In all these writings Sarpi held firmly by his main principle, that the State, no less than the Church, exists jure divino.  The papal usurpation of secular prerogatives was in his eyes not merely a violation of the divinely appointed order of government, but also a deformation of the ecclesiastical ideal.  Those, he argued, are the real heretics who deprave the antique organism of the Church by making the Pope absolute, who preach the deity of the Roman Pontiff as though he were a second God equal in almightiness to God in heaven.  ‘Nay,’ he exclaims in a passage marked by more than usual heat, ’should one drag God from heaven they would not stir a finger, provided the Pope preserved his vice-divinity or rather super-divinity.  Bellarmino clearly states that to restrict the Papal authority to spiritual affairs is the same as to annihilate it; showing that they value the spiritual at just zero.’[150] Sarpi saw that the ultra-papalists of his day, by subordinating the State, the family and the individual to the worldly interests of Rome, by repressing knowledge and liberty of conscience, preaching immoral and anti-social doctrines, encouraging superstition and emasculating education, for the maintenance of those same worldly interests, were advancing steadily upon the path of self-destruction.  The essence of Christianity was neglected in this brutal struggle for supremacy; while truth, virtue and religion, those sacred safe-guards of humanity, which the Church was instituted to preserve, ran no uncertain risk of perishing through the unnatural perversion of its aims.

[Footnote 150:  Lettere, vol. ii. p. 169.]

The work which won for Sarpi a permanent place in the history of literature, and which in his lifetime did more than any other of his writings to expose the Papal system, is the history of the Tridentine Council.  It was not published with his name or with his sanction.  A manuscript copy lent by him to Marcantonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, was taken by that waverer between Catholicism and Protestantism to England, and published in London under the pseudonym of Pietro Soave Polano—­an anagram of Paolo Sarpi Veneto—­in the year 1619.  That Sarpi was the real author admits of no doubt.  The book bears every stamp of genuineness.  It is written in the lucid, nervous, straightforward style of the man, who always sought for mathematical precision rather than rhetorical elegance in his use of language.  Sarpi had taken special pains to collect materials for a History of the Council; and in doing so he had enjoyed exceptional advantages.  Early in his manhood he formed at Mantua a close friendship with Camillo Olivo, who had been secretary to the Papal Legate, Cardinal Gonzaga of Mantua, at Trent.  During his residence in Rome between 1585 and 1587 he became intimately acquainted with Cardinal Castagna, president of the committee appointed for drawing up the decrees of the Council.  In addition to the