His own resources exhausted, he applied for contributions
to all who came in his way. His father became alarmed at his son's
excessive liberality and the consequences that might ensue from his
strange recklessness; it is even said that he turned him out of
doors; it seems that the commercial partnership was cancelled: it is
certain that the son was compelled to make some great renunciation of
wealth, and that his private means were seriously restricted. That a
man of business should be blind to the preciousness of money was a
sufficient proof then, as now, that he must be mad.
O ye wary men of the world, bristling with the shrewdest of maxims,
bursting with the lessons of experience, ye of the cool heads and the
cold grey eyes, ye whom the statesman loves, and the tradesman
trusts, cautious, sagacious, prudent; when the rumbling of the
earthquake tells us that the foundations of the earth are out of
course, we must look for deliverance to other than you! A grain of
enthusiasm is of mightier force than a million tons of wisdom such as
yours; then when the hour of the great upheaval has arrived, and
things can no longer be kept going!
"Build up my church!" said the voice again to this gushing emaciated
fanatic in the second-rate Italian town, this dismal bankrupt of
twenty-four years of age, "of lamentably low extraction," whom no
University claimed as her own, and whom the learned pundits pitied.
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