Savonarola at an early age chose the study of theology for a profession, and devoted himself to the Holy Scriptures, and at the age of twenty-two was greatly impressed by the preaching of a friar. He became member of a Dominican convent at Bologna. He was removed to Florence, then became friar, and saw great need of reform in the lax and worldly ways of the monks. He soon developed great gifts as a preacher, and had a rapt and impassioned style of oratory; and his early study of the Apocalypse led him into mystical language, which heightened the effect. His denunciations of the current vices made him a formidable censor, and even gave him political influence, and excited enmities. Like some of his near contemporaries, his influence over the ardent youths caused them at the carnival of 1497 to go the round of the city and collect all the rich and extravagant dresses, pictures, musical instruments, books of sorcery, and false hair into a large pile; and then, amid singing of hymns, sounding of bells and trumpets, the heap was fired amid great enthusiasm. His attacks on the vices of the period led the Pope to excommunicate him. But his preaching was a constant attraction and kept up the excitement. Shorthand writers took the sermons down, printed and dispersed them all over Italy. Once he was challenged by a bitter enemy to walk through a burning pile forty yards long, in order to test which of two opposing doctrines was true; and he felt bound to accept the challenge, though ultimately this mode of trial was prohibited by the magistrates. He was, like other advanced reformers, charged with heresy, tortured, and ultimately sentenced to be burnt alive, after being degraded. The sentence was carried out in 1498, and his ashes were thrown into the river, under the idle notion that his name and influence would perish. Some have denounced him as a fanatic, and others as a reformer too far advanced for his age, though Luther was only a few years his junior. In Germany also three noted reformers appeared between 1450 and 1489--namely, John of Goch, John of Wesel, and John Wessel, whose teaching tended towards Lutheranism, then in the bud and soon about to flower. CHAPTER X. _FAMOUS MONKS AND MONASTERIES._ A MONK WITH A GENIUS FOR MONKERY (A.D. 400).