Next it tried the old weapons against the little government at Turin. For many generations the House of Savoy had been dutifully submissive to religious control; nowhere out of Spain had heresy been treated more cruelly; yet here, too, the Vatican claim was spurned. But the final humiliation took place some years later under Urban VIII.,--the same pontiff who wrecked papal infallibility on Galileo's telescope. He tried to enforce his will on the state of Lucca, which, in the days of Pope Paul, had submitted to the Vatican decrees abjectly; but that little republic now seized the weapons which Sarpi had devised, and drove the papal forces out of the field: the papal excommunication was, even by this petty government, annulled in Venetian fashion and even less respectfully.[1] [1] The proofs--and from Catholic sources--that it was the Pope who condemned Galileo's doctrine of the earth's movement about the sun, and not merely the Congregation of the Index, the present writer has given in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, vol. i. chap. iii. Thus the world learned how weak the Vatican hold had become. Even Pope Paul learned it, and, from being the most strenuous of modern pontiffs, he became one of the most moderate in everything save in the enrichment of his family. Thus ended the last serious effort to coerce a people by an interdict, and so, one might suppose, would end the work of Father Paul. Not so. There was to come a second chapter in his biography, more instructive, perhaps, than the first,--a chapter which has lasted until our own day. A. D. White. {February, 1904, number DLVI.} II. The Venetian Republic showed itself duly grateful to Sarpi. The Senate offered him splendid presents and entitled him "Theologian of Venice." The presents he refused, but the title with its duty, which was mainly to guard the Republic against the encroachments of the Vatican, he accepted, and his life in the monastery of Santa Fosca went on quietly, simply, laboriously, as before. The hatred now felt for him at Rome was unbounded. It corresponded to the gratitude at Venice. Every one saw his danger, and he well knew it. Potentates were then wont to send assassins on long errands, and the arm of the Vatican was especially far-reaching and merciless. It was the period when Pius V, the Pope whom the Church afterwards proclaimed a saint, commissioned an assassin to murder Queen Elizabeth.[1]