[Footnote 172:  Fulgenzio’s Life, p. 98.]

[Footnote 173:  Ibid. p. 105.]

[Footnote 174:  Ibid.]

[Footnote 175:  Letter of the Superior to the Venetian Senate, printed in the Lettere, vol. ii. pp. 450-453.  It is worth meditating on the contrast between Sarpi’s and Bruno’s deaths.  Sarpi died with the consolations of religion on his bed in the convent which had been his life-long home.  Bruno was burned alive, with eyes averted from the crucifix in bitter scorn, after seven and a half years spent in the prisons of the Inquisition.  Sarpi exhaled his last breath amid sympathizing friends, in the service of a grateful country.  Bruno panted his death-pangs of suffocation and combustion out, surrounded by menacing Dominicans, in the midst of hostile Rome celebrating her triumphant jubilee.  Sarpi’s last thoughts were given to the God of Christendom and the Republic.  Bruno had no country; the God in whom he trusted at that grim hour, was the God within his soul, unrealized, detached by his own reason from every Church and every creed.]

    I will return to God from whom I came.

These words—­not the last, for the last were Esto perpetua; but the last spoken in the presence of his fraternity—­have a deep significance for those who would fain understand the soul of Sarpi.  When in his lifetime he spoke of the Church, it was always as ‘the Church of God.’  When he relegated his own anxieties for the welfare of society to a superior power, it was not to Mary, as Jesuits advised, nor even to Christ, but invariably to the Providence of God.  Sarpi, we have the right to assume, lived and died a sincere believer in the God who orders and disposes of the universe; and this God, identical in fact though not in form with Bruno’s, he worshiped through such symbols of ceremony and religion as had been adopted by him in his youth.  An intellect so clear of insight as this, knew that ’God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’  He knew that ’neither on this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,’ neither in Protestant communities nor yet in Rome was the authentic God made tangible; but that a loyal human being, created in God’s image, could serve him and adore him with life-worship under any of the spiritual shapes which mortal frailty has fashioned for its needs.

To penetrate the abyss of any human personality is impossible.  No man truly sees into his living neighbor’s, brother’s, wife’s, nay even his own soul.  How futile, therefore, is the effort which we make to seize and sketch the vital lineaments of men long dead, divided from us not merely by the grave which has absorbed their fleshly form and deprived us of their tone of voice, but also by those differences in thought and feeling which separate the centuries of culture!  Yet this impossible task lies ever before the historian.  Few characters are more patently difficult to comprehend than that