important clause in the Concordat was the seventh, which provided that the right of the bishops and inquisitors to prohibit books not on the present Index should refer only to books which attacked religion, or which were printed outside of Venice, or which were issued with a false imprint. This limitation of the ecclesiastical Inquisition to purely religious or theological questions constituted a most valuable precedent in the long fight between the Church and the secular authorities for the control of the press. The Concordat was the last arrangement arrived at until the year 1766 between Rome and Venice in regard to the supervision of the press. During the century and a half following the Concordat, the Venetian republic persistently refused to authorise the publication within its territory of an augmented Index. A list of later prohibitions was, however, finally accepted in 1766, _juxta formam concordatorum_. The most prominent figure in this long struggle between Venice and the Papacy was Fra Paolo Sarpi. Cleric though he was, he contended vigorously that the Church was embarking upon a wrong course, and he held that the State was justified in resisting, in secular matters, ecclesiastical encroachments upon the rights of the sovereign. The fight made by Sarpi on behalf of the independence of the State, and particularly of the right of the State to supervise and control literary productions, was of first importance for the intellectual activities of Europe. The arguments used in Venice were repeated in Madrid, Paris, Zürich, and Oxford. Time was gained for authors and for printers, until, largely by means of the presses which the Church was endeavouring to throttle, the spirit of resistance to the domination of the Papacy, and the feeling of national independence against the right of Rome to lay down the law for Europe, had gathered so much strength that the claims of the Church had to be withdrawn or very much moderated. In 1613, two books by the Englishman Thomas Preston, who wrote under the name of Roger Widdrington, _Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini_ and _Disputatio Theologica_, were placed on the Index by the Congregation. The Government of Venice, acting under the advice of Sarpi, refused to allow the provision to take effect in Venice on the two grounds that the theological doctrines taught by Widdrington were sound and orthodox, and that his arguments against the pernicious doctrine of the temporal authority of the pope over princes were eminently worthy of dissemination.