This peculiar antithesis--nowhere more striking than at Venice, on the one side, religious fears and hopes; on the other, keen insight into the ways of ecclesiasticism--led to peculiar compromises. The bankers who had taken interest upon money, the merchants who had traded with Moslems and heretics, in their last hours frequently thought it best to perfect their title to salvation by turning over large estates to the Church. Under the sway of this feeling, and especially of the terrors infused by priests at deathbeds, mortmain had become in Venice, as in many other parts of the world, one of the most serious of evils. Thus it was that the clergy came to possess between one fourth and one third of the whole territory of the Republic, and in its Bergamo district more than one half; and all this was exempt from taxation. Hence it was that the Venetian Senate found it necessary to devise a legal check which should make such absorption of estates by the Church more and more difficult. There was a second cause of trouble. In that religious atmosphere of Venice, monastic orders of every sort grew luxuriantly, not only absorbing more and more land to be held by the dead hand, thus escaping the public burdens, but ever absorbing more and more men and women, and thus depriving the state of any healthy and normal service from them. Here, too, the Senate thought it best to interpose a check: it insisted that all new structures for religious orders must be authorized by the State. Yet another question flamed forth. Of the monks of every sort swarming through the city, many were luxurious and some were criminal. On these last, the Venetian Senate determined to lay its hands, and in the first years of the seventeenth century all these questions, and various other matters distasteful to the Vatican, culminated in the seizure and imprisonment of two ecclesiastics charged with various high crimes,--among these rape and murder. There had just come to the papal throne Camillo Borghese, Paul V.,--strong, bold, determined, with the highest possible theory of his duties and of his position. In view of his duty toward himself, he lavished the treasures of the faithful upon his family, until it became the richest which had yet risen in Rome; in view of his duty toward the Church, he built superbly, and an evidence of the spirit in which he wrought is his name, in enormous letters, still spread across the facade of St. Peter's. As to his position, he accepted fully the theories and practices of his boldest predecessors, and in this he had good warrant; for St. Thomas Aquinas and Bellarmine had furnished him with convincing arguments that he was divinely authorized to rule the civil powers of Italy and of the world.[1]