this most pious of all countries, which had previously been so
docile, and which had stood steadily by the Vatican against
Venice in the recent struggle, would again set an example of
submission. Never was there a greater mistake: the Vatican
received from Spanish piety a humiliating refusal.

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