experiment; and we think we are not wrong in attributing to him more of the modern scientific spirit and less of the medieval belief in formulas than was possessed by most of his contemporaries.

If Father Paul was not an infidel, neither was he a Protestant, though we have Hallam's opinion to the contrary. It is true that he makes common cause with the Huguenots. God bless their designs!' he exclaims, and speaks of their cause as the cause of religion and liberty, a cause diametrically opposed to that of Rome and Spain. Wotton and Bedell thought that, like Casaubon and De Dominis, if he came to England, he might have joined the English communion. He was interested in the English Prayer Book. 'For the substance of religion they are wholly ours,' writes Bedell of him and the Venetian malcontents. But he was wrong. There was no thought at Venice of separation from Rome, or even of setting up a congregation. Sarpi himself considered King James's Calvinism as upsetting the fundamentals of faith.* Yet if he had come across some of the school of theology at that time rising in England, it is likely that he would have found something congenial in their moderation, learning, and respect for antiquity. He would have liked the English model of Church government; and he would have been, if not a controversialist, a learned critic of Arminian controversy.

He preferred labour and danger at Venice to safety in exile. He was a priest and a friar, and bound to his convent; not an Englishman, but an Italian, an Italian too of subtle intellect, who would have found much to shock him in our rudeness and incompleteness, and whose mode of thinking in religion was different from ours. The spirit of rebellion in Italy is not congenial to Protestantism. It is directed against practical abuses, not against false doctrine; and Sarpi, like Savonarola, had no quarrel with the traditional doctrines of the Roman Church, though he may have held latitudinarian opinions upon the creed of Pope Pius IV. 'I base myself upon the Nicene Creed,' he is reputed to have said,† and to have declared his agreement with the doctrine of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. His intellectual attitude in religious matters would seem to have been one of expectancy. As a Venetian statesman, he desired no scandal and no breach of union with Rome. The Republic was born Catholic, and has always continued so.' He saw the crudity

* Letter XXI. King James, whilst wishing 'Apocalypsin revelare, ea concussit quæ fundamenta fidei habentur.'

+ Bianchi Giovini, i. 200.

Life, p. lxxxviii., Eng. transl.

of

of the Reformation, and had no wish to make experiments in religion. 'We ought to stand firm in the Church in which God has placed us,' was his position as affirmed by his biographer Fra Fulgenzio;* and in the History of the Inquisition' he sketches the via media in ecclesiastical politics (not in dogma) which satisfied him in the following words: This most renowned Commonwealth, as well as other Catholic countries, finds itself between two contraries: the Protestants, who have no other aim but to diminish ecclesiastical authority, and the Church of Rome, which hath no other aim but to increase it, and to make the temporal her servant.' As a Catholic he hoped for the purification of the Church from within, by reform, not by rebellion; and to bring this about he looked not to Popes who cared for dominion more than religion, nor to kings, of whom, even of Henry IV., it was well said, 'Nolite confidere in principibus,' nor to councils, which he, who had read their history, knew to be congregations of fallible men ; but to the general sense of the world, the gradual illumination of religion by the secular intellect shedding new light through the windows of the Church itself. Bossuet said of him: Sous un froc il cachoit un cœur Calviniste et il travailloit sourdement à discréditer la Messe qu'il disoit tous les jours.' It is true that he said Mass every day, and that he said he did it unwillingly, lest he should seem to admit the validity of the Interdict. God does not regard externals as long as the mind and heart are right before Him.' Clearly he was no formalist. But there is little doubt that he was a sincere Christian, a free-thinker within Christian limits, a critic in everything, but not a denier. He said Mass, as we have seen, every day of his life, interdict or no interdict, and therefore not only as an act of policy: he attended the services of his convent 'come l'ultimo frate:' his private devotions were never neglected. Every morning he rose at dawn, and his first thoughts (we are told) were of God. He had so studied his Greek Testament that there was not a word he had not marked with his red lead,' says Bedell, to whom he gave a Hebrew Bible and Psalter as a keepsake; and his Old Testament and Psalter bore the same traces of use. His last days were those of a man to whom religion is a reality, not merely the habit of a convent; and his personal character had the true impress of saintliness. For a saint, too, may hold strong opinions and express them with a caustic wit. All agree to praise his won

6

* Convien star saldi nella Chiesa.' (Life, p. lxxxvii., Eng. transl.) The whole passage is worth reading.

† 'History of the Inquisition,' English translation, chap. 28.

2 D 2

derful

derful modesty. He was the humblest thing breathing.' He would not be called 'Padre' or 'Maestro,' only Fra Paolo.' Though his life was one long disease, though he was enfeebled by a painful malady, a bad digestion and slow circulation, and probably also by the abstinence which he habitually practised, partly from fear of poison, partly in order to keep his brain clear, he is said never to have spoken an impatient word. He never gave trouble. He would throw himself on a chest to sleep, or wake all night if he were interested in some piece of work. The only complaint which his friends made was that in his last illness he would not take care of himself, would not be served, would not allow one of the brethren to sleep in his room, to the very last would show himself in chapel and refectory; showing in all this not only indomitable courage, but also that self-will which is inseparable from a great character.

He died as he had lived,-hated, maligned, plotted against, employed, trusted, beloved; having received no promotion from the Church, and from the State the only reward it could give to one who refused all rewards, the right of serving Venice to the end. And in fact two days before his death he obeyed a summons to the Palace, and gave his attention and his advice on an important matter of State; and on the very day on which he died he dictated a State paper at the request of the Signory. As he drew near his end he said, 'I have consoled you as long as I could ; it is now your turn to cheer me.' He repeated the Nunc dimittis frequently; he was heard to say, Quem proposuit Deus Mediatorem per fidem in sanguine suo.' His last words were, 'It is time to go to St. Mark's-we shall be late,' and after a pause, Esto perpetua.'

6

Such was the man whom now, 270 years after his death, the City of Venice has honoured with a statue and a festival. The statue, a colossal figure in bronze from the hand of Signor Emilio Mavrilio, was inaugurated on the 20th September, 1892, the anniversary of the day of Victor Emanuel's entry into Rome. It is characteristic of the time rather than of the man, that a day was chosen which, while recalling the triumph of the principle in defence of which Fra Paolo's life was spent, recalls also a sentiment of disunion rather than of Catholicity. No religious hallowing accompanied the ceremony, though Fra Paolo died a Catholic Christian, after receiving the last sacraments, and with the firmest expressions of faith. He is ranked in Italian memory with Galileo, Bruno, and Campanella. But Galileo was a man of science, not a controversialist; Bruno and Campanella, if not atheists, were philosophers rather than Christians. Sarpi was a devout Catholic; and he would, if he had lived to-day,

have regretted the secular zeal which cannot separate the temporal sovereignty from the Church, and which is rather polemical than religious. Yet we are bound to confess that in the orations with which his memory was celebrated last year, this side of his character is not ignored, and his politics and his religion are kept apart. We only regret that the motive of this secular canonization should have been hostility to the Vatican, represented by so excellent a Pontiff as Leo XIII., not the hope of a reconciliation between Vatican and Quirinal. But we cannot have everything; and Italian liberty of to-day may point proudly to the Venetian friar as the forerunner of the great men who created Italy in 1860 in spite of Pius IX. and his Curia. As the man who desired the liberty of the Church and the freedom of the State from priestly control, Italy has a right to claim him as one of her noblest patriots, and the harbinger of her liberty.

It is an illustration of the vanity of human studies that one of the first natural philosophers of his age should now be chiefly known as the author of a History which is read by none but historians. But some compensation for this may be found in the recollection that it is principally for the beauty of his moral character, the purity, modesty, and impartiality which were found in company with a rare intellect, that a later age still takes pleasure in hearing the story of Father Paul. And the more we read of him, the more we are inclined to repeat the lament of his friends when they lost him, 'Non verrà più mai un Fra Paolo.'

ART.

ART. V.-The Unseen Foundations of Society: an Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science due to neglected Elements. By the Duke of Argyll, K.G., K.T. London, 1893. THOMAS CARLYLE, in one of his letters to Varnhagen

von Ense, well speaks of the art of writing' as 'the outcome of many arts and gifts.' 'The grand secret of it,' he continues, 'is insight, and just appreciation, and understanding by head, and especially by heart.' These words indicate, admirably, the merit of the Duke of Argyll's new work. It is the book of a man who has eyes to see and heart to understand, and who has set down for us in a clear, distinct, and accurate shape what it is that he has seen and understood. But more than this: the Duke not only puts before us, with lively and luminous diction, what he holds on the important theme with which he deals; he also shows us how it was that he came to hold it. Hence his work has the additional charm of that inwardness (if we may use the word) which renders autobiography so especially fascinating. Man is perennially interesting to man. The history of the workings of another mind in the quest for truth, in any department of human thought, possesses a peculiar value quite apart from the results reached. This it is which renders such books as St. Augustine's 'Confessions,' Cardinal Newman's 'Apologia,' and M. Renan's 'Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse,' so attractive to cultivated readers of the most diverse schools of thought. This it is which specially marks off the Duke of Argyll's volume from all other treatises with which we are acquainted, on a theme usually regarded, through the fault of its expositors, as dry, dull, and dismal.

We gather from the Duke of Argyll's preface that he began life as a disciple of the economic school commonly associated with the name of Adam Smith. This was mainly due to his early familiarity with the life and speeches of the younger Pitt, whom, he tells us, I regarded, and do still regard, as, on the whole, the greatest figure in our political history.' 'There was, however,' the Duke goes on to observe, a wide margin in Mr. Pitt's case between the intellectual perception of great general principles, and the possibilities which were open to him in the direction of their full practical application. He was forced, by the almost universal state of public sentiment in England, to make large concessions to the policy of Protection, and, in some passages, his language is emphatic in disclaiming any abandonment of that policy as regarded the competition of foreign countries, or as regarded the special favour which was then always held to be due to our own colonies.