onastery 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.

The Christ spirit filled the heart of Savonarola. His soul was wrung
with pity for the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed; and he had
sufficient insight into economics to know that where greed, gluttony and
idleness abound, there too stalk oppres