handled by princes for the reform of the ecclesiastical system, has caused the greatest deformation that hath ever been since the name of Christian came into existence; by bishops with hope expected as that which would restore the episcopal authority, now in large part absorbed by the sole Roman Pontiff, hath been the reason of their losing the last vestige of it and of their reduction to still greater servitude.  On the other hand, dreaded and evaded by the Court of Rome, as an efficient instrument for curbing that exorbitant power, which from small beginnings hath arrived by various advances to limitless excess, it has so established and confirmed it over the portion still left subject to it, as that it never was so vast nor so well-rooted.’  In treating of what he pithily calls ’the Iliad of our age,’ Sarpi promises to observe the truth, and protests that he is governed by no passion.  This promise the historian kept faithfully.  His animus is never allowed to transpire in any direct tirades; his irony emerges rather in reporting epigrams of others than in personal sarcasms or innuendoes; his own prepossessions and opinions are carefully veiled.  After reading the whole voluminous history we feel that it would be as inaccurate to claim Sarpi for Protestantism as to maintain that he was a friend of ultra-papal Catholicism.  What he really had at heart was the restoration of the Church of God to unity, to purer discipline and to sincere spirituality.  This reconstruction of Christendom upon a sound basis was, as he perceived, rendered impossible by the Tridentine decrees.  Yet, though the dearest hope of his heart had been thus frustrated, he set nothing down in malice, nor vented his own disappointment in laments which might have seemed rebellious against the Divine will.  Sarpi’s personality shows itself most clearly in the luminous discourses with which from time to time he elucidates obscure matters of ecclesiastical history.  Those on episcopal residence, pluralism, episcopal jurisdiction, the censure of books, and the malappropriation of endowments, are specially valuable.[151] If no other proof existed, these digressions would render Sarpi’s authorship of the History unmistakable.  They are identical in style and in intention with his acknowledged treatises, firmly but calmly expressing a sound scholar’s disapproval of abuses which had grown up like morbid excrescences upon the Church.  Taken in connection with the interpolated summaries of public opinion regarding the Council’s method of procedure and its successive decrees, these discourses betray a spirit of hostility to Rome which is nowhere openly expressed.  Sarpi illustrated Aretino’s cynical sentence:  ’How can you speak evil of your neighbor?  By speaking the truth, by speaking the truth!’—­without rancor and without passion.  Nothing, in fact, could have been more damaging to Rome than his precise analysis of her arts in the Council.

I have said that the History of the Tridentine Council, though it confirmed Sarpi’s heretical reputation, would not justify us in believing him at heart a Protestant.[152]