that great movement which a generation after his death was to revolutionize western Europe. Martin Luther was fifteen years of age at the time of Savonarola's death; and it was the tattered banner of revolt that the Florentine prophet had laid down too prematurely in 1498 which Luther raised in 1517, when he nailed his "theses" to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, the first act in the drama of the Reformation.

Savonarola has left us for his monument the thought of Jesus as the great overlord of our corporate life. In these democratic days there is a growing sense of the incongruity of conceiving Jesus under terms of secular monarchy. But what was in Savonarola's mind is plain. He meant that our legislation shall be conceived in His spirit, that it shall be enacted and administered along the lines of His will, and that our public bodies, from Parliament and Congress down to the veriest subcommittee of parish councillors or selectmen, shall sit as it were in His presence. Let His will be the touchstone of our enactments, let His principles become the fundamentals of civic and national life, let His character become the citizen's ideal. Thus Savonarola, though he be dead, yet speaketh; and this generation, God knows, needs to listen to him.

SUGGESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION

It would be worth while to test the statement that the prophet's first word is "Repent," by reference to Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and John the Baptist.

Repentance and penitence are often supposed to be the same thing; they are, however, different. How are we to distinguish between them?

Why is the term King somewhat unconvincing when we apply it to Jesus? Can you suggest any other term which will retain the spiritual idea implied in kingship, but which is devoid of the notion of authority imposed from without?

CHAPTER X

The Prophet of Humanity—
Mazzini

(1805-1872)

The prophet has almost always been a patriot; but his patriotism has been of a distinct order. The blatant assumption of superiority over other peoples, an inflated national pride—these things and such as these which sometimes pass for patriotism bear the name falsely. The true patriotism has other attributes. In its essence it is a passionate love for one's nation, its traditions, and its institutions, joined to a profound faith in its possibilities and in its specific mission in the plan of history. It is not at all akin to that selfish and exclusive temper which regards the securing of certain material goods for a people as a worthy end in itself; on the contrary, it seeks such advantages as will enable the nation to fill its own place in the larger life of the race.

The patriot-prophet always appears at a time when his own country is degenerating and becoming incapable of making its own contribution to the life of the world. He starts by seeing what Jesus once saw and feeling as He then felt-"when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them, because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd." The putrescence of national life, the disintegration of its social bonds-these things weigh heavily on his soul, and he emerges out of the wilderness or the cloister into the high

ways and the city streets with a great call to repentance. His one passion is to stay the degeneracy, to snatch his people from the perilous incline down which they are sliding to destruction, and to set them again upon the path which they have forsaken and which alone can lead them in safety to their own place in the manifold economy of God.

The Italy of Mazzini's youth was no less broken and distressed than that of Dante or Savonarola. Metternich, the Austrian statesman, had sneered at Italy as merely "a geographical expression," and the description was in fact not untrue. That dream of a united Italy which Dante had dared to dream five hundred years before was still in the clouds. It was to this ideal that Mazzini devoted himself while yet a young man; for it he lived and suffered and wrought. Though the republic in which he had hoped to see Italy united was never established, he nevertheless lived to see Italy a nation, settling down to order its new-found life on lines which would enable it to stand unashamed in the councils of Europe and to make its own contribution to the enrichment of the common life of man. Mazzini, unlike his friend Ruffini, was not permitted to die for Italy; he was compelled to do that more difficult thing-to live for his country. In one of his essays he quotes Lamennais, that great French lover of liberty: "Faith demands Action, not tears; it demands of us the power of sacrifice, sole origin of our salvation. It seeks Christians capable of looking down upon the world from on high and facing its fatigues without fear; Christians capable of saying, 'We will die for this'; above all, Christians capable of saying, 'We will live for this.'" Such an one was Mazzini himself.

[A good collection of Mazzini's essays may be obtained in a volume called by the title of his greatest essay, "The Duties of Man," in Everyman's Library. The volume also contains an excellent biographical introduction.]

DAILY READINGS

Tenth Week, First Day

And what shall I more say? For the time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah; of David and Samuel and the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned to flight armies of aliens. Women received their dead by a resurrection: and others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: and others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were tempted, they were slain with the sword: they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, evil entreated (of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves, and the holes of the earth. And these all, having had witness borne to them through their faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing concerning us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.-Heb. 11: 32-40.

It was no inspiring spectacle that Italy presented to the eyes of the young Mazzini. There was no national vitality. The people were plunged into a gross materialism, where they were not wholly buried in a profound indifference. The revolutionary society of the Carbonari, which Mazzini joined, was zealous enough for Italian independence; but its spirit was utilitarian and its methods altogether opportunist. But Mazzini himself was neither. the one nor the other. "I believed," he says of himself, "that the great problem of the day was a religious problem, to which all other questions were secondary." "The people," he wrote in his great manifesto, "Faith and the Future" (1835), "lack faith . . . the faith that arouses the multitudes, faith in their own destiny, in their own mission and in the mission of the epoch; the faith that fights and prays; the faith that enlightens and bids men

advance fearlessly in the ways of God and humanity, with the sword of the people in their hand, the religion of the people in their heart, and the future of the people in their soul."

Faith, in Mazzini's view, was essentially the power of "seeing the invisible," of deriving inspiration from its eternal sources in the unseen. He had little patience with the devious ways and the compromising spirit of the conventional statecraft: the redemption of Italy must be sought along other lines. Her soul must be raised from the dead. This was possible only by calling upon her people as another prophet had done before him, to a nation equally apathetic, to "lift up their eyes on high.” Mazzini broke away from the revolutionary spirit which cherished no ideals higher than that of the pocket or the stomach, and preached to a people held in the deadly grip of an arid materialism, the old gospel that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"-by which he proved himself to belong to "the goodly fellowship of the prophets."

Tenth Week, Second Day

The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. And it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many peoples shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations, and shall reprove many peoples: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.-Isa. 2: 1-4.

Mazzini's early agitations ended disastrously for him; he suffered a long exile full of strange vicissitudes.