religion on his bed in the convent which had been his
life-long home. Bruno was burned alive, with eyes averted from the
crucifix in bitter scorn, after seven and a half years spent in the
prisons of the Inquisition. Sarpi exhaled his last breath amid
sympathizing friends, in the service of a grateful country. Bruno panted
his death-pangs of suffocation and combustion out, surrounded by
menacing Dominicans, in the midst of hostile Rome celebrating her
triumphant jubilee. Sarpi's last thoughts were given to the God of
Christendom and the Republic. Bruno had no country; the God in whom he
trusted at that grim hour, was the God within his soul, unrealized,
detached by his own reason from every Church and every creed.]

I will return to God from whom I came.

These words--not the last, for the last were _Esto perpetua_; but the
last spoken in the presence of his fraternity--have a deep significance
for those who would fain understand the soul of Sarpi. When in his
lifetime he spoke of the Church, it was always as 'the Church of God.'
When he relegated his own anxieties for the welfare of society to a
superior power, it was not to Mary, as Jesuits advised, nor even to
Christ, but invariably to the Providence of God. Sarpi, we have the
right to assume, lived and died a sincere believer in the God who orders
and disposes of the universe; and this God, identical in fact though not
in form with Bruno's, he worshiped through such symbols of ceremony and
religion as had been adopted by him in his youth. An intellect so clear
of insight as this, knew that 'God is a spirit, and they that worship
him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' He knew that 'neither on
this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,' neither in Protestant communities
nor yet in Rome was the authentic God made tangible; but that a loyal
human being, created in God's image, could serve him and adore him with
life-worship under any of the spiritual shapes which mortal frailty has
fashioned for its needs.

To penetrate the abyss of any human personality is impossible. No man
truly sees into his living neighbor's, brother's, wife's, nay even his
own soul. How futile, therefore, is the effort which we make to seize
and sketch the vital lineaments of men long dead, divided from us not
merely by the grave which has absorbed their fleshly form and deprived
us of their tone of voice, but also by those differences in thought and
feeling which separate the centuries of c