steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness.

The great Monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new "voice crying in the
wilderness" of selfishness and wrong around him--an impassioned witness
that "there is a God that judgeth in the earth," protesting by speech and
by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side.
To the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing
all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to God; merging all private
interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking 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