t of libraries, translated it into
Italian, and gave it to the press accompanied by an introductory letter
which he signed.[134] Cardinal Bellarmino responded from Rome with an
attack on Sarpi's orthodoxy and Gerson's authority. Sarpi replied in an
Apology for Gerson. Then, finding that Leoni's narrative had missed its
mark, he poured forth pamphlet upon pamphlet, penning his own
_Considerations on the Censures_, inspiring Fra Fulgenzio Micanzi with a
work styled _Confirmations_, and finally reducing the whole matter of
the controversy into a book entitled a _Treatise on the Interdict_,
which he signed together with six brother theologians of the Venetian
party. It is not needful in this place to institute a minute
investigation into the merits of this pamphlet warfare. In its details,
whether we regard the haughty claims of delegated omnipotence advanced
by Rome, or the carefully studied historical and canonistic arguments
built up by Sarpi, the quarrel has lost actuality. Common sense and
freedom have so far conquered in Europe that Sarpi's opinions, then
denounced as heresies, sound now like truisms; and his candid boast that
he was the first to break the neck of Papal encroachments upon secular
prerogative, may pass for insignificant in an age which has little to
fear from ecclesiastical violence.

[Footnote 133: Fra Fulgenzio's _Vita di F. Paolo_, p. 42. Venetian
Dispatches in Mutinelli's _Storia Arcana_, vol. iii. p. 67.]

[Footnote 134: The treatise which Sarpi translated was Gerson's
_Considerations upon Papal Excommunications_. Gerson's part in the
Council of Constance will be remembered. See Creighton's _History of the
Papacy_, vol. i. p. 211.]

Yet we must not forget that, during the first years of the seventeenth
century, the Venetian conflict with Papal absolutism, considered merely
as a test-case in international jurisprudence, was one of vitally
important interest. When we reflect how the Catholic Alliance was then
engaged in rolling back the tide of Reformation, how the forces of Rome
had been rallied by the Tridentine Council, and how the organism of the
Jesuits had been created to promulgate new dogmas of Papal almightiness
in Church and State, this resistance of Venice, stoutly Catholic in
creed, valiant in her defense of Christendom against the Moslem,
supported by her faithful churchman and accomplished canonist, was no
inconsiderable factor in the European strife for light and liberty. The
occas