nce
ends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy
one; but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that the
Church was--not a compromise of parties to secure a more or less
approximate justice in the appropriation of funds, but--a living
organism, instinct with Divine power to bless and to curse. To most of
the pious Florentines, who had hitherto felt no doubt in their adherence
to the Frate, that belief in the Divine potency of the Church was not an
embraced opinion, it was an inalienable impression, like the concavity
of the blue firmament; and the boldness of Savonarola's written
arguments that the Excommunication was unjust, and that, being unjust,
it was not valid, only made them tremble the more, as a defiance cast at
a mystic image, against whose subtle immeasurable power there was
neither weapon nor defence.

But Romola, whose mind had not been allowed to draw its early
nourishment from the traditional associations of the Christian community
in which her father had lived a life apart, felt her relation to the
Church only through Savonarola; his moral force had been the only
authority to which she had bowed; and in his excommunication she only
saw the menace of hostile vice: on one side she saw a man whose life was
devoted to the ends of public virtue and spiritual purity, and on the
other the assault of alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful, greedy,
lying, and murderous old man, once called Rodrigo Borgia, and now lifted
to the pinnacle of infamy as Pope Alexander the Sixth. The finer shades
of fact which soften the edge of such antitheses are not apt to be seen
except by neutrals, who are not distressed to discern some folly in
martyrs and some judiciousness in the men who burnt them. But Romola
required a strength that neutrality could not give; and this
Excommunication, which simplified and ennobled the resistant position of
Savonarola by bringing into prominence its wider relations, seemed to
come to her like a rescue from the threatening isolation of criticism
and doubt. The Frate was now withdrawn from that smaller antagonism
against Florentine enemies into which he continually fell in the
unchecked excitement of the pulpit, and presented himself simply as
appealing to the Christian world against a vicious exercise of
ecclesiastical power. He was a standard-bearer leaping into the breach.
Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster
at th