three bodies sitting alternately. As a further precaution against popular excess, the power of initiating laws lay in the Signory, and of discussion in the Eighty, while the gonfaloniere was to be elected for life. Thus the liberalism expressed in Savonarola's system of government was of a very modified character. Nor in what he planned can he be regarded either as the apostle of the revolutionary principle or of Italian unity. He was not an enemy of the temporal power of the Pope; he never regarded the Papacy as the accomplice of foreign oppressors or the principal obstacle to the union of an emancipated Italy. Nor was he a champion of the separation of Church and State.1 No trace of the feeling can be found in his writings. The idea never crossed his mind of achieving the temporal unity of Italy by restricting the powers of Rome to spiritual concerns. He scarcely seems to have entertained the dream of Dante's universal empire, still less does he sanction the revolutionary projects of Arnold of Brescia. In other points there is little sign of modern ideas. He clings to the traditional and fatal policy of calling in the aid of foreign princes, and from the national standpoint his support of Charles VIII. might be stigmatized as unpatriotic. He never conceived the plan which could alone have given external strength to Florence-the confederation of the Tuscan cities. On the contrary, his attitude towards Pisa is that of the conqueror to the conquered: the rebel must at all hazards be crushed. As a moral reformer he endeavoured to reunite morality with religion, from which it had been divorced by the pernicious example of the priesthood. But he set his face against the infusion of new elements of religious vitality, and his ideal of reform is the revival of mediæval orthodoxy. He had no conception of the idea that the enlargement of the spheres of human thought and the treasures of the newborn antiquity might be adapted to the use of religion, and splendidly confirm the reign of Christianity. In the face of relaxed morality and religious torpor his reforms assume a tinge of monastic severity. He wished men to attend only to those things that make for salvation. The true key to his character seems to us to lie in the fact that he was a man absorbed in one overmastering idea, pursuing its realization with undivided aims. First, above all things, and entirely, he was a religious and moral reformer. He founded his republic on the basis of the fear of God; his devotional works were composed to fit the Florentine to be 1 This view is put forward by Madden, The Life and Martyrdom of Savonarola, &c., London, 1853. the citizen of a theocracy. Instaurare omnia in Christo' was the motto of his thoughts, his actions, his whole existence. His inmost soul speaks in the inscription placed upon the Palazzo della Signoria, 'Jesus Christus populi Florentini creatus Rex.' It was to further this religious reformation that he prophesied, that he led his crusade against paganism, that he rebuked the immoralities of the Church and of society. It was with this object, and this alone, that he entered political life, and towards this one end all his political reforms were directed. On December 12, 1494, when, after the expulsion of the Medici, the republic of Florence was constituted by his efforts, he prefaced his sketch of the new government by these words : : 'O my people, ye know that I have never intended to meddle with affairs of State. Do ye not believe that I would not even now interfere if I were not forced to do so for the salvation of your souls? Our reformation must begin with the things that concern the spirit. These are superior to temporal matters-nay, they are their very rule and life.' Those who, holding this key in their hands, do not attempt to read into a simple pious character, cast in the mediæval mould, the complexities of modern motives, will find that Savonarola ceases to be a riddle. It explains the influence which he exercised over his contemporaries, the attitude which he adopted towards the Renaissance, the resistance which he offered to the Papacy, the grounds on which he based his prophecies. And, finally, it contradicts the theory that he wrote, preached, prayed, and suffered for the triumph of principles which involved the destruction of much that he held most sacred. It is unnecessary to speak of him as a heretic, or a Vandal, or a charlatan, or a modern liberal. He was none of these. The spirit in which he lived was that of the following passage from his Sermons: 'You, at least, my friends, who are the elect of God, you for whom I weep day and night, have pity upon me! Give me flowers, as the Canticle saith, quia amore langueo, because I faint for love of flowers, that is, of good works. I ask nothing else than that you should please God and save your souls alive. But what, O Lord, will be the reward hereafter of him who issues a victor from such a struggle as mine? Eye cannot see it, nor can the ear hear it told: it will be bliss everlasting. And the reward in this life? servant shall not be greater than the master," saith the Lord. knowest that I preached and was crucified: thy fate, too, is martyrdom." O Lord, I beseech Thee send me then this martyrdom! O Lord, grant that I may shortly die for Thee, as Thou hast died for me!' "The "Thou ART. IX.-RECENT HYMNOLOGY. Supplemental Hymns to Hymns Ancient and Modern.' care to CONSIDERABLE fault has been found with recent developments of ecclesiastical hymnology. We do not dwell on complaints against hymns which emphasize the Divinity of our Lord, or adopt the Scriptural language as to the efficacy of His death, or which incur the displeasure of two classes of critics on account of their alleged 'sacerdotalism.' Objections of this class proceed from peculiar theological standpoints, and to discuss them would carry us far away from the subject of hymns. But it is worth while to consider the validity and the scope of a charge which comes with much more weight from a thoroughly ecclesiastical quarter— to the effect that our hymnology has become far too subjective. Ancient hymns, it is truly said, were much more simply occupied with the contemplation of God Himself, His glory, His perfections, and His revealed action. Modern hymns dwell much more on human feelings, wants, aspirations. 'Look,' says Dr. Liddon, 'at a modern hymn: it is, as a rule, full of man . . . full of his religious self, if you will, but still of himself.' 1 A very different writer went so far in a Church periodical as to condemn, with a view to use in church, all hymns expressive of personal feeling such as did not correspond to the type of heavenly worship. This, we are persuaded, is mere rigorism; but let us confine ourselves to the more measured statement of the difficulty. We grant, then, that modern hymnody differs in this respect from ancient; and we not only grant, but would insist, that it is in many cases excessive in its subjectivity. But we cannot admit that the difference as such is condemnatory; and we think it only reasonable to bear in mind that our conditions, so to speak, are not altogether identical with those of primitive worshippers. To say, 'The ancient Latin hymns are austere, reserved, impersonal, unexuberant,' is not to prove that modern hymnwriters are bound to take this characteristic as a model. That momentous operation of Christianity on the Latin races which has been so exquisitely described by Dean Church in his lectures on Some Influences of Christianity upon National 1 Easter Sermons, i. 200. Character-the operation which opened for those races the great wellspring of the affections, as it had never been opened before-had not been fully accomplished in the age of St. Ambrose, nor even in that of 'Gregory, our father, who sent us baptism.' We modern Christians, especially we of the Teutonic blood, require a richer and larger hymnological utterance for the religious affections than contented the men of a different race at a very much earlier period; and to restrict us to their standard of devotional speech would be at case of putting new wine into old wine-skins. Moreover, English people in this age are inevitably more 'self-conscious' than our earlier predecessors in the faith. Doubts and anxieties, and misgivings and moods of depression, are part of our experience-we may say, of our allotted portion. They result from the atmosphere of our time, from the complicated conditions of our life. We want to be braced up, comforted, satisfied; and therefore it is natural for us to 'pour out our hearts before God' with a freer exuberance than was needed by a simpler generation. After all, hymnody must be real for those who use it; one of its purposes is to provide expression for the affections in question beyond what liturgical forms can supply; it must, therefore, be more fervid, more expansive, more 'subjective' than those forms. Tie it down rigidly to the recitation of, or the meditation upon, revealed facts, and you close up a vent which is meant to be open, and stifle a craving which has a right to be satisfied; and, so far, you chill what ought to be aglow. It is sometimes forgotten by the advocates of what we will venture to call ultra-objectivity that the Psalter, which has been through so many ages perpetually on the lips of the Church, makes its own provision (in Dr. Liddon's words) 'for the soul's various moods of hope and fear, of penitence and exultation.' It would be purely arbitrary to say, 'You ought to be content with that provision.' One might as well insist that Christians should be content with the Psalmist's utterance of simple adoration or praise. The Psalter is confessedly insufficient for Christian purposes in the latter respect; it is not less insufficient in the former. We want hymnody in explicitly Christian language for both of these requirements. As for the contention that we ought to 'forget self' in our worship, it is flawed by transparent ambiguity. To 'forget self' may mean to banish from the area of worship all low or unworthy aims, all meanly narrow interests; but, as here used, it suggests what is impossible, the forcible suppression of wants and aspirations inseparable from our personality as seen in the light of our relation to the Giver of all good. Not less unreasonable is the remark 'Worship in heaven is pure adoration;' for, not to say that the saints at rest are believed to plead, with personal yearnings of loving anxiety, for those whom they have left behind in this troublesome world, we who use hymns are sinners and pilgrims, and to affect to worship as if we were not would be a presumptuous selfdeception, which ought to be impossible for those who daily recite the Psalms, or who daily offer up the Lord's Prayer. But then, when this is granted, the necessary cautions and safeguards come in; the 'subjectivity' which must be recognized and allowed for in modern hymnody must be kept within due bounds. What sort of hymns, then, should be excluded from public use on account of an unregulated subjectivity? First, we should say, any hymns which represent exceptional states of personal religious feeling, such as the ordinary worshipper, always supposing him to be earnest, devout, and fairly intelligent, cannot be reasonably expected to appreciate and to make his own. The wonderful verses ascribed to Francis Xavier, and exhibited in our last number, are clearly of this class; and, although some of our readers may be shocked, we feel bound to place 'Lead, kindly Light' beside them. No English composition is stamped with a more incommunicable individuality than the lines written in a Sicilian orange-boat, during a week of becalming, on the very eve of the Church revival; and if the matter were not so serious, there would be a grotesque incongruity in the notion of an English congregation appropriating those autobiographical hints about a previous 'love of the garish day' and still earlier musings on 'angel faces.' But, further, we should reject those hymns which express even ordinary religious feeling in forms of unhealthy exaggeration or morbid sentimentalism, such as should be avoided in private as well as in public approaches to God. We repeat what was said in this Review five years ago, that every compiler of a hymnal would do well to keep before him the lines in the Lyra Apostolica (by the author of 'Lead, kindly Light') beginning, 'Prune thou thy words.' The facile admission of verses which offend in this respect has done serious harm to the devotional habit by encouraging persons to think that a luxurious indulgence in the pleasure of religious emotion is safe for the soul, and amounts, in effect, to a 'religious exer 1 1 Church Quarterly Review, xviii. 96. |