elled against his authority. He
complained bitterly to the Florentine ambassador, of the haughty friar
who rebuked and defied him. He summoned a consistory of fourteen eminent
Dominican theologians, to inquire into his conduct and opinions, and
issued a brief forbidding him to preach, under penalty of
excommunication. Yet Savonarola continued to preach, and more violently
than ever. He renewed his charges against Rome. He even called her a
harlot Church, against whom heaven and earth, angels and devils, equally
brought charges. The Pope then seized the old thunderbolts of the
Gregories and the Clements, and excommunicated the daring monk and
preacher, and threatened the like punishment on all who should befriend
him. And yet Savonarola continued to preach. All Rome and Italy talked
of the audacity of the man. And it was not until Florence itself was
threatened with an interdict for shielding such a man, that the
magistrates of the city were compelled to forbid his preaching.

The great orator mounted his pulpit March 18, 1498, now four hundred
years ago, and took an affectionate farewell of the people whom he had
led, and appealed to Christ himself as the head of the Church. It was
not till the preacher was silenced by the magistrates of his own city,
that he seems to have rebelled against the papal authority; and then not
so much against the authority of Rome as against the wicked shepherd
himself, who had usurped the fold. He now writes letters to all the
prominent kings and princes of Europe, to assemble a general council;
for the general council of Constance had passed a resolution that the
Pope must call a general council every ten years, and that, should he
neglect to assemble it, the sovereign powers of the various states and
empires were themselves empowered to collect the scattered members of
the universal Church, to deliberate on its affairs. In his letters to
the kings of France, England, Spain, and Hungary, and the Emperor of
Germany, he denounced the Pope as simoniacal, as guilty of all the
vices, as a disgrace to the station which he held. These letters seem to
have been directed against the man, not against the system. He aimed at
the Pope's ejectment from office, rather than at the subversion of the
office itself,--another mark of the difference between Savonarola and
Luther, since the latter waged an uncompromising war against Rome
herself, against the whole _regime_ and government and institutions and