[Footnote 167:  Lettere, vol. ii. p. 86.]

[Footnote 168:  Ib. vol. i. p. 283.]

Side light may be thrown upon Sarpi’s judgment of the European situation by considering in detail what he said about the Jesuits.  This company, as we have seen, lent its support to Papal absolutism; and during the later years of Sarpi’s life it seemed destined to carry the world before it, by control of education, by devotion to Rome, by adroit manipulation of the religious consciousness for anti-social ends and ecclesiastical aggrandizement.

The sure sign of being in the right, said Sarpi, is when one finds himself in contradiction to the Jesuits.  They are most subtle masters in ill-doing, men who, if their needs demand, are ready to commit crimes worse than those of which they now are guilty.  All falsehood and all blasphemy proceed from them.  They have set the last hand at establishing universal corruption.  They are a public plague, the plague of the world, chameleons who take their color from the soil they squat on, flatterers of princes, perverters of youth.  They not only excuse but laud lying; their dissimulation is bare and unqualified mendacity; their malice is inestimable.  They have the art so to blend their interests and that of Rome, seeking for themselves and the Papacy the empire of the world, that the Curia must needs support them, while it cowers before their inscrutable authority.  They are the ruin of good literature and wholesome doctrine by their pitiful pretense of learning and their machinery of false teaching.  On ignorance rests their power, and truth is mortal to them.  Every vice of which humanity is capable, every frailty to which it is subject, finds from them support and consolation.  If S. Peter had been directed by a Jesuit confessor he might have arrived at denying Christ without sin.  The use the confessional as an instrument of political and domestic influence, reciprocating its confidences one with the other in their own debates, but menacing their penitents with penalties if a word of their counsel be bruited to the world.  Expelled from Venice, they work more mischief there by their intrigues than they did when they were tolerated.[169] They scheme to get a hold on Constantinople and Palestine, in order to establish seminaries of fanatics and assassins.  They are responsible for the murder of Henri IV., for if they did not instigate Ravaillac, their doctrine of regicide inspired him.  They can creep into any kingdom, any institution, any household, because they readily accept any terms and subscribe to any conditions in the certainty that by the adroit use of flattery, humbug, falsehood, and corruption, they will soon become masters of the situation.  In France they are the real Morbus Gallicus.  In Italy they are the soul of the Diacatholicon.

[Footnote 169:  It is worthy of notice, as a stern Venetian joke, that when the Jesuits eventually returned to Rialto, they were bade walk in processions upon ceremonial occasions between the Fraternities of S. Marco and S. Teodoro—­saints amid whose columns on the Molo criminals were executed.]