orm, was rather civil and political than religious or
theological. Could those soaring wings of Rome be broken, then and not
till then might the Italians enjoy freedom of conscience, liberty of
discussion and research, purer piety, and a healthier activity as
citizens.

[Footnote 167: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 86.]

[Footnote 168: _Ib._ vol. i. p. 283.]

Side light may be thrown upon Sarpi's judgment of the European situation
by considering in detail what he said about the Jesuits. This company,
as we have seen, lent its support to Papal absolutism; and during the
later years of Sarpi's life it seemed destined to carry the world before
it, by control of education, by devotion to Rome, by adroit manipulation
of the religious consciousness for anti-social ends and ecclesiastical
aggrandizement.

The sure sign of being in the right, said Sarpi, is when one finds
himself in contradiction to the Jesuits. They are most subtle masters in
ill-doing, men who, if their needs demand, are ready to commit crimes
worse than those of which they now are guilty. All falsehood and all
blasphemy proceed from them. They have set the last hand at establishing
universal corruption. They are a public plague, the plague of the world,
chameleons who take their color from the soil they squat on, flatterers
of princes, perverters of youth. They not only excuse but laud lying;
their dissimulation is bare and unqualified mendacity; their malice is
inestimable. They have the art so to blend their interests and that of
Rome, seeking for themselves and the Papacy the empire of the world,
that the Curia must needs support them, while it cowers before their
inscrutable authority. They are the ruin of good literature and
wholesome doctrine by their pitiful pretense of learning and their
machinery of false teaching. On ignorance rests their power, and truth
is mortal to them. Every vice of which humanity is capable, every
frailty to which it is subject, finds from them support and consolation.
If S. Peter had been directed by a Jesuit confessor he might have
arrived at denying Christ without sin. The use the confessional as an
instrument of political and domestic influence, reciprocating its
confidences one with the other in their own debates, but menacing their
penitents with penalties if a word of their counsel be bruited to the
world. Expelled from Venice, they work more mischief there by their
intrigues than they did when they were tolerated.[169] Th