hope of pay and spiritual benefit, rushed without a back-thought into like adventures.  Ready to risk their lives in an unholy cause, such ruffians were doubly glad to do so when the bait of heaven’s felicity was offered to their grosser understanding.  These considerations explain, but are far indeed from exculpating, the complicity of clergy and cut-throats in every crime of violence attempted against foes of Papal Rome.

Sarpi’s worst enemies could scarcely fix on him the crime of heresy.  He was a staunch Catholic; so profoundly versed both in dogmatic theology and in ecclesiastical procedure, that to remain within the straitest limits of orthodoxy, while opposing the presumption of the Papal Court, gave him no trouble.  Yet at the time in which he lived, the bare act of resistance to any will or whim of Rome, passed with those doctors who were forging new systems of Pontifical supremacy, for heretical.  In this arbitrary and uncanonical sense of the phrase Sarpi was undoubtedly a heretic.  He had deserved the hatred of the Curia, the Inquisition, the Jesuits, and their myrmidons.  Steadily, with caution and a sober spirit, he had employed his energies and vast accumulated stores of knowledge in piling up breakwaters against their pernicious innovations.  In all his controversial writings during the interdict Sarpi used none but solid arguments, drawn from Scripture, canon law, and the Councils of the early Church, in order to deduce one single principle:  namely that both secular and ecclesiastical organisms, the State and the Church, are divinely appointed, but with several jurisdictions and for diverse ends.  He pressed this principle home with hammer-strokes of most convincing proof on common sense and reason.  He did so even superfluously to our modern intellect, which is fatigued by following so elaborate a chain of precedents up to a foregone conclusion.  But he let no word fall, except by way of passing irony, which could bring contempt upon existing ecclesiastical potentates; and he maintained a dispassionate temper, while dealing with topics which at that epoch inflamed the fiercest party strife.  His antagonists, not having sound learning, reason, and the Scripture on their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of personal abuse and the stiletto.  In the end the badness of their cause was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars, murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which told them of their aberration from the laws of God.

It was not merely by his polemical writings during the interdict, that Sarpi won the fame of heretic in ultra-papal circles.  In his office as Theologian to the Republic he had to report upon all matters touching the relations of State to Church; and the treatises which he prepared on such occasions assumed the proportions, in many instances, of important literary works.  Among these the most considerable is entitled Delle Materie Beneficiarie.  Professing to be a discourse