er
the Edict of Nantes. Feeling safe with the Protestants and with the
Politiques, who were the real basis of his administration, he devoted
himself to the task of winning over their Catholic opponents. The
Jesuits represented Rome, the Counter-Reformation, and the League, and
were banished for tyrannicide. Henry recalled them, and made one of
them, a divine whose life has been written in four volumes, the keeper
of his conscience. He was solicitous of the friendship of Rome, and
of influence in the College of Cardinals, where his moderating hand
was soon felt.

The king's conciliatory policy triumphed in a quarrel which broke out
between Rome and Venice. The Papacy desired to enforce a system of
its own in matters of Church and State, and, in other words, to make
laws for the nations to obey. The Canon Law did not come down from
heaven, but was enacted from time to time in the past, and was to be
enacted furthermore in the future. Venice, as a modern state,
self-sufficing and concentrating power, legislated for its clergy as
well as for its laity, resenting interference outside questions of
pure doctrine. The two pretensions clashed under Paul V, a zealous
and uncompromising pontiff, the founder of the House of Borghese. He
claimed a jurisdiction in Venice which could not have been asserted
successfully in France or Spain, because a surrender of authority
which may be made to superior force cannot be made voluntarily where
there is no compulsion. But the court of Rome was the chief seat of
those aspirations after the control of states, which had been so
lately renewed.

Since the failure of the schemes against Elizabeth and the victory of
Gallicans over the League and the medieval ideal, a new heresy, the
political heresy, had been discovered, which Cardinal Baronius, the
foremost of the Roman divines, denounced as the most damnable of all
heresies. By that was meant the notion of a science of politics
limiting the ecclesiastical domain; an ethical and political system
deriving its principles elsewhere than from the Church, and setting up
a new and rival authority yet to be defined, ascertainable in no book,
and not accepted by the nations. Those amongst us who deny the
existence of a political science, and believe that ethics cannot be
made to include politics, have ardent supporters in the Roman clergy
of three centuries ago. The Venetian theorists who could be caught
were burnt at Rome. One, who did