have harkened to the Voice," he said.

* * * * *

Savonarola remained in the monastery at Bologna for six years, scarcely
passing beyond its walls. These were years of ceaseless study, writing,
meditation--work. He sought the most menial occupations--doing tasks
that others cautiously evaded. His simplicity, earnestness and austerity
won the love and admiration of the monks, and they sought to make life
more congenial to him, by advancing him to the office of teacher to the
novitiates.

He declared his unfitness to teach, and it was an imperative order, and
not a suggestion, that forced him to forsake the business of scrubbing
corridors on hands and knees, and array himself in the white robe of a
teacher and reader.

The office of teacher and that of orator are not far apart--it is all a
matter of expression. The first requisite in expression is
animation--you must feel in order to impart feeling. No drowsy, lazy,
disinterested, half-hearted, preoccupied, selfish, trifling person can
teach--to teach you must have life, and life in abundance. You must have
abandon--you must project yourself, and inundate the room with your
presence. To infuse life, and a desire to remember, to know, to become,
into a class of a dozen pupils, is to reveal the power of an orator. If
you can fire the minds of a few with your own spirit, you can, probably,
also fuse and weld a thousand in the same way.

Savonarola taught his little class of novitiates, and soon the older
monks dropped in to hear the discourse. A larger room was necessary, and
in a short time the semi-weekly informal talk resolved itself into a
lecture, and every seat was occupied when it was known that Brother
Girolamo would speak.

This success suggested to the Prior that Savonarola be sent out to
preach in the churches round about, and it was so done.

But outside the monastery Savonarola was not a success: he was precise,
exact, and labored to make himself understood--freedom had not yet come
to him.

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 m