But let us wait!
One of America's greatest preachers was well past forty before he evolved abandon, swung himself clear, and put out for open sea. Uncertainty and anxiety are death to oratory.
In every monastery there are two classes of men—the religious, the sincere, the earnest, the austere; and the fat, lazy, profligate and licentious.
And the proportion of the first class to the second changes just in proportion as the monastery is successful—to succeed in Nature is to die. The fruit much loved by the sun rots first. The early monasteries were mendicant institutions, and for mendicancy to grow rich is an anomaly that carries a penalty. A successful beggar is apt to be haughty, arrogant, dictatorial—from a humble request for alms to a demand for your purse is but a step. In either case the man wants something that is not his—there are three ways to get it: earn it, beg it, seize it. The first method is absurd—to dig I am ashamed—the second, easy; the last is best of all, provided objection is not too strenuous. Beggars a-horseback are knights of the road.
That which comes easy, goes easy, and so it is the most natural thing in the world for a monk to become a connoisseur of wines, an expert gourmet, a sensualist who plays the limit. The monastic impulse begins in the beautiful desire for solitude—to be alone with God—and ere it runs its gamut dips deep into license and wallows in folly.
The austere monk leaves woman out, the other kind enslaves her: both are wrong, for man can never advance and leave woman behind. God never intended that man, made in His image, should be either a beast or a fool.
And here we are wiser than Savonarola—noble, honest and splendid man that he was. He saw the wickedness of the world and sought to shun it by fleeing to a monastery. There he saw the wickedness of the monastery, and there being no place to flee he sought to purify it. And at the same time he sought to purify and better the world by standing outside of the world.
The history of the Church is a history of endeavor to keep it from drifting into the thing it professes not to be—concrete selfishness. The Church began in humility and simplicity, and when it became successful, behold it became a thing of pomp, pride, processional, crowns, jewels, rich robes and a power that used itself to subjugate and subdue, instead of to uplift and lead by love and pity.
Oh, the shame of it!
And Savonarola saw these things—saw them to the exclusion of everything else—and his cry continually was for a return to the religion of Jesus the Carpenter, the Man who gave his life that others might live.