Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/226

 210 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE CHURCH. with a cynical disregard even of hypocrisy. To the earnest be- liever it might well seem that God's wrath could not much longer be restrained, and that calamities must be impending which would sweep away the wicked and restore to the Church and to man- kind the purity and simplicity fondly ascribed to primitive ages. For centuries a succession of prophets — Joachim of Flora, St. Catharine of Siena, St. Birgitta of Sweden, the Friends of God, Tommasino of Foligno, the Monk Telesforo — had arisen with pre- dictions which had been received with reverence, and as time passed on and human wickedness increased, some new messenger of God seemed necessarv to recall his erring children to a sense of the retribution in store for them if they should continue deaf to his voice. That Savonarola honestly believed himself called to such a mission, no one who has impartially studied his strange career can well doubt. His lofty sense of the evils of the time, his profound conviction that God must interfere to work a change which was beyond human power, his marvellous success in moving his hearers, his habits of solitude and of profound meditation, his frequent ecstasies with their resultant visions might well, in a mind like his, produce such a belief, which, moreover, was one taught by the re- ceived traditions of the Church as within the possibilities of the experience of any man. Five years before his first appearance in Florence, a young hermit who had been devotedly serving in a leper hospital at Volterra, came thither, preaching and predicting the wrath to come. He had had visions of St. John and the angel Raphael, and was burdened with a message to unwilling ears. Such things, we are told by the diarist who happens to record this, were occurring every day. In 1491 Rome was agitated by a mysterious prophet who foretold dire calamities impending in the near future. There was no lack of such earnest men, but, unlike Savonarola, their influence and their fate were not such as to pre- serve their memory.* ducci., Diario Fiorentino, Firenze, 1883, p. 30. — Stepb. Infessurae Diar. (Eccard. Corp. Hist. Med. ^Evi II. 2000). Villari shows (La Storia di Gir. Savonarola, Firenze, 1887, I. pp. viii.-xi.) that the life which passes under the name of Burlamacchi is a rifacimento of an imprinted Latin biography by a disciple of Savonarola. I take this opportunity
 * Burlaraacchi, Vita di Savonarola (Baluz. et Mansi I. 533-542). — Luca Lan-