FUL REFORMS.

This lecture is intended to set forth a memorable movement in the Roman
Catholic Church,--a reformation of morals, preceding the greater
movement of Luther to produce a reformation of both morals and
doctrines. As the representative of this movement I take Savonarola,
concerning whom much has of late been written; more, I think, because he
was a Florentine in a remarkable age,--the age of artists and of
reviving literature,--than because he was a martyr, battling with evils
which no one man was capable of removing. His life was more a protest
than a victory. He was an unsuccessful reformer, and yet he prepared the
way for that religious revival which afterward took place in the
Catholic Church itself. His spirit was not revolutionary, like that of
the Saxon monk, and yet it was progressive. His soul was in active
sympathy with every emancipating idea of his age. He was the incarnation
of a fervid, living, active piety amid forms and formulas, a fearless
exposer of all shams, an uncompromising enemy to the blended atheism and
idolatry of his ungodly age. He was the contemporary of political,
worldly, warlike, unscrupulous popes, disgraced by nepotism and personal
vices,--men who aimed to extend not a spiritual but temporal dominion,
and who scandalized the highest position in the Christian world, as
attested by all reliable historians, whether Catholic or Protestant.
However infallible the Catholic Church claims to be, it has never been
denied that some of her highest dignitaries have been subject to grave
reproaches, both in their character and their influence. Such men were
Sixtus IV., Julius II., and Alexander VI.,--able, probably, for it is
very seldom that the popes have not been distinguished for something,
but men, nevertheless, who were a disgrace to the superb position they
had succeeded in reaching.

The great feature of that age was the revival of classical learning and
artistic triumphs in sculpture, painting, and architecture, blended with
infidel levity and social corruptions, so that it is both interesting
and hideous. It is interesting for its triumphs of genius, its
dispersion of the shadows of the Middle Ages, the commencement of great
enterprises and of a marked refinement of manners and tastes; it is
hideous for its venalities, its murders, its debaucheries, its
unblushing wickedness, and its disgraceful levities, when God and duty
and self-restraint were alike ignored. Cruel tyrants re