- compromising hatred of worldliness, wickedness, and
crime. He was not immediately connected with the great movement known as the Reformation, in which Luther a few years later was the principal figure, when the Protestants broke off from the Roman Catholic Church. But Luther declared Savonarola to have been the precursor of his doctrine. And, indeed, his strong protest against the immorality and corruption of the Papacy and his fervent desire to increase the spiritual rather than the material authority of the Church—that is to say, its influence over men's minds rather than its worldly power—helped to lay the foundations on which the great Reformers built. At the same time it must not be supposed that he himself had any desire to alter the creeds and traditions of the Roman Church.
A very fine description of Savonarola is introduced by one of our great novelists, George Eliot, in the story of "Romola." Referring to his martyrdom, she says:
Power rose against him not because of his sins but because
of his greatness, not because he sought to deceive
the world but because he sought to make it noble. And
through that greatness of his he endured double agony:
not only the reviling and the torture and the death-throe,
but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious
achievement into that deep shadow where he could only
say, "I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me:
yet the light I saw was the true light."
A. P.
