Of this combination of zeal for religion with hostility to ecclesiasticism we have striking examples throughout the history of the Republic. While, in every other European state, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks were given leading parts in civil administration and, in some states, a monopoly of civil honors, the Republic of Venice not only excluded all ecclesiastics from such posts, but, in cases which touched church interests, she excluded even the relatives of ecclesiastics. When church authority decreed that commerce should not be maintained with infidels and heretics, the Venetian merchants continued to deal with Turks, Pagans, Germans, Englishmen, and Dutchmen as before. When the Church decreed that the taking of interest for money was sin, and great theologians published in Venice some of their mightiest treatises demonstrating this view from Holy Scripture and the Fathers, the Venetians continued borrowing and lending money on usance. When efforts were made to enforce that tremendous instrument for the consolidation of papal power, the bull In Coena Domini, Venice evaded and even defied it. When the Church frowned upon anatomical dissections, the Venetians allowed Andreas Vesalius to make such dissections at their University of Padua. When Sixtus V., the strongest of all the Popes, had brought all his powers, temporal and spiritual, to bear against Henry IV. of France as an excommunicated heretic, and seemed ready to hurl the thunderbolts of the Church against any power which should recognize him, the Venetian Republic not only recognized him, but treated his Ambassador with especial courtesy. When the other Catholic powers, save France, yielded to papal mandates and sent no representatives to the coronation of James I. of England, Venice was there represented. When Pope after Pope issued endless diatribes against the horrors of toleration, the Venetians steadily tolerated in their several sorts of worship Jews and Greeks, Mohammedans and Armenians, with Protestants of every sort who came to them on business. When the Roman Index forbade the publication of most important works of leading authors, Venice demanded and obtained for her printers rights which were elsewhere denied. As to the religious restrictions which touched trade, the Venetians in the public councils, and indeed the people at large, had come to know perfectly what the papal theory meant,--with some of its promoters, fanaticism, but with the controlling power at Rome, revenue, revenue to be derived from retailing dispensations to infringe the holy rules.