[Footnote 148: Sarpi, _Discorso_, vol. iv. p. 25, on Bellarmino's doctrine. Sarpi's _Letters_, vol. i. pp. 138, 243. Sarpi says that he and Gillot had both had their portraits painted in a picture of Hell and shown to the common folk as foredoomed to eternal fire, because they opposed doctrines of Papal omnipotence. _Ibid._ p. 151.] This paragraph in the statutes of the Index had, however, a further and far more ambitious purpose than the suppression of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Sarpi. By assuming to condemn all political writings of which she disapproved, and by forbidding the secular authorities to proscribe any works which had received her sanction, the Church obtained a monopoly of popular instruction in theories of government. She interdicted every treatise that exposed her own ambitious interference in civil affairs or which maintained the rights of temporal rulers.[149] She protected and propagated the works of her servile ministers, who proclaimed that the ecclesiastical was superior in all points to the civil power; that nations owed their first allegiance to the Pope, who was divinely appointed to rule over them, and their second only to the Prince, who was a delegate from their own body; and that tyrannicide itself was justifiable when employed against a contumacious or heretical sovereign. Such were the theories of the Jesuits--of Allen and Parsons in England, Bellarmino in Italy, Suarez and Mariana in Spain, Boucher in France. [Footnote 149: On this point, again, Sarpi's _Letters_ furnish valuable details. He frequently remarks that a general order had been issued by the Congregation of the Index to suppress all books against the writings of Baronius, who was treated as a saint, vol. i. pp. 3, 147, ii. p. 35. He relates how the Jesuits had procured the destruction of a book written to uphold aristocracy in states, without touching upon ecclesiastical questions, as being unfavorable to their theories of absolutism (vol. i. p. 122). He tells the story of a confessor who refused the sacraments to a nobleman, because he owned a treatise written by Quirino in defense of the Venetian prerogatives (vol. i. p. 113). He refers to the suppression of James I.'s _Apologia_ and De Thou's _Histories_ (vol. i. pp. 286, 287, 383).] In his critique of this monstrous unfairness Sarpi says: 'There are not wanting men in Italy, pious and of sound learning, who hold the truth upon such topics; but these can neither write nor send their writings to the press.'[150] The best years and the best energies of Sarpi's life were spent, as is well known, in combating the arrogance of Rome, and in founding the relations of State to Church upon a basis of sound common sense and equity. More than once he narrowly escaped martyrdom as the reward of his temerity; and when the poignard of an assassin struck him, his legend relates that he uttered the celebrated epigram: _Agnosco stilum Curiae Romanae_.