688 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
Savonarola. Portraying the insincerity of the clergy, he said : —
In these days, prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things. The care of souls is no longer their concern. They are content with the receipt of revenue. The preachers preach to please princes and to be praised by them. They have done worse. They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new Church after their own pattern. Go to Rome and see ! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see ! Thou shalt find them all with the books of the humanities in their hands and telling one another that they can guide mens' souls by means of Virgil, Horace and Cicero. . . . The prelates of former days had fewer gold mitres and chalices and what few they possessed were broken up and given to relieve the needs of the poor. But our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support. Dost thou not know what I would tell thee! "What doest thou, O Lord! Arise, and come to deliver thy Church from the hands of devils, from the hands of tyrants, from the hands of iniquitous prelates.^
Dizzy flights of fancy abounded in Savonarola's discourses and took the place of calm and logical exposition. On the evening before he preached his last sermon in Advent, 1492, Savonarola beheld in the middle of the sky a hand holding r. sword with the inscription, Behold the sword of the Lord will descend suddenly and quickly upon the earth — Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter. Suddenly the sword was turned toward the earth, the sky was darkened, swords, arrows and flames rained down. The heavens quaked with thunder and the world became a prey to famine and death. TJie^ vision was ended by a command to the preacher to make these things known. Again and again, in after years did he refer to this prophetic vision. ^ Its memory was also preserved by a medal, representing on one side Savonarola and on the other a sword in the heavens held by a hand and pointing to a city beneath.
The inscription on the heavenly sword well represents the
1 Villari, I. 183 sqq.
2 So Nov. 1, 1494, etc. See Schottmiiller, p. 28 sqq. The motto, cito et velociter, was repeated to Savonarola by the Virgin in his vision of heaven, 1495.
§ 76. GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA. 689
style of Savonarola's preaching. It was impulsive, pictorial, eruptive, startling, not judicial and instructive. And yet it made a profound impression on men of different classes. Pico della Mirandola the elder has described its marvellous effect upon himself. On one occasion, when he announced as his text Gen. 6 : 17, " Behold I will bring the flood of waters upon the earth," Pico said he felt a cold shudder course through him, and his hair, as it were, stand on end. One is reminded of some of the impressions made by the sermons of Christmas Evans, the Welsh preacher, and the impression made by Whitefield's oratory upon Lord Chesterfield and Franklin. But the imagery of the sermon, brilliant and weird as it was, is no sufficient explanation of the Florentine preacher's power. The preacher himself was burning with religious passion. He felt deeply and he was a man of deep devotion. He had the eye of the mystic and saw beneath the external and ritual to the inner movements of'spiritual power.
The biblical eleiuent was also a conspicuous feature of his jgreachilTg. Defective as Savonarola's exegesis was, the biblical element was everywhere in control of his thought and descriptions. His famous discourses were upon the ark. Exodus, and the prophets Haggai, Ezekiel, Amos and Hosea, and John's Revelation. He insisted upon the authority of Scripture. " I preach the regeneration of the Church," he said, " taking the Scriptures as my sole guide." ^
Another. eifiJ3ieiLfcjwhichj^veto_Saypnarola's sermons their virility and power was the prophetic element. Savonarola was not merely the expounder of righteousness. He clalmfi,d toJbe a prophet revealing things whichijto.use-hisL owil worda»_" ara be_yond the scope of the knowledge which is natural to any creature." This element would have been a sign of weakness, if it had not been associated with a great personality, bent on noble ends. The severity of his warnings was often so fearful
1 Rudelbach, pp. 333-346, presents an elaborate statement of Savonarola's attitude to the Bible, and quotes from one of his sermons on the Exodus thus: " The tlieologians of our time have soiled everything by their unseemly disputations as with pitch. They do not know a shred of the Bible, yea, they do not even know the names of its books." 2y