rbitrary and uncanonical sense of the phrase Sarpi was undoubtedly a
heretic. He had deserved the hatred of the Curia, the Inquisition, the
Jesuits, and their myrmidons. Steadily, with caution and a sober spirit,
he had employed his energies and vast accumulated stores of knowledge in
piling up breakwaters against their pernicious innovations. In all his
controversial writings during the interdict Sarpi used none but solid
arguments, drawn from Scripture, canon law, and the Councils of the
early Church, in order to deduce one single principle: namely that both
secular and ecclesiastical organisms, the State and the Church, are
divinely appointed, but with several jurisdictions and for diverse ends.
He pressed this principle home with hammer-strokes of most convincing
proof on common sense and reason. He did so even superfluously to our
modern intellect, which is fatigued by following so elaborate a chain of
precedents up to a foregone conclusion. But he let no word fall, except
by way of passing irony, which could bring contempt upon existing
ecclesiastical potentates; and he maintained a dispassionate temper,
while dealing with topics which at that epoch inflamed the fiercest
party strife. His antagonists, not having sound learning, reason, and
the Scripture on their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of
personal abuse and the stiletto. In the end the badness of their cause
was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars,
murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which
told them of their aberration from the laws of God.

It was not merely by his polemical writings during the interdict, that
Sarpi won the fame of heretic in ultra-papal circles. In his office as
Theologian to the Republic he had to report upon all matters touching
the relations of State to Church; and the treatises which he prepared on
such occasions assumed the proportions, in many instances, of important
literary works. Among these the most considerable is entitled _Delle
Materie Beneficiarie_. Professing to be a discourse upon ecclesiastical
benefices, it combines a brief but sufficient history of the temporal
power of the Papacy, an inquiry into the arts whereby the Church's
property had been accumulated, and a critique of various devices
employed by the Roman Curia to divert that wealth from its original
objects. In 'this golden volume,' to use Gibbon's words, 'the Papal
system is deeply studied and fr