
restoration of the liberties of the people of Florence. It
is significant that the dying sinner found it easy to assent
to the first, hard to assent to the second, and impossible
to concede the last.

#Locusts and Wild Honey#

This proletarian strain in Christianity goes back to a time long
before Jesus; it seems to have been inherent in the religious
character of the Jews--that stubborn independence, that stiff-necked
insistence on the right of a man to interview God for himself and to
find out what God wants him to do; also the inclination to find that
God wants him to oppose earthly rulers and their plundering of the
poor. What is it that gives to the Bible the vitality it has today?
Its literary style? To say that is to display the ignorance of the
cultured; for elevation of style is a by-product of passionate
conviction; it is what the Jewish writers had to say, and not the way
they said it, that has given them their hold upon mankind. Was it
their insistence upon conscience, their fear of God as the beginning
of wisdom? But that same element appears in the Babylonian psalms,
which are as eloquent and as sincere as those of the Hebrews, yet are
read only by scholars. Was it their sense of the awful presence of
divinity, of the soul immortal in its keeping? The Egyptians had that
far more than the Hebrews, and yet we do not cherish their religious
books. Or was it the love of man for all things living, the lesson of
charity upon which the Catholics lay such stress? The gentle Buddha
had that, and had it long before Christ; also his priests had
metaphysical subtlety, greater than that of John the Apostle or Thomas
Aquinas.

No, there is one thing and one only w