They are identical in style and in intention with his acknowledged treatises, firmly but calmly expressing a sound scholar's disapproval of abuses which had grown up like morbid excrescences upon the Church.

Taken in connection with the interpolated summaries of public opinion regarding the Council's method of procedure and its successive decrees, these discourses betray a spirit of hostility to Rome which is nowhere openly expressed.

Sarpi illustrated Aretino's cynical sentence: 'How can you speak evil of your neighbor?
By speaking the truth, by speaking the truth!'-- without rancor and without passion.

Nothing, in fact, could have been more damaging to Rome than his precise analysis of her arts in the Council.
I have said that the History of the Tridentine Council, though it confirmed Sarpi's heretical reputation, would not justify us in believing him at heart a Protestant.[152] [Footnote 151: _Opere di Paolo Sarpi_, Helmstaedt, 1761, vol.i.pp.

200, 233, 311; vol.ii.pp.