no_. The papal
usurpation of secular prerogatives was in his eyes not merely a
violation of the divinely appointed order of government, but also a
deformation of the ecclesiastical ideal. Those, he argued, are the real
heretics who deprave the antique organism of the Church by making the
Pope absolute, who preach the deity of the Roman Pontiff as though he
were a second God equal in almightiness to God in heaven. 'Nay,' he
exclaims in a passage marked by more than usual heat, 'should one drag
God from heaven they would not stir a finger, provided the Pope
preserved his vice-divinity or rather super-divinity. Bellarmino clearly
states that to restrict the Papal authority to spiritual affairs is the
same as to annihilate it; showing that they value the spiritual at just
zero.'[150] Sarpi saw that the ultra-papalists of his day, by
subordinating the State, the family and the individual to the worldly
interests of Rome, by repressing knowledge and liberty of conscience,
preaching immoral and anti-social doctrines, encouraging superstition
and emasculating education, for the maintenance of those same worldly
interests, were advancing steadily upon the path of self-destruction.
The essence of Christianity was neglected in this brutal struggle for
supremacy; while truth, virtue and religion, those sacred safe-guards of
humanity, which the Church was instituted to preserve, ran no uncertain
risk of perishing through the unnatural perversion of its aims.

[Footnote 150: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 169.]

The work which won for Sarpi a permanent place in the history of
literature, and which in his lifetime did more than any other of his
writings to expose the Papal system, is the history of the Tridentine
Council. It was not published with his name or with his sanction. A
manuscript copy lent by him to Marcantonio de Dominis, Archbishop of
Spalatro, was taken by that waverer between Catholicism and
Protestantism to England, and published in London under the pseudonym of
Pietro Soave Polano--an anagram of Paolo Sarpi Veneto--in the year 1619.
That Sarpi was the real author admits of no doubt. The book bears every
stamp of genuineness. It is written in the lucid, nervous,
straightforward style of the man, who always sought for mathematical
precision rather than rhetorical elegance in his use of language. Sarpi
had taken special pains to collect materials for a History of the
Council; and in doing so he had enjoyed exceptional advantage