The difference between Savonarola and Luther was that the Saxon reformer attacked the root of the corruption; not merely outward and tangible and patent sins which everybody knew, but also and more earnestly those false principles of theology and morals which sustained them, and which logically pushed out would necessarily have produced them.  For instance, he not merely attacked indulgences, then a crying evil, as peddled by Tetzel and others like him, and all to get money to support the temporal power of the popes or build St. Peter’s church; but he would show that penance, on which indulgences are based, is antagonistic to the doctrine which Paul so forcibly expounded respecting the forgiveness of sins and the grounds of justification.  And Luther saw that all the evils which good men lamented would continue so long as the false principles from which they logically sprung were the creed of the Church.  So he directed his giant energies to reform doctrines rather than morals.  His great idea of justification could be defended only by an appeal to the Scriptures, not to the authority of councils and learned men.  So he made the Scriptures the sole source of theological doctrine.  Savonarola also accepted the Scriptures, but Luther would put them in the hands of everybody, of peasants even,—­and thus instituted private judgment, which is the basal pillar of Protestantism.  The Catholic theologians never recognized this right in the sense that Luther understood it, and to which he was pushed by inexorable logic.  The Church was to remain the interpreter of the doctrinal and disputed points of the Scriptures.

Savonarola was a churchman.  He was not a fearless theological doctor, going wherever logic and the Bible carried him.  Hence, he did not stimulate thought and inquiry as Luther did, nor inaugurate a great revolutionary movement, which would gradually undermine papal authority and many institutions which the Catholic Church indorsed.  Had he been a great genius, with his progressive proclivities, he might have headed a rebellion against papal authority, which upheld doctrines that logically supported the very evils he denounced.  But he was contented to lop off branches; he did not dig up the roots.  Luther went to the roots, as Calvin did; as Saint Augustine would have done had there been a necessity in his day, for the theology of Saint Augustine and Calvin is essentially the same.  It was from Saint Augustine that Calvin drew his inspiration next after Saint Paul.  But Savonarola cared very little for the discussion of doctrines; he probably hated all theological speculations, all metaphysical divinity.  Yet there is a closer resemblance between doctrines and morals than most people are aware of.  As a man thinketh, so is he.  Hence, the reforms of Savonarola were temporary, and were not widely extended; for he did not kindle the intelligence of the age, as did Luther and those associated with him.  There can be no great and lasting reform without an appeal to reason,