LITMIR.BIZ

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his nephew, and lived plainly on what remained, that he might give largely in charity.109 He made Savonarola his almoner, who on his behalf gave alms to destitute people and marriage portions to poor maidens.110 He had frequent thoughts of entering the Dominican Order, and

      “On a time as he walked with his nephew, John Francis, in a garden at Ferrara, talking of the love of Christ, he broke out with these words: ‘Nephew,’ said he, ‘this will I show thee; I warn thee keep it secret; the substance I have left after certain books of mine are finished, I intend to give out to poor folk, and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot, walking about the world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach Christ.’ ”111

      It is also recorded that he made a practice of scourging himself; especially “on those days which represent unto us the Passion and Death that Christ suffered for our sake, he beat and scourged his own flesh in remembrance of that great benefit, and for cleansing his old offences.”112 But above all things he devoted himself to a diligent study of the Holy Scriptures, and commended the practice to his nephew:

      “ ‘Thou mayest do nothing more pleasing to God, nothing more profitable to thyself, than if thine hand cease not day and night to turn and read the volumes of Holy Scripture. There lieth privily in them a certain heavenly strength, quick and effectual, which, with a marvellous power, transformeth and changeth the readers' mind into the love of God, if they be clean and lowly entreated.’ ”113

      The great Platonist forsook Plato for St. Paul, whom he called the “glorious Apostle.”114 When he died he left his lands to one of the hospitals in Florence, and desired to be buried in the hood of the Dominican monks and within the Convent of San Marco.

      Another distinguished member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano, was also one of Savonarola's converts. We find him exchanging confidences with Pico, both declaring that love and not knowledge is the faculty by which we learn to know God:

      “ ‘But now behold, my well-beloved Angelo,’ writes Pico, ‘what madness holdeth us. Love God (while we be in this body) we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. In loving Him also we more profit ourselves; we labour less and serve Him more. And yet had we rather always by knowledge never find that thing we seek, than by love possess that thing which also without love were in vain found.’ ”115

      Poliziano, like Pico, had at one time some thoughts of joining the Dominican Order. He too was buried at his own request in the cowl of the Dominican monk in the Convent of San Marco.

      Lorenzo de Medici, who during his life had made many attempts to win the support of Savonarola, and had always been repulsed, could not die without entreating the great preacher to visit him on his deathbed and grant him absolution.

      Italian Humanism was for the moment won over to Christianity by the Prior of San Marco. Had the poets and the scholars, the politicians and the ecclesiastics, the State and the Church, not been so hopelessly corrupt, there might have been a great renovation of mankind, under the leadership of men who had no desire to break the political unity of the mediæval Church. For it can scarcely be too strongly insisted that Savonarola was no Reformation leader in the more limited sense of the phrase. The movement he headed has much more affinity with the crude revival of religion in Germany in the end of the fifteenth century, than with the Reformation itself; and the aim of the reorganisation of the Tuscan congregation of the Dominicans under Savonarola has an almost exact parallel in the creation of the congregation of the Augustinian Eremites under Andreas Proles and Johann Staupitz. The whole Italian movement, as might be expected, was conducted by men of greater intelligence and refinement. It had therefore less sympathy than the German with pilgrimages, relics, the niceties of ceremonial worship, and the cult of the vulgarly miraculous; but it was not the less mediæval on these accounts. It was the death rather than the life and lifework of Savonarola that was destined to have direct effect on the Reformation soon to come beyond the Alps; for his martyrdom was a crowning evidence of the impossibility of reforming the Church of the Middle Ages apart from the shock of a great convulsion. “Luther himself,” says Professor Villari, “could scarcely have been so successful in inaugurating his Reform, had not the sacrifice of Savonarola given a final proof that it was hopeless to hope in the purification of Rome.”116

§ 2. John Colet.

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      While Savonarola was at the height of his influence in Florence, there chanced to be in Italy a young Englishman, John Colet, son of a wealthy London merchant who had been several times Lord Mayor. He had gone there, we may presume, like his countrymen Grocyn and Linacre, to make himself acquainted with the New Learning at its fountainhead. There is no proof that he went to Florence or ever saw the great Italian preacher; but no stranger could have visited Northern Italy in 1495 without hearing much of him and of his work. Colet's whole future life in England bears evidence that he did receive a new impulse while he was in Italy, and that of such a kind as could have come only from Savonarola. What Erasmus tells us of his sojourn there amply confirms this. Colet gave himself up to the study of the Holy Scriptures; he read carefully those theologians of the ancient Church specially acceptable to the Neo-Platonist Christian Humanists; he studied the pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, and Jerome. What is more remarkable still in a foreign Humanist come to study in Italy, he read diligently such English classics as he could find in order to prepare himself for the work of preaching when he returned to England. The words of Erasmus imply that the impulse to do all this came to him when he was in Italy, and there was no one to impart it to him but the great Florentine.

      When Colet returned to England in 1496, he began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of St. Paul. His method of exposition, familiar enough after Calvin had introduced it into the Reformed Church, was then absolutely new, and proves that he was an original and independent thinker. His aim was to find out the personal message which the writer (St. Paul) had sent to the Christians at Rome; and this led him to seek for every trace which revealed the personality of the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was equally imperative to know what were the surroundings of the men to whom the Epistle was addressed, and Colet studied Suetonius to find some indications of the environment of the Roman Christians. He had thus completely freed himself from the Scholastic habit of using the Scriptures as a mere collection of isolated texts to be employed in proving doctrines or moral rules constructed or imposed by the Church, and it is therefore not surprising to find that he never lards his expositions with quotations from the Fathers. It is a still greater proof of his daring that he set aside the allegorising methods of the Schoolmen—methods abundantly used by Savonarola—and that he did so in spite of his devotion to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius. He was the first to apply the critical methods of the New Learning to discover the exact meaning of the books of the Holy Scriptures. His treatment of the Scriptures shows that however he may have been influenced by Savonarola and by the Christian Humanists of Italy, he had advanced far beyond them, and had seen, what no mediæval theologian head been able to perceive, that the Bible is a personal and not a dogmatic revelation. They were mediæval: he belongs to the Reformation circle of thinkers. Luther, Calvin, and Colet, whatever else separates them, have this one deeply important thought in common. Further, Colet discarded the mediæval conception of a mechanical inspiration of the text of Scripture, in this also agreeing with Luther and Calvin. The inspiration of the Holy Scriptures was something mysterious to him. “The Spirit seemed to him by reason of its majesty to have a peculiar method of its own, singularly, absolutely free, blowing where it lists, making prophets of whom it will, yet so that the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets.”117

      Colet saw clearly, and denounced the abounding evils which were ruining the Church of his day. The Convocation of the English Church never listened to a bolder sermon than that preached to them by the Dean of St. Paul's in 1512—the same year that Luther addressed an assembly of clergy at Leitzkau. The two addresses should be compared. The same fundamental thought is contained in both—that every true reformation must begin with the individual man. Colet declared that reform must begin with the bishops, and that once begun it would spread to the clergy and thence to the laity; “for the body follows the soul; and as are the rulers in a State,

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