each one
not to his own pleasures, ambition, or ease, but to that which shall best
advance a reign of truth, justice, and love on earth,--to this end he has
consecrated himself and all his powers. The path thus chosen is for
himself a hard one; circumstanced as our humanity is, it never has been
otherwise--never shall be so while these heavens and this earth remain.
Mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and
vanities of the world, lie very lightly on a nature like Savonarola's,
and such things scarcely enter into the pain and hardness of his chosen
lot. It is the opposition,--active, in the intrigues and machinations of
enemies both in Church and State--passive, in the dull cold hearts that
respond so feebly and fitfully to his appeals; it is the constant wearing
bitterness of hope deferred, the frequent still sterner bitterness of
direct disappointment,--it is things like these that make his cross so
heavy to bear. But they cannot turn him aside from his course--cannot
win him to lower his aim to something short of the highest good
conceivable by him. We may smile now in our days of so-called
enlightenment at some of the measures he directs in pursuance of his
great aim. His "Pyramid of Vanities" may be to our self-satisfied
complacency itself a vanity. To him it represents a stern reality of
reformation in character and life; and to the Florentine of his age it
symbolises one form of vain self-pleasing offered up in solemn willing
sacrifice to God.

One trial of his faith and steadfastness, long expected, comes on him at
last. The recognised head of that great organisation of which he is a
vowed and consecrated member declares against him, and the papal sentence
of excommunication goes forth. We, looking as we deem on the Papacy
trembling to its fall, can very imperfectly enter into the awful gravity
of this struggle. To us, the prohibition of an Alexander Borgia may seem
of small account, and his anathema of small weight in the councils of the
universe. But it was otherwise with Savonarola: the Monk-apostle,
trained and vowed to unqualified obedience, has thus forced on him the
most difficult problem of his time. This to him more than earthly
authority, the visible embodiment of the Divine on earth, the direct and
only representative of the one authority of God in Christ, has declared
his course to be a course of error and sin. Shall he accept or reject
the decision? To rej