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is coming. The other chastisement shall be that they shall go down into hell. Did they but know what I know, for this chastisement will reach a vast multitude in Italy and beyond Italy, but I will confine myself to Italy in which I say that very few will be saved. The Lord says, by the mouth of Malachi the prophet, that the priest ought to know the law, for he is an angel of God, and now ye know nothing of the Scripture: you do not even know grammar; and this would be tolerable, if you were of good life, and did set good example. For this cause says the Lord God, I have given you up to the scorn of the people for your wicked doings. Ye keep concubines, ye do worse, and ye are notorious gamblers; ye lead lives more flagitious than the seculars; and it is an awful shame that the people should be better than the clergy. I speak not of the good but of the bad. Give up your mules, give up your hounds and your slaves; waste not the things of Christ, the gains of your benefices on hounds and mules. And the same have I to say to the bishops. If you do not yield up your superfluous benefices which you hold, I tell you, and I proclaim to you. (and this is the word of the Lord,) you will lose your lives, your benefices, and all your wealth, and ye shall go to the mansion of the devil; every way ye must lose them and this ye shall know by experience. And now to the religious -the monks and friars.'*. -These fare no better.-Predica, p. 499,

This is the perpetual tone; the burthen is their simony, concubinage, nameless vices; the country clergy had everywhere their concubines; as to the cardinals, we must revert to a passage in one of the older sermons to illustrate the frightful state of morals.† He is insisting on the universal curse upon the earth— quia maledicta terra in operibus eorum-on the universal misery of mankind. Kings are not exempt from this misery. There are ever those who would kill and betray them, they are ever in straitness and sadness of mind.

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You will say, perhaps, ecclesiastical persons, cardinals and prelates, who have great possessions and revenues, enjoy profound peace, for they have not to think of wives and children. They go out hunting and riding every day, and suffer not the least trouble; they are served by all, held in reverence and gratitude by all. It seems indeed that they have perfect peace. But I tell you, "maledicta terra in operibus eorum"-for the higher the rank the greater the danger: they have no peace, for they are always in fear lest they should be killed or poisoned. Look, when they eat how many buffets must there be quante credenze bisogna fare; [here is the origin of the credence table or closet in private and in the church], lest the common food, lest the spiritual food of the holy Eucharist should be poisoned. If they travel to any place

* See a curious passage on Zachariah, Predica xxxiv., in which he treats on St. Augustine, St. Basil, St. Dominic, St. Francis bastinadoing their degenerate disciples.-Amos, Prediche, p. 352.

† See in his earlier volume, p. 293, his invectives against adulterated medicine, false weights, tricks of attorneys, &c.

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they must take everything with them. This seems to me a miserable life, a life full of death. I had rather eat bread and onions, like peasants who labour all the day, and eat that bread and those onions with a good appetite, than eat as you do snipes, partridges and pheasants.'Sopra il Salmo, c. viii. p. 313.

The vices which Savonarola denounces as the shame and disgrace of Florence are luxury, usury, and covetousness, splendid and immodest apparel, sensuality in its most degrading and repulsive form, incest, promiscuous intercourse, and gambling. Fully to illustrate this we must have quoted page after page.

In a terrible sermon (on Psalm xxvi.) he is not content with his own maledictions, awful as they were; but he calls on the magistrates to execute punishments more stern than those in the Mosaic law. For one nameless crime, he will have no secret fine or penalty, he would light a fire to burn the guilty, whose lurid glare should affright all Italy. Thus he goes on

'Shall a thousand, ten thousand perish for one wretch? those poems are the cause of God's wrath. Fathers, keep your sons from poems (poesie). Bring out all the harlots into the public place with the sound of trumpets. Fathers, there are enough to throw any city into confusion. Well then begin with one, then another. Punish gaming, prohibit it in the streets. If you find only one man staking fifty ducats, tell him the State has need of a thousand. "Pay up on the spot." Pierce the tongues of blasphemers! St. Louis of France ordered a blasphemer's lips to be cauterised, and said "I should be happy if they would do the same by me, if I could clear my realm of blasphemers.' down balls, it is not time for dancing, put them down in town and country. Have your eyes everywhere, punish all offenders. Have all taverns shut up at six o'clock. This has been ordered again and again. Shut your eyes awhile, and then catch them in the fact, and exact the penalty. Let all shops be shut, even apothecaries, on festival days. If your tooth aches have it drawn on a festival, there is no harm in that, but stand not buying boxes and toys. Let debtors leave their houses to go to church on week days without fear of arrest.'

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His audience was not only all Florence and the country around, but people came from the neighbouring cities, Pisa, and Leghorn. The seats in the cathedral were built up in an amphitheatre to accommodate the crowds; and even the piazza was full.

The wonderful change which his preaching wrought is the boast of his admirers, the sullen but implicit admission of his enemies. Half the year was devoted to abstinence. It was scandalous to purchase meat on a day assigned as a fast by Savonarola. The tax on butchers was lowered. On the days when the Prior of St. Mark preached, the streets were almost a desert; houses, schools, and shops closed. No obscene songs were

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heard in the streets, but low or loud chaunts of lauds, psalms, or spiritual songs. Vast sums were paid in restitution of old debts, or wrongful gains. The dress of men became more sober, that of women modest and quiet. To ladies of great rank Savonarola would allow some jewels and ornaments; in others they were proscribed or cast off. Many women quitted their husbands to enter convents. Savonarola enforced severe continence even on married people. Weddings were solemn and awful ceremonies; sometimes newly-wedded couples made vows of continence, either for a time or for ever. It was a wiser counsel of Savonarola that mothers should nurse their own offspring. Nor were the converts only amongst the lowly and uneducated. Men of the highest fame in erudition, in arts, in letters, became amongst the most devoted of his disciples;—names, which in their own day were glorious, and some of which have descended to our At his death there were young men among the brethren of St. Mark, from all the noble families of Florence, Medici, Rucellai, Salviatí, Albizzi, Strozzi.†

own.*

But Savonarola might seem at last to despair of the present generation, inured to their luxuries and sins, in which they were either stone dead or constantly relapsing into death; he would train a new generation to his own lofty and austere conceptions of holiness, virtue, and patriotism. He issued to the youth of the city a flattering invitation to attend his sermons; on their young imagination, and souls yet unenslaved to habits of indulgence, he would lay the spell of his eloquence. They crowded in such numbers that he was obliged to limit the age to between ten and twenty. He proceeded to organize this sacred militia. The laws to which they subjected themselves by enrolment (and the enrolment swept within its ranks almost all the youth of the city) were, 1, the observation of the commandments of God and of the Church; 2, constant attendance at the Sacraments of penance and the Eucharist; 3, the renunciation of all public spectacles and worldly pleasures; 4, the greatest simplicity of manners, conduct, and dress. The young republic had its special magistrates, peace-officers (pacieri) who kept order and silence in the church and in the streets and regulated processions; correctors (correttori) who inflicted paternal punishment on delinquents; almoners (limosinieri) who made collections for religious objects; lustratori, who watched over the cleanliness and propriety of the crosses and other objects of worship; and finally young inquisitors.

The young inquisitors were to fulfil the office of the older neg

*Burlamacchi observes with wonder, not without triumph, that even some Franciscans were among his converts.

† Marchese, 185, Note.

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ligent magistrates. They were to inquire after and denounce blasphemers and gamblers, to seize their cards, dice, and money; to admonish women and girls too gaily dressed. It was touching to hear them, says Burlamacchi, utter such simple and sweet sounds as these, In the name of Jesus Christ, the king of our city, and of the Virgin Mary-We command you to cast off these vanities; if you do not, you will be stricken with disease.' They forced themselves into houses and seized on cards, chessboards, harps, lutes, perfumes, mirrors, masks, books of poems and other instruments of perdition. Savonarola not only urged the reversal of the law of nature, not only did he vindicate this boyish police set over the state, but inveighed with more than usual vehemence against the older citizens.

The tyranny exercised by these boy magistrates over their parents was not the only abuse; his enemies aver that there was discord and delation in every house; wives wrote to Savonarola to accuse their husbands as plotting against his authority. Two cases of this kind are named in the hostile Process, as notorious throughout the city. The object of Savonarola's most devout aversion was the Carnival, celebrated as it was at Florence, with gaiety which degenerated into wild licence, with poetry which had taken a Pagan turn. Youths on chariots drove through the city representing ancient triumphs; masques paraded and danced and sung their carnival songs from Lorenzo's poetry. Perhaps, indeed, his Canti Carnialeschi are the most spirited and graceful of his works, but they sang of Bacchus and Ariadne, and of Cupid and Venus. The Carnival must be put down or at least cast off its heathen character. If still riotous it must be religious riot. The firmer the ascendency of Savonarola, the more the monk broke out. He was not content with Florence as a Christian republic, he would have it one wide cloister. The holy revolt of the children against parental authority caused sullen murmur. He acknowledged the reproach, which was if not loudly, secretly urged against his proceedings. Dice Firenze e fatta Frate, il popolo e diventato Frate; non vogliono più d'esser sbeffate per queste quaresme e orationi.' He adds, that in the perfect state of Florence, matrimony shall be all but unknown.

But even if Florence had submitted to his austere yoke, would Rome bear the neighbourhood of a city which was not only a standing reproach, but a bitter invective against her and against her rulers?

The old religion of Rome and the new religion of Florence could not but come into terrible collision. The Christian religion of Florence would not endure as it were on her borders the simoniacal, the worse than heathen, Christianity of Rome: Rome

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would not endure the rebellious pretensions of Florence to holiness, which she had repudiated so utterly and so long. Savonarola and Alexander VI. could not rule together the mind of Christendom: it must be an internecine war between Savonarola the Prophet, with the austerity of the most famous founders of the monastic orders, and Alexander VI., against whom all contemporary history, without a protest, lifts up its unrebuked voice. Never yet had the Roman Church such desperate difficulty to separate the man Borgia from the Pope Alexander VI.; to palliate, to elude, to perplex by theological subtlety, the incongruity which glared upon the common sense, and sent a deep shudder through the moral feelings of mankind. Men must believe that God could appoint as his Vicar upon earth, as Vicar of his sinless, gentle, peaceful Son, a man loaded with every crime, with simony, rapacity, sensuality, perhaps with incest; that infallibility as to faith might dwell together with vices which in their blackest form, disdained disguise; that in direct opposition to the Saviour's. words, which had indissolubly linked together the acquaintance with his tenets with the practice of his precepts, the same person could have the most profound knowledge of the doctrines of the Gospel with the most. utter contempt of its virtues. It was impossible that Savonarola should preach his severe cloistral Christianity in Florence and be respectfully silent on the anti-Christian iniquities of Rome; or vaticinate the renovation of the Church by the terrible chastisements of God, and leave unrebuked the capital and centre of all offence. Throughout his sermons it is Rome, against which he thunders his most bitter invectives, and calls down and predicts, with the profoundest conviction, the imminent wrath of God. He always, says Burlamacchi, called. Rome Babylon.*

Alexander VI. could neither close his ears against the stunning maledictions of the prophet, nor fail to perceive its fearful consequences; yet at first, his unrivalled secular sagacity might seem at fault. Alexander had permitted himself to be surprised into a consent to render the convent of St. Mark independent of the Dominican province of Lombardy. The report of one of the most terrible sermons of Savonarola had been taken down by a hostile scribe and transmitted in darkened colours to Rome. The preacher had attacked the clergy with the bitterest taunts; he traced the whole evil up to that shameless pontifical court, where all the crimes that pride, cupidity, and luxury can commit are done in open day. To this he attributed the past, present, future miseries of Italy and of the world, and summoned the Court to answer

* p. 551.

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