PAUL THE POPE AND PAUL THE FRIAR. A STORY OF AN INTERDICT. BY T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE, AUTHOR OF "FILIPPO STROZZI: A BIOGRAPHY;" "A DECADE OF ITALIAN WOMEN," A NEW EDITION. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 1870. Sn PREFACE. THE great contest between the Venetian Republic and the Holy See, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was, in its results and bearings on the progress and fortunes of Europe, a far more momentous and memorable event than a mere quarrel between two small Italian States. The contemporary world, indeed, felt it to be so, and interested itself proportionably in the vicissitudes of the struggle. Rome had recently emerged from her greater contest with the principles of the Reformation, sorely diminished indeed as to the extent of the countries and populations subjected to her sway, but with renewed strength and a firmer hold, as many have thought, on those that still owned her supremacy. This quarrel with Venice was the first serious collision with any part of her subjects, after the so-called "restoration" of Catholicism; the first trial of her renovated strength against a force which the Popes, in the palmy days of the Church, would have crushed with one blow of the pastoral staff. And the restored and re-invigorated Church was defied and defeated, with losses, which it has never recovered. The increase of power, which would have accrued to the Holy See, had Rome succeeded in humbling Venice, would have been considerable. But it would have been as nothing to the loss which she sustained by her failure to do so. Reasons have been assigned in the first book of the following story for misdoubting the value of the supposed "restoration" of the Catholic Church towards the close of the sixteenth century. The issue of her contest with Venice supplies a further confirmation of the opinion there expressed. But the subsequent history of the Church, from that day to the present, has made evident more than this. It has shown (even to those minds, which failed to reach a similar conviction from an à priori consideration of the constitution and foundations of a Church claiming infallible authority), that the Papacy, not only was not restored, but was then and evermore unrestorable; that it could but continue its path in the straight line in which it had hitherto travelled; and that this straight line must, at a more or less distant point, come into irreconcilable collision with that other straight line, on which mankind was as certainly and inevitably advancing, as surely as two converging lines must sooner or later meet. The two great, but infinitely unequal forces are rushing onwards, each on its inted path, and the collision point is very near; |