is private conduct: his fellow-monks,
including one who had formerly been his secretary for several years, and
who, with more than the average culture of his companions, had a
disposition to criticise Fra Girolamo's rule as Prior, bore testimony,
even after the shock of his retraction, to an unimpeachable purity and
consistency in his life, which had commanded their unsuspecting
veneration. The Pope himself had not been able to raise a charge of
heresy against the Frate, except on the ground of disobedience to a
mandate, and disregard of the sentence of excommunication. It was
difficult to justify that breach of discipline by argument, but there
was a moral insurgence in the minds of grave men against the Court of
Rome, which tended to confound the theoretic distinction between the
Church and churchmen, and to lighten the scandal of disobedience.

Men of ordinary morality and public spirit felt that the triumph of the
Frate's enemies was really the triumph of gross licence. And keen
Florentines like Soderini and Piero Guicciardini may well have had an
angry smile on their lips at a severity which dispensed with all law in
order to hang and burn a man in whom the seductions of a public career
had warped the strictness of his veracity; may well have remarked that
if the Frate had mixed a much deeper fraud with a zeal and ability less
inconvenient to high personages, the fraud would have been regarded as
an excellent oil for ecclesiastical and political wheels.

Nevertheless such shrewd men were forced to admit that, however poor a
figure the Florentine government made in its clumsy pretence of a
judicial warrant for what had in fact been predetermined as an act of
policy, the measures of the Pope against Savonarola were necessary
measures of self-defence. Not to try and rid himself of a man who
wanted to stir up the Powers of Europe to summon a General Council and
depose him, would have been adding ineptitude to iniquity. There was no
denying that towards Alexander the Sixth Savonarola was a rebel, and,
what was much more, a dangerous rebel. Florence had heard him say, and
had well understood what he meant, that he would not _obey the devil_.
It was inevitably a life and death struggle between the Frate and the
Pope; but it was less inevitable that Florence should make itself the
Pope's executioner.

Romola's ears were filled in this way with the suggestions of a faith
still ardent under its wounds, and the sugges