But they have become the commonplaces of posterity.

We can therefore hardly do justice to the originality and audacity which they displayed at an epoch when only Protestants at war with Rome advanced the like in deadly hatred--when the Catholic pulpits of Europe were ringing with newly-promulgated doctrines of Papal supremacy over princes and peoples, of national rights to depose or assassinate excommunicated sovereigns, and of blind unreasoning obedience to Rome as the sole sure method of salvation.

Upon the path of that Papal triumph toward the Capitol of world-dominion, Sarpi, the puny friar from his cell at Venice, rose like a specter announcing certain doom with the irrefragable arguments of reason.

The minatory words he uttered were all the more significant because neither he nor the State he represented sought to break with Catholic traditions.

His voice was terrible and mighty, inasmuch as he denounced Rome by an indictment which proclaimed her to be the perturbing power in Christendom, the troubler of Israel, the whore who poured her cup of fornications forth to sup with princes.
[Footnote 136: _Lettere_, vol.i.p.