In course of time it became the mark of birth and wealth to lodge a rabble of such rascals.  They lived on terms of familiarity with their employer, shared his secrets, served him in his amours, and executed any devil’s job he chose to command.  Apartments in the basement of the palace were assigned to them, so that a nobleman’s house continued to resemble the castle of a mediaeval baron.  But the bravi, unlike soldiery, were rarely employed in honorable business.  They formed a permanent element of treachery and violence within the social organism.  Not a little singular were the relations thus established.  The community of crime, involving common interests and common perils, established a peculiar bond between the noble and his bravo.  This was complexioned by a certain sense of ‘honor rooted in dishonor,’ and by a faint reflection from elder retainership.  The compact struck between landowner and bandit parodied that which drew feudal lord and wandering squire together.  There was something ignobly noble in it, corresponding to the confused conscience and perilous conditions of the epoch.

While studying this organized and half-tolerated system of social violence, we are surprised to observe how largely it was countenanced and how frequently it was set in motion by the Church.  In a previous chapter on the Jesuits, I have adverted to their encouragement of assassination for ends which they considered sacred.  In a coming chapter upon Sarpi, I shall show to what extent the Roman prelacy was implicated in more than one attempt to take away his life.  The chiefs of the Church, then, instead of protesting against this vice of corrupt civilization in Italy, lent the weight of their encouragement to what strikes us now, not only as eminently unchristian, but also as pernicious to healthy national conditions of existence.  We may draw two conclusions from these observations:  first, that religions, except in the first fervor of their growth and forward progress, recognize the moral conventions of the society which they pretend to regulate:  secondly, that it is well-nigh impossible for men of one century to sympathize with the ethics of a past and different epoch.  We cannot comprehend the regicidal theories of the Jesuits, or the murderous intrigues of a Borghese Pontiff’s Court, without admitting that priests, specially dedicated to the service of Christ and to the propagation of his gospel, felt themselves justified in employing the immoral and unchristian means which social custom placed at their disposal for ridding themselves of inconvenient enemies.  This is at the same time their defense as human beings in the sixteenth century, and their indictment as self-styled and professed successors of the Founder who rebuked Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane.