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I could not support the enormous wickedness of most of the people in Italy. Everywhere I saw virtue despised, vice in honour. When God, in answer to my prayer, condescended to show me the right way, could I decline it? O gentle Jesus, may I suffer a thousand deaths rather than oppose thy will and show myself ungrateful for thy goodness. Think not that I have not endured the deepest affliction in separating myself from you. Never, since I was born, have I suffered such bitter mental torment as at the moment when I abandoned my own father to make the sacrifice of my body to Jesus Christ, and to surrender my will into the hands of those whom I had never seen. You complain of the secrecy of my departure, I should rather say, my flight. In truth, I suffered such grief and agony of heart when I left you, that, if I had betrayed myself, I verily believe that my heart would have broken, and I should have changed my purpose. In mercy, then, most loving father, dry your tears, and add not to my pain and sorrow. To be Cæsar, I would not return to the world; but, like you, I am of flesh and blood; the senses wage a cruel war with the reason, and I would not give vantage to the devil. The first days, the bitter days, will soon be over. As a man of strong mind, I beseech you, comfort my mother, and both of you send me, I entreat you, your blessing.'

Savonarola, like all men, especially Italian men, of his temperament, sought expression for his passionate feelings in poetry. The able editor of his few poems, M. de Rians,† assigns his earliest ode, 'De Ruinâ Mundi,' to some period a year or two before his flight to Bologna. It breathes the same sensitive horror of the awful moral spectacle around him, and already Rome is the centre and source of all wickedness :

'La terra è si oppressa da ogni vizio
Che mai da se non leverà la soma,

A terra se ne va il suo capo, Roma,

Per mai non tornar al grande offizio.'-St. 5.

If this first poem revealed the stern aversion of his heart to the sins of the world, his second, 'On the Ruin of the Church,' showed no less his vivid imagination, already revelling in that allegorical significance which he assigned to every word of the Scripture, and in the boundless symbolism of the Church. The Ode is a string of brilliant material images, each of which has its latent spiritual meaning: jewels, diamonds, lamps, sapphires, white robes, golden zones, white horses. But Italy lost no poet by the elevation of Savonarola to be her greatest preacher. Girolamo's verses are hard and harsh; all his higher odes are utterly

* The letter may be read in Latin in the Epistolæ Spirituales published by P. Quetif; in Italian, in Burlamacchi; in French, in M. Perrens; in our own tongue, in both the English Lives.

† Poesie di Savonarola. Firenze, 1847.

deficient

deficient in the exquisite music, the crystalline purity of Petrarch; his more lowly and familiar stanzas, if they have the rudeness want the simple fervour of St. Francis, still more the vigour of Jacopone da Todi. We fear his poetry itself would hardly have disenchanted the popular ear from the profane and pagan, but light and festive, carnival songs of Lorenzo de' Medici. 'Savonarola's poetry is to be sought in his sermons and even in some of his treatises.

There could be no doubt that Savonarola would equal the austerest sons of St. Dominic in the congenial virtues of the cloister. Yet though sternly submissive to the rigorous rules of his Order as to fastings and mortifications, there does not always appear that extravagance of asceticism in which some of the older anchorites and the more famous monks luxuriated and gloried. He has no special aspirations after peculiar filth and misery; and throughout his teaching the advice to others on these subjects, though in harmony with the rules of his Church, has a tone of moderation and good sense; bodily austerities are but subordinate, of low esteem, in comparison with the graces and virtues of the heart and soul. No breath of calumny ever attainted the personal purity of Savonarola. When he was the spiritual lord of Florence, if he condescended now and then to notice imputations of interested motives, of covetousness or spiritual extortion, it was to reject them with a defiant scorn, with an appeal to his own lofty disdain of wealth, to his known and lavish charities to the poor. He might have been, but disdained to be, wealthy. He was even above that more fatal and common avarice of his Church; he sternly condemned the prodigal expenditure of wealth on magnificent buildings, on church ornaments, the golden censers, the jewelled pixes, the rich embroidered vestments: he would still be the simple, self-denying monk, not the splendid churchman.

In his obedience he was a mild brother of his Order; as yet a humble disciple, he was in all respects strictly subordinate to his rule, and to the authority of his superiors. In his studies alone he struggled with gentle pertinacity for some freedom, which he at length obtained. He submitted to the common discipline of the Order, the study of the Fathers, of scholastic theology with all its subtle perplexities and all its arid dialectics: but his heart rebelled; and dwelt with still increasing interest and exclusiveness on the Holy Scriptures. But it was not his heart alone which found its rest and consolation in the simple truths and peaceful promises of the Gospel. It was the bold and startling imagery, the living figures, the terrible denunciatory language, the authoritative rebukes of sin in the name

of

of a terrible and avenging God, the awful words of God himself, as uttered and avouched by the ancient prophets, which clave to his memory, kindled his soul, and became at length his own, as he supposed, not less inspired language. His was not anxious searching of the Scriptures, in order to find out the way for the salvation of his own soul.* As to that way he had implicit faith in the doctrines and in the authority of the Church. He had the simple conviction that this was by faith and holiness of life, faith inspired by grace, of which holiness was the necessary manifestation. But the Bible, he felt by the terrific power of its language, by the deep meaning of its phrases and imagery, and by its direct application to the state of existing things could alone shake the perishing world around him, and beat up the universal wickedness which comprehended the people, the clergy, the Pope himself. At first indeed his mind was in the fetters of his earlier and colder studies. According to the usage of his Order he was commissioned to visit many of the cities of Lombardy, to administer spiritual instruction, to exhort, to hear confession, and in every ordinary way to promote religion. In 1482, six years after his admission into the Dominican order, he was at Ferrara, his native city. He went there with reluctance, for no man is a prophet in his own country, and he compares himself with unsuspected irreverence to the Carpenter's son, to whom his native Nazareth paid but slight respect-a singular illustration of his prescience of his own high powers and destiny, as well as of his simplicity.† Ferrara was threatened with war by the Venetians. Most of the Dominicans were ordered by their superior to retire from their convent in Ferrara, S. Maria dei Angeli. Among those who were sent to Florence was Fra Girolamo. He was received in the magnificent convent of the order, San Marco, hereafter to be the scene of his glory, and his fate. The name of Fra Girolamo was already not without celebrity, but it was for his learning and for his sanctity. Many stories were abroad of conversions which he had wrought, hardly less than preternatural ; the number of his disciples in later days threw back the halo of miracle around many of his earlier acts. On a voyage from Ferrara to Mantua he had been shocked by the blasphemies and

* There are four copies of the Scriptures in different libraries at Florence, annotated by the hand of Savonarola. The notes themselves are in a kind of short hand, but there is an interpretation in the MSS. The passage extracted by M. Perrens is genuine Savonarola-a record of the wild dreams which crossed his slumbering or his waking imagination, in the prophetic significance of which he seemed to have implicit faith.-Appendix, tom. i. p. 458.

In his beautiful letter to his mother, published by F. Marchese, Archivio Storico, p. 112; no one who reads this, and no more than this, can doubt the perfect sincerity of Savonarola.

obscenities

obscenities of the rude boatmen. After half an hour of his earnest catechising, eleven of them threw themselves at his feet, in profound contrition, confessing their sins, and imploring absolution.

Florence witnessed the first recorded instance of his public preaching. By the admission, it may almost be said, by the boast of his admiring biographers, this first attempt was a total, it might seem a hopeless, failure, such as might have crushed a less ardent man. He was appointed to preach the Carême (the course of Lent sermons) in the great church of San Lorenzo. The expectation was high; his countenance was known to be fine and expressive; his form, though slight, was full of grace and strength. But his voice was thin and harsh; his delivery unimpressive, his gestures rude and awkward; his language, not yet disembarrassed of dry scholastic form, heavy and dull. His audience dwindled down to a still diminishing few; not twenty-five persons lingered in the vacant nave. His superiors, whether in kindness, or suspecting his slumbering powers, sent him during two consecutive years (1484-5) to preach at San Gemignano. Still all was cold and ineffective; a scanty and listless audience, or vacant aisles. He retired to Florence and re-assumed the humble office of reader; it might seem that his career of fame and of usefulness was closed for ever.

On a sudden, at Brescia, he burst out; appalling, entrancing, shaking the souls of men, piercing to their heart of hearts, and drawing them in awe-struck crowds before the foot of his pulpit. The secret was in the text-book of his sermons. It was the Apocalypse of St. John. Aut insanum inveniet aut faciet such was the axiom of no less a person than Calvin on the study of this mysterious book; an axiom probably not much known to those who hold the peculiar doctrines of the French reformer among ourselves. If we receive, according to the letter, the account of this Brescian sermon, its causes and its consequences, as related in the life by Burlamacchi, it might be adduced as illustrating the wisdom of the great Genevese reformer. Not only in preaching on the chapter concerning the 23 (24) elders, did he declare that one of the elders had been commissioned to reveal to him the terrible doom which awaited Italy, and especially the city of Brescia; not only did he summon Brescia to repentance, for 'fathers would see their children massacred and dragged through the streets'-a scourge which would fall upon the city during the life-time of many there present; but besides this, it was averred by Fra Angelo of Brescia that on the night of the Nativity, in the convent of Brescia (the sermon had been preached on St. Andrew's day)

Fra

Fra Girolamo had stood in an extacy for five hours, entirely motionless, with his face shining so as to illuminate the whole

* From this time Savonarola was no longer a preacher, he was a prophet.† Already, by his own account, he had struck this chord at San Gemignano, but with a feeble hand, and it had not vibrated to the hearts of his hearers: he had preached the scourging, the renewal of the Church, and that quickly; but he had preached it not by divine revelation, but as an inference from the Scriptures. This more sober statement might seem to comprehend his preaching at Brescia, and all the period of four years (1486-1490) which elapsed before his return to Florence. But the study of the Apocalypse, and the congenial study of the Prophets of the Old Testament, neither found Savonarola mad, nor drove him to madness, if we take madness in its ordinary and vulgar sense. Yet if to be possessed by one great, noble, and holy aim, and in the exclusive and absorbing pursuit of that aim sometimes to pass over the imperceptible boundary of prudence and reason: if conscious of the undoubted mission of all good men, and especially of all in holy orders, or who wore the cowl of the monk, to denounce with peculiar authority the divine wrath against human wickedness, and to summon the Church to repentance, he forgot at times-or thought suspended in his own behalfthe ordinary laws of Divine Providence; if he did not reverently admit that the All-Wise jealously reserves in the mysteries of his own councils the times and the seasons;' if he at times lost his Christian patience, and no longer uttered in humble expostulation, Holy and True, how long? and imagined that he saw the sword already bare, and heard it summoned to go through the land-if these things are insanity, so far must be admitted the madness of Savonarola. But as that madness in no way whatever lessens his responsibility, if it tempers our astonishment, and permits our cool judgment to trace the causes of his failure, and to a certain degree of his fatal end, so it gives full scope to our admiration of that which assuredly entitles him (by a much better claim than doubtful miracles, seen by blind disciples) to canoniza

* Burlamacchi, apud Mansi, p. 533.

A prophecy of such ruin to Brescia might have been hazarded at any time with no doubtful chance of its veracity. No city was so often besieged, few suffered such frequent desolation. It was said to have been fulfilled in the storming by the French some years after.

E andando a San Gemignano a predicarsi, comincia a predicarne, e in due anni ch' io vi predicai, proponendo queste conclusioni che la chiesa aveva a essere flagellata, rinovata, e presto. E questo non avevo per rivelazione, ma per ragione delle Scritture. E così dicevo, e in questo modo predicai a Brescia, e in molte altri luoghi di Lombardia qualche volta di queste cose, dove stette anni circa a quattro. Processo. Baluz, Miscell. iv. 529.

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