ing in all fair cities, new villas on
pleasant slopes and summits; and the men who had more than their share
of these good things were in no fear of the larger number who had less.
For the citizens' armour was getting rusty, and populations seemed to
have become tame, licking the hands of masters who paid for a ready-made
army when they wanted it, as they paid for goods of Smyrna. Even the
fear of the Turk had ceased to be active, and the Pope found it more
immediately profitable to accept bribes from him for a little
prospective poisoning than to form plans either for conquering or for
converting him.

Altogether this world, with its partitioned empire and its roomy
universal Church, seemed to be a handsome establishment for the few who
were lucky or wise enough to reap the advantages of human folly: a world
in which lust and obscenity, lying and treachery, oppression and murder,
were pleasant, useful, and when properly managed, not dangerous. And as
a sort of fringe or adornment to the substantial delights of tyranny,
avarice, and lasciviousness, there was the patronage of polite learning
and the fine arts, so that flattery could always be had in the choicest
Latin to be commanded at that time, and sublime artists were at hand to
paint the holy and the unclean with impartial skill. The Church, it was
said, had never been so disgraced in its head, had never shown so few
signs of renovating, vital belief in its lower members; nevertheless it
was much more prosperous than in some past days. The heavens were fair
and smiling above; and below there were no signs of earthquake.

Yet at that time, as we have seen, there was a man in Florence who for
two years and more had been preaching that a scourge was at hand; that
the world was certainly not framed for the lasting convenience of
hypocrites, libertines, and oppressors. From the midst of those smiling
heavens he had seen a sword hanging--the sword of God's justice--which
was speedily to descend with purifying punishment on the Church and the
world. In brilliant Ferrara, seventeen years before, the contradiction
between men's lives and their professed beliefs had pressed upon him
with a force that had been enough to destroy his appetite for the world,
and at the age of twenty-three had driven him into the cloister. He
believed that God had committed to the Church the sacred lamp of truth
for the guidance and salvation of men, and he saw that the Church, in
its corr