eval Church, "and therefore I die in exile."

In ten years after this ignominious execution, Raphael painted the
martyr among the sainted doctors of the Church in the halls of the
Vatican, and future popes did justice to his memory, for he inaugurated
that reform movement in the Catholic Church itself which took place
within fifty years after his death. In one sense he was the precursor of
Loyola, of Xavier, and of Aquaviva,--those illustrious men who headed
the counter-reformation; Jesuits, indeed, but ardent in piety, and
enlightened by the spirit of a progressive age. "He was the first," says
Villari, "in the fifteenth century, to make men feel that a new light
had awakened the human race; and thus he was a prophet of a new
civilization,--the forerunner of Luther, of Bacon, of Descartes. Hence
the drama of his life became, after his death, the drama of Europe. In
the course of a single generation after Luther had declared his mission,
the spirit of the Church of Rome underwent a change. From the halls of
the Vatican to the secluded hermitages of the Apennines this revival was
felt. Instead of a Borgia there reigned a Caraffa." And it is remarkable
that from the day that the counter-reformation in the Catholic Church
was headed by the early Jesuits, Protestantism gained no new victories,
and in two centuries so far declined in piety and zeal that the cities
which witnessed the noblest triumphs of Luther and Calvin were disgraced
by a boasting rationalism, to be succeeded again in our times by an
arrogance of scepticism which has had no parallel since the days of
Democritus and Lucretius. "It was the desire of Savonarola that reason,
religion, and liberty might meet in harmonious union, but he did not
think a new system of religious doctrines was necessary."

The influence of such a man cannot pass away, and has not passed away,
for it cannot be doubted that his views have been embraced by
enlightened Catholics from his day to ours,--by such men as Pascal,
Fenelon, and Lacordaire, and thousands like them, who prefer ritualism
and auricular confession, and penance, monasticism, and an
ecclesiastical monarch, and all the machinery of a complicated
hierarchy, with all the evils growing out of papal domination, to
rationalism, sectarian dissensions, irreverence, license, want of unity,
want of government, and even dispensation from the marriage vow. Which
is worse, the physical arm of the beast, or the maniac soul of a lyi