All the people . . . said, The Lord, He is the God.
Christianity acknowledged supreme
In the Introduction to his Analogy of Religion, Bishop Butler says: “It has come to pass--I know not how--that Christianity is discovered to be victorious.” Why, that was nearly two hundred years ago! I wonder how many books have been written against the Bible since then, andhanded up, one after the other, to the cobwebs of the upper shelves in the library, while the old Book still lies before us, saying with a conscious sense of superiority to all the other books--
“Books may come and books may go,
But I go on for ever.”
A reformer’s temporary successes
“There was a time, towards the close of the fifteenth century, when the devoted monk and martyr, Savonarola, seemed to have set up the kingdom of Christ in his beloved city of Florence. How he remodelled the Republican government; how he tamed the mischievous boys of the city; how at his bidding the people kindled in the great Piazza, during the Carnival of 1496, the strange Bonfire of Vanities; how the watchword of Florence became, ‘Viva Gesu Cristo, nostro Re’--Long live Jesus Christ, our King: there are few histories like it. It was an Italian theocracy. It was a day of heaven on the earth. ‘So much joy was there in all hearts,’ one of the chroniclers tells us, ‘that the glory of Paradise seemed to have descended to this lower world.’ The pity is that the Golden Age of Florence was so transient and brief-lived.” (Sunday School Teacher.)
