“Conform your life to that image, my daughter; make your sorrow an offering; and when the fire of divine charity burns within you, and you behold the need of your fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will not call your offering great.  You have carried yourself proudly, as one who held herself not of common blood or of common thoughts; but you have been as one unborn to the true life of man.  What! you say your love for your father no longer tells you to stay in Florence?  Then, since that tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion; you are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her young.  If the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love, without obligation.  See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history of a great redemption, in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his own place and among his own people!  If you held that faith, my beloved daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness.  You would feel that Florence was the home of your soul as well as your birthplace, because you would see the work that was given you to do there.  If you forsake your place, who will fill it?  You ought to be in your place now, helping in the great work by which God will purify Florence and raise it to be the guide of the nations.  What! the earth is full of iniquity—­full of groans—­the light is still struggling with a mighty darkness, and you say, ’I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst them asunder; I will go where no man claims me?’ My daughter, every bond of your life is a debt:  the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else.  In vain will you wander over the earth; you will be wandering forever away from the right.”

Romola hesitates, she pleads that her brother Dino forsook his home to become a monk, and that possibly Savonarola may be wrong.  He then appeals to her conscience, and assures her that she has assumed relations and duties which cannot be broken from on any plea.  The human ties are forever sacred; there can exist no causes capable of annulling them.

“You are a wife.  You seek to break your ties in self-will and anger, not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them.  The higher life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law.  That seems hard to you.  It is the portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness.  And the symbol of it hangs before you.  That wisdom is the religion of the cross.  And you stand aloof from it; you are a pagan; you have been taught to say, ’I am as the wise men who lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth was crucified.’  And that is your wisdom!  To be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose