Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/593

 ATHEISTIC TENDENCIES. 577 ite with Leo X., who made him count of the palace, and paid him to prove against Pomponazio that Aristotle maintained the immortality of the soul. He became the accepted interpreter of Averrhoes throughout Italy, and his mitigated Averrhoism re- mained the doctrine taught at Padua during the remainder of the century.* It was impossible that the ministers of the Church should es- cape the contagion of this fashionable infidelity, however little, in their worldly self-seeking, they might trouble themselves about the theories of Averrhoism. In his sermons on Ezekiel, in the Lent of 1497, Savonarola describes the priests of the period as slaying the souls of their flocks by their wicked example ; their worship, he says, is to spend the night with strumpets and the day in singing in the choir ; the altar is their shop ; they openly assert that the world is not ruled by the providence of God, but that everything is the result of chance, and that Christ is not in the Eucharist.f It was no wonder, then, that the more thoughtful of the laity, conscious of the evils of the dominant faith, and yet powerless, under the watchful eye of the Inquisition, to apply a corrective short of indifferentism or practical atheism; striving helplessly for something better than they saw around them, and yet unable to release the primal principles of Christianity from the incrustations of scholastic theology, should find their only refuge in these philosophical speculations which virtually reduced Chris- tianity to nothingness. Had not the Reformation come, the cult- ure of Europe would inevitably have been atheistic, or devoted to sublimated deism, scarce distinguishable from atheism. The Church would permit no dissidence within its pale, and yet was singularly tolerant of these aberrations of the fashionable Human- ism. It persecuted the Fraticelli who dared to uphold the poverty of Christ, yet it allowed the paganism of the revived Hellenism to be disseminated almost without interference. Occasionally some zealous Dominican, eager to defend the inspired doctrines of the Angelic Doctor, would threaten trouble, and would burn a too daring book, but the author could readily find protectors high in the Church, some Barozzi or Bembo, who conjured the storm. t Villari, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Ed. 1887, T. II. p. a III.— 37
 * Renan, pp. 367-72.— Cantu, I. 183.