A passage from Sarpi’s correspondence may be cited, as sounding the keynote to all his writings in this famous controversy.  ‘I imagine,’ he writes to Jacques Gillot in 1609, ’that the State and the Church are two realms, composed, however, of the same human beings.  The one is wholly heavenly, the other earthly.  Each has its own sovereignty, defended by its own arms and fortifications.  Nothing is held by them in common, and there should be no occasion for the one to declare war upon the other.  Christ said that he and his disciples were not of this world.  S. Paul affirms that our city is in the heavens.  I take the word Church to signify an assembly of the faithful, not of priests only; for when we regard it as confined to those, it ceases to be Christ’s kingdom, and becomes a portion of the commonwealth in this world, subject to the highest authority of State, as also are the laity.[136] This emphatic distinction between Church and State, both fulfilling the needs of humanity but in diverse relations, lay at the root of Sarpi’s doctrine.  He regarded the claim of the Church to interfere in State management, not only as an infringement of the prince’s prerogative, but also as patent rebellion against the law of God which had committed the temporal government of nations in sacred trust to secular rulers.  As the State has no call to meddle in the creation and promulgation of dogmas, or to impose its ordinances on the religious conscience of its subjects, so the Church has no right to tamper with affairs of government, to accumulate wealth and arrogate secular power, or to withdraw its ministers from the jurisdiction of the prince in matters which concern the operation of criminal and civil legislature.  The ultramontanism of the Jesuits appeared to him destructive of social order; but, more than this, he considered it as impious, as a deflection from the form of Christian economy, as a mischievous seduction of the Church into a slough of self-annihilating cupidity and concupiscence.

Sarpi’s views seemed audacious in his own age.  But they have become the commonplaces of posterity.  We can therefore hardly do justice to the originality and audacity which they displayed at an epoch when only Protestants at war with Rome advanced the like in deadly hatred—­when the Catholic pulpits of Europe were ringing with newly-promulgated doctrines of Papal supremacy over princes and peoples, of national rights to depose or assassinate excommunicated sovereigns, and of blind unreasoning obedience to Rome as the sole sure method of salvation.  Upon the path of that Papal triumph toward the Capitol of world-dominion, Sarpi, the puny friar from his cell at Venice, rose like a specter announcing certain doom with the irrefragable arguments of reason.  The minatory words he uttered were all the more significant because neither he nor the State he represented sought to break with Catholic traditions.  His voice was terrible and mighty, inasmuch as he denounced Rome by an indictment which proclaimed her to be the perturbing power in Christendom, the troubler of Israel, the whore who poured her cup of fornications forth to sup with princes.