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 reject, is to break with the supposed tradition of fourteen centuries, and with all his own past training, predilections, and habits of thought; it is to nullify his own voluntary act of the past, accepting implicit obedience, and to go forth on a path which has thenceforth no outward guidance, light, or stay.  To accept, is to break with all his own truest and deepest past, to abandon all that for him gives truth and reality to life, and to retire to his cell, and limit his attention thenceforth—­if he can—­to making the “salvation” of his own soul secure.  We may safely esteem that this is the culminating struggle of his life.  We may well understand the solemn pause that ensues, the retirement to solitude, there to review the position before the only court of appeal that remains to him,—­that inward voice of conscience, that inward sense of right, which is the immediate presence of God within.  But we never doubt what the decision will be.  “I must obey God rather than man; I cannot recognise that this voice—­even of God’s vicegerent—­is the voice of God.  Necessity is laid on me, which I dare not gainsay, to preach this Gospel of God’s kingdom, as, even on earth, a kingdom of righteousness, truth, and love.”