y, the other earthly. Each has its own sovereignty, defended by
its own arms and fortifications. Nothing is held by them in common, and
there should be no occasion for the one to declare war upon the other.
Christ said that he and his disciples were not of this world. S. Paul
affirms that our city is in the heavens. I take the word Church to
signify an assembly of the faithful, not of priests only; for when we
regard it as confined to those, it ceases to be Christ's kingdom, and
becomes a portion of the commonwealth in this world, subject to the
highest authority of State, as also are the laity.[136] This emphatic
distinction between Church and State, both fulfilling the needs of
humanity but in diverse relations, lay at the root of Sarpi's doctrine.
He regarded the claim of the Church to interfere in State management,
not only as an infringement of the prince's prerogative, but also as
patent rebellion against the law of God which had committed the temporal
government of nations in sacred trust to secular rulers. As the State
has no call to meddle in the creation and promulgation of dogmas, or to
impose its ordinances on the religious conscience of its subjects, so
the Church has no right to tamper with affairs of government, to
accumulate wealth and arrogate secular power, or to withdraw its
ministers from the jurisdiction of the prince in matters which concern
the operation of criminal and civil legislature. The ultramontanism of
the Jesuits appeared to him destructive of social order; but, more than
this, he considered it as impious, as a deflection from the form of
Christian economy, as a mischievous seduction of the Church into a
slough of self-annihilating cupidity and concupiscence.

Sarpi's views seemed audacious in his own age. But they have become the
commonplaces of posterity. We can therefore hardly do justice to the
originality and audacity which they displayed at an epoch when only
Protestants at war with Rome advanced the like in deadly hatred--when
the Catholic pulpits of Europe were ringing with newly-promulgated
doctrines of Papal supremacy over princes and peoples, of national
rights to depose or assassinate excommunicated sovereigns, and of blind
unreasoning obedience to Rome as the sole sure method of salvation. Upon
the path of that Papal triumph toward the Capitol of world-dominion,
Sarpi, the puny friar from his cell at Venice, rose like a specter
announcing certain doom with the irrefragable arg