'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.