the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love,
without obligation. See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life
of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and
feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that
offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history
of a great redemption, in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his
own place and among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved
daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and
blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness. You would
feel that Florence was the home of your soul as well as your
birthplace, because you would see the work that was given you to do
there. If you forsake your place, who will fill it? You ought to be in
your place now, helping in the great work by which God will purify
Florence and raise it to be the guide of the nations. What! the earth
is full of iniquity--full of groans--the light is still struggling with
a mighty darkness, and you say, 'I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst
them asunder; I will go where no man claims me?' My daughter, every
bond of your life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that
debt; it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the earth;
you will be wandering forever away from the right."

Romola hesitates, she pleads that her brother Dino forsook his home to
become a monk, and that possibly Savonarola may be wrong. He then appeals
to her conscience, and assures her that she has assumed relations and
duties which cannot be broken from on any plea. The human ties are forever
sacred; there can exist no causes capable of annulling them.

"You are a wife. You seek to break your ties in self-will and anger,
not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them. The higher
life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will to bow
before a Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the portal of
wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And the symbol of it hangs before
you. That wisdom is the religion of the cross. And you stand aloof from
it; you are a pagan; you have been taught to say, 'I am as the wise men
who lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth was crucified.' And
that is your wisdom! To be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose
ear