of doubt remained upon the minds of those who had been witnesses of his life-drama.  Upon this topic Guicciardini, Stor.  Fior., Op.  Ined. vol. iii. p. 179; Nardi, Stor.  Fior. lib. ii. caps. 16 and 36, may be read with advantage.

’I began’—­Savonarola writes himself with reference to a course of sermons delivered in 1491—­’I began publicly to expound the Revelation in our Church of S. Mark.  During the course of the year I continued to develop to the Florentines these three propositions:  That the Church would be renewed in our time; that before that renovation God would strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement; that these things would happen shortly.’  It is by right of the foresight of a new age contained in these three famous so-called conclusions that Savonarola deserves to be named the Prophet of the Renaissance.  He was no apostle of reform:  it did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute the discipline, or to criticise the authority of the Church.  He was no founder of a new order:  unlike his predecessors, Dominic and Francis, he never attempted to organize a society of saints or preachers; unlike his successors, Caraffa the Theatine and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia for the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for education.  Starting with simple horror at the wickedness of the world, he had recourse to the old prophets.  He steeped himself in Bible studies.  He caught the language of Malachi and Jeremiah.  He became convinced that for the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent.  From that conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief that a new age would dawn.  The originality of his intuition consisted in this, that while Italy was asleep, and no man trembled for the future, he alone felt that the stillness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its tranquillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown from the very nostrils of the God of Hosts.

To the astonishment of his hearers, and perhaps also of himself, his prophecies began to fulfill themselves.  Within three years after his first sermon in S. Mark’s, Charles VIII. had entered Italy, Lorenzo de’ Medici was dead, and politicians no less than mystics felt that a new chapter had been opened in the book of the world’s history.  The Reform of the Church was also destined to follow.  What Savonarola had foreseen, here too happened; but not in the way he would have wished, nor by the means he would have used.  It is one thing to be a prophet in the sense of discerning the catastrophe to which circumstances must inevitably lead, another thing to trace beforehand the path which will be taken by the hurricanes that change the face of the world.  Remaining in his soul a monk, attached by education and by natural sympathy to the past rather than the future, he felt in spite of himself the spirit of the coming age.  Had he lived but one century earlier, we should not have called him prophet.  It was the Renaissance which set the seal of truth upon his utterances.  Yet in his vision of the world to be, he was like Balaam prophesying blindly of a star.