pects he was
a good man,--a beautiful type of Christian piety, with fewer faults than
Luther or Calvin had, and as great an enemy as they to corruptions in
State and Church, which he denounced even more fiercely and
passionately. Not even Erasmus pointed out the vices of the day with
more freedom or earnestness. He covered up nothing; he shut his eyes
to nothing.

The difference between Savonarola and Luther was that the Saxon reformer
attacked the root of the corruption; not merely outward and tangible and
patent sins which everybody knew, but also and more earnestly those
false principles of theology and morals which sustained them, and which
logically pushed out would necessarily have produced them. For
instance, he not merely attacked indulgences, then a crying evil, as
peddled by Tetzel and others like him, and all to get money to support
the temporal power of the popes or build St. Peter's church; but he
would show that penance, on which indulgences are based, is antagonistic
to the doctrine which Paul so forcibly expounded respecting the
forgiveness of sins and the grounds of justification. And Luther saw
that all the evils which good men lamented would continue so long as the
false principles from which they logically sprung were the creed of the
Church. So he directed his giant energies to reform doctrines rather
than morals. His great idea of justification could be defended only by
an appeal to the Scriptures, not to the authority of councils and
learned men. So he made the Scriptures the sole source of theological
doctrine. Savonarola also accepted the Scriptures, but Luther would put
them in the hands of everybody, of peasants even,--and thus instituted
private judgment, which is the basal pillar of Protestantism. The
Catholic theologians never recognized this right in the sense that
Luther understood it, and to which he was pushed by inexorable logic.
The Church was to remain the interpreter of the doctrinal and disputed
points of the Scriptures.

Savonarola was a churchman. He was not a fearless theological doctor,
going wherever logic and the Bible carried him. Hence, he did not
stimulate thought and inquiry as Luther did, nor inaugurate a great
revolutionary movement, which would gradually undermine papal authority
and many institutions which the Catholic Church indorsed. Had he been a
great genius, with his progressive proclivities, he might have headed a
rebellion against papal authority, which uphel