o savored of
heresy. If the Holy Office had instituted a prosecution against the
victim and had condemned him in his absence, the path was plain.
Sentence of excommunication and death publicly pronounced on such a man
reduced him to the condition of a wild beast, whose head was worth solid
coin and plenary absolution to the cut-throat. A private minute recorded
on the books of the Inquisitors had almost equal value; and Sarpi was
under the impression that some such underhand proceeding against himself
had loosed a score of knives. But short of these official or
semi-judicial preliminaries, it was maintained upon the best casuistical
authority that to take the life of any suspected heretic, of any one
reputed heterodox in Roman circles, should be esteemed a work of merit
creditable to the miscreant who perpetrated the deed, and certain, even
should he die for it, to yield him in the other world the joys of
Paradise. These joys the Jesuits described in language worthy of the
Koran. Dabbled in Sarpi's or Duplessis Mornay's blood, quartered and
tortured like Ravaillac, the desperado of so pious a crime would swim
forever in oceans of ecstatic pleasure. The priest, ambitious for his
hierarchy, fanatical in his devotion to the Church, relying upon
privilege if he should chance to be detected, had a plain interest in
promoting and directing such conspiracies. Men of blood, and bandits up
to the hilts in crimes of violence, rendered reckless by the
indiscriminate cruelty of justice in those days, allured by the double
hope of pay and spiritual benefit, rushed without a back-thought into
like adventures. Ready to risk their lives in an unholy cause, such
ruffians were doubly glad to do so when the bait of heaven's felicity
was offered to their grosser understanding. These considerations
explain, but are far indeed from exculpating, the complicity of clergy
and cut-throats in every crime of violence attempted against foes of
Papal Rome.

Sarpi's worst enemies could scarcely fix on him the crime of heresy. He
was a staunch Catholic; so profoundly versed both in dogmatic theology
and in ecclesiastical procedure, that to remain within the straitest
limits of orthodoxy, while opposing the presumption of the Papal Court,
gave him no trouble. Yet at the time in which he lived, the bare act of
resistance to any will or whim of Rome, passed with those doctors who
were forging new systems of Pontifical supremacy, for heretical. In this
a