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Oh my sweet haven, shall I ever find thee more! Oh my heart, how hast thou suffered thyself to be taken away from so sweet a haven. Oh my soul, look where thou art; surely we are in the midst of a deep sea, and the winds are adverse on every side. Lord, I say unto thee, as Jeremiah said-"Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed; I am in derision daily; every one mocketh me. For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil, because the word of the Lord was made a reproach unto me, and a derision daily." And again I will say with Jeremiah"Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth."† I would go to the haven and I find not the way; I sought rest, but found no place of rest; I would be in peace and speak no more, but I cannot, for the word of the Lord is as a fire in my heart. His word, if I utter it not forth, burns my marrow and my bones. Well then, Lord, if thou wilt that I navigate this deep sea, thy will be done.' ‡

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The pulpit was the throne of Savonarola: for nearly three years he held the sway over Florence with as rigid a despotism as the Medici of old. His sermons are, to the Florentine history of his brief period, what the orations of Demosthenes are to that of Athens, of Cicero to that of Rome. Now it is that his eloquence swells to its full diapason. His triumphant career began with the Advent of 1494 on Haggai and the Psalms. But it is in the Carême of 1496, on Amos and Zechariah, that the preacher girds himself to his full strength, when he had attained his full authority, and could not but be conscious that there was a deep and dangerous rebellion brooding in the hearts of the hostile factions at Florence, and when already ominous murmurs began to be heard from Rome. He that would know the power, the daring, the oratory of Savonarola, must study this volume. Nor do the discourses on the Festivals of the same year, on Ruth and Micah, fall much below this height. The Advent of 1496, the Lent of 1497 on Ezekiel, and above all, the last series, during the Lent of 1498, on Exodus, are those of a haughty mind struggling bravely with his inevitable destiny; they are gloomy and solemn with his approaching end.

The Sermons of Savonarola may be read even now with curious interest, and not seldom with admiration. What must they have been, poured forth without check, by the excited teacher to a most excitable audience, by a man fully possessed with the conviction that he was an inspired prophet, to those who implicitly believed his prophetic gift!

'The manner in which an Italian- -a Dominican-preaches, I cannot convey to you; so fervid, so forcible, so full of action and of passion;

* Jer. xx. 7, 8.

† Jer. xv. 10.

On Amos, Predic. i. p. 9. often

often as if he would pour out his very soul with his speech, and if not attended to wonìd expire on the spot. But this is the kind of sermon with which Savonarola wrought upon the mind of the people at Florence. Day after day, an outpouring of mixed doctrine and emotion, of exhortation and prayer; speech full of force, though not of grace; surging up, as it were, from hot-springs in his heart, and flowing forth from his eyes, his hands, his features, as well as from his lips; rendering him unmindful of all but his subject, and his audience unmindful of all but himself.'

*

We read after this with much less wonder Burlamacchi's bold assertion, that his more fervent hearers beheld angels hovering over him while he preached, the Virgin herself uttering with him his benedictions; palms of martyrdom upon his head; blood welling from his side. One noble lady declared that he never preached without some of these celestial signs. †

His sermons address alike the fears, the hopes, the imagination, the affections. Nor do they less appeal to the republican Florentine pride, for if the burthen of woe was ever denounced on Florence, to Florence were made all the ennobling promises of prosperity and peace. There was even the fierce factious spirit and invective against political enemies. In place of the old battle-cries of Guelf and Ghibelline, White and Grey, Palleschi (Medicean), or popular, had grown up new names of religious partisanship, the Piagnoni, who with Savonarola mourned over the sins of the city; the Tiepidi, the lukewarın, among the monks and clergy, whom he hated with the greatest cordiality; the Arrabbiati, the infuriated at his doctrines; the Compagnacci, the young libertines, who detested his austerities, and looked back to the free and gay times of Lorenzo and his sons. He is himself a Florentine, even in their animosities. For subject, for oppressed Pisa, the lover of Florentine liberty has no word of sympathy or of mercy. Pisa, on whom Charles VIII, in his rashness or his ignorance had bestowed its freedom, must be brought again under the detested yoke of Florence; and that triumph Savonarola promises as the heaven-appointed reward of the fidelity of Florence to God their Lawgiver and the Head of their republic.

The chief characteristic of his eloquence was that it was

*We quote this from Lectures on Great Men,' by the late Frederick Myers, the remarkable book of a remarkable man, of rare abilities and more rare virtues. The life forms one of a course of lectures, delivered as parochial instruction in the school of a small district in the north of England, part of Keswick. It is a popular life from popular materials, with somewhat too much of Mr. Carlyle, but of his better part. The idol of Mr. Myers is not Force, but Goodness; and it has also this peculiarity, that it is written in sound and racy English.

+ Apud Baluzium (Mansi), p. 539. See, too, the chapters on his affability, humility, his singular and edifying amusements with the young friars.

still more and more biblical. Every image, every word, every event in the Old Testament, was not merely a remote sign, a figure, a type, but a direct, undeniable presignification of the state of things around him. It was all as plainly and intentionally spoken of Florence, of Italy, of Rome, as it had been of Israel and Judah.* It was the gift, the mission of Savonarola, to interpret, with the authority of God himself, all this vast adumbration of things to come, to unfold these phrases of terror, these pregnant, awful metaphors, which were not applicable by a moral affinity to present persons and events, but by the profound counsels of God, had been endowed with those endless inexhaustible meanings. From one who read off the visions of the older seers into their modern signification, the step was easy to the authority of a prophet. The more limited sense of prophesying,' usual in the New Testament, belonging to the commissioned preacher of the new revelation, was lost in the wider mission of the Hebrew seer. Nor was this a paroxysm to which he was now and then wrought up by the excess of zeal; a temporary hallucination, which gave way to more calm and sober views. It was his deliberate, repeated, printed, assertion. No one can know Savonarola who has not read and studied the 'Compendium Revelationum,' in which he offered to the world, as it were, the credentials of his prophetic mission.†

This book was published in the midst of his career; it opened with the distinct avowal of his power of predicting future events by divine inspiration. This gift he had exercised rarely on account of the hardness of men's hearts. He will not scatter pearls before swine. His prophetic gift is from God alone, for God alone beholds future and contingent things. He indignantly rejects all arts of divination, especially astrology, against which he wrote a treatise. God reveals futurity to his chosen servants, either by supernatural light infused into the soul, by which man becomes in a certain sense participant in the eternity of God: he sees intuitively, and with certainty, that particular things are true, and that they are of God, as the philosopher perceives that two and two make four. The second more specific, and more ordinary mode of divine revelation, is threefold. 1. By flashing things directly upon the mind; 2ndly, by visions;

* E. g. hanno scritto che questo Amos ha ribellato contro la I alia, et che egli ha fatto lega con questo e con quell' altro gran maestro, et che gli ha acquistato molte migliaia de' ducate, e che egli ha fatto ricchi i suoi, e che egli e l'huomo che guasta la Italia, et che e dice mal del Papa, de' Cardinali, et de' episcopi e de' Prelati. e che dice questo Amos (he himself is Amos), che Hieroboam a morire in gladio? &c. &c.-Predic. xxiii. p. 231. The Latin may be read at the end of the Life by Pico de Mirandola. We always prefer the Italian of the Friar to his Latin.

3rdly, by the intermediation of angels. In all these ways he, Savonarola, had known future events. He relates his first predictions, when interpreting the Apocalypse, in 1489. In 1490, his misgivings were solemnly rebuked; in consequence of which he made a terrible sermon (una spaventosa predica). He seems utterly unconscious of the vagueness of his own predictions; he was preaching on the Ark of Noah, on the words 'the waters shall cover the earth.' This, by his awe-struck hearers, and by himself, was supposed to foreshow the descent of Charles VIII. on Italy, though uttered when Charles had already passed the Alps. But Savonarola was too absolutely convinced of his divine inspiration, to suspect that these things were within the range of mere human conjecture.

The extraordinary part of the treatise is the argumentative. In a visionary dialogue with the Tempter (under the form of a holy hermit), he suggests every possible rationalistic objection to his own supernatural gift, and, to his own satisfaction, disdainfully refutes them all. He has simulated nothing, as some supposed, with the holy purpose of deceiving mankind. to their good. If I ever used simulation in my preaching, may God deprive me of Paradise!' Nor did his visions proceed from a spirit of melancholy, or a disordered imagination. This,' he replies, 'was belied by his profound knowledge of philosophy, and of the Scriptures, inconsistent with a bewildered phantasy.' It could not be from astrology or divination, which he denies, and abhors as condemned by Holy Writ. It is no deception of the Devil: the Devil knows not future effects; the Devil would not wish the good wrought by his preaching. How can the Devil know the times and seasons?' The Tempter appeals to the prophets of old! Why should God have chosen him (Fra Girolamo) as his prophet, when there were so many better than he in the Church? Why did God elect Peter, Paul, Luke, and Mark rather than others as Apostles and Evangelists? Even sinners have been gifted with prophecy, as Balaam.' The Tempter goes on: he received it all from foolish dreaming women.' He rarely conversed with women. Though there have been prophetesses named in Holy Writ, women are ignorant, fickle, vain, liable to be misled by the Evil One. Some say that you are in the secret of the councils of princes.' It would be folly to rest the truth of prophecies on such changeable and insecure foundations; so especially, he asserts, of the rulers of Florence. He had learned these things by astuteness and political wisdom; he had learned them from the old prophecies of Joachim and S. Bridget. He ought to suppress such perilous truths in silence.' 'Did Moses, Isaiah, or the saints of old, or S. Benedict,

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S. Benedict, S. Victor, or S. Catherine of Sienna suppress their oracles?' 'He ought to prove his divine mission by miracles.' 'Did Jeremiah, did John the Baptist work miracles?' He was an heretic;' he believed, he replied, the whole doctrine of the Roman Church. Many great men, many of the wisest, laughed his prophecies to scorn.' The wise of the world always scorn the words of heaven.' 'The believers are few in comparison with the unbelievers.' Many are called, but few chosen. Few heard Christ and his apostles. The many persecuted them.' 'He had prophesied many things not true.' This he denies; all that he had prophesied had turned out true to an iota; but he drew subtle distinctions. 6 Sometimes he spoke as a man! The Holy Spirit did not always dwell in the prophet!' The Tempter then argues with him at length upon the unreasonableness of his mingling in politics, and examines his whole conduct both as political leader and as prior of St. Mark. Savonarola justifies himself at still greater length, and in every particular. 'He ought to preach like other preachers, on virtues and vices.' Savonarola triumphantly appeals to the fruits of his preaching.

In our summary whole pages have shrunk into sentences. The rest of this remarkable work is occupied by a Vision, as purely poetic as those of Dante, in which the Virgin takes her place, as it were, as the divine Protectress, the tutelar Saint of Florence. This will show how entirely southern and Italian was the mind of Savonarola; how little kindred it was with those of whom he has been considered the harbinger, the German and English Reformers. We may add, that though in prose, it approaches nearer to that less read part of Dante, the Paradiso, than anything in Italian literature since the Divina Commedia.

If the imagery of the Old Testament predominates in the preaching of Fra Girolamo, so does the tone: the terrible judgment of God was its burthen; its promises, bright as they were, were seen only in remote distance, on the faint horizon, behind long and heavy-looming banks of clouds, which must first burst and overwhelm. The denunciations were against all orders, especially the clergy and the monks.

You who write to Rome (of Rome more hereafter), and say that I have spoken evil of this man and that, write this-that I say the cause of this visitation is the evil life of the prelates and of the clergy; and the bad example of the heads of the clergy is that which brings down this visitation. I tell you to repent, and if you do not repent I announce to you two most terrible chastisements (flagelli). One in this world which you cannot escape; that is the tribulations which are at hand, for the Lord God cometh in haste and instantly. I tell you that it

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