What Savonarola had foreseen, here too happened; but not in the way he would have wished, nor by the means he would have used.

It is one thing to be a prophet in the sense of discerning the catastrophe to which circumstances must inevitably lead, another thing to trace beforehand the path which will be taken by the hurricanes that change the face of the world.

Remaining in his soul a monk, attached by education and by natural sympathy to the past rather than the future, he felt in spite of himself the spirit of the coming age.

Had he lived but one century earlier, we should not have called him prophet.

It was the Renaissance which set the seal of truth upon his utterances.