this he resided at Rome, at Naples, at Florence, always in correspondence with heretics, and for a time with a strong Calvinistic bias, though later his sympathies were Lutheran. The accession of the stern old Inquisitor Ghislieri as Pope Pius V again brought Carnesecchi into danger. Cosimo consented to give him up (being rewarded two years afterwards with the title of Grand Duke); and on July 4, 1566, he was in prison in Rome. The trial was a lengthy one; he fought hard for his life, endeavouring, as was his wont, to resist force by cunning. But it could have only one end. On September 21, 1567, he was handed over to the secular arm, and on October 21, with a friar Giulio Maresio, he was beheaded and burnt.
But the great process against Carnesecchi had an importance apart from the man himself: as it has been said, he is but the secondary figure in it, and its real heroes are the illustrious dead. Carnesecchi was the disciple of Valdés, the friend of Flaminio and Pole; he had been on terms of intimacy with that body of loyal sons and daughters of the Church of whom mention has been made already, who had striven nobly, through evil report and good report, for its reformation, and who had been hopelessly beaten at the Council of Trent. They had been watched and suspected by the Inquisition ever since; some indeed had actually suffered at its hands. Most of them were dead before 1566; but the pursuit of heresy ceased not at the grave, and those who during their lives were revered as the hope of the Church were impugned as suspects or as actual heretics in the famous process of Carnesecchi. This Catholic minority, for such it really was, grew out of the body of friends who centred round Contarini in Venice; it was reinforced by many who had sat at the feet of Valdés, or who had travelled in the north. The aim of this party was the reform of the whole ecclesiastical system; its doctrinal rally ing-point was justification by faith in Christ Jesus and not by a man's own works. So far they were at one with Luther. But, realising as they did that this had ever been the doctrine of the Church, they were not impelled, as he was, to deny the reality of free will, to depreciate the fruits of faith, or to eviscerate faith itself by reducing it to an act of intellectual assent, and divorcing it from Christian love which issues in action. "We obtain this blessing of complete and perpetual salvation," wrote Sadoleto to the citizens of Geneva, "by faith alone in God and in Jesus Christ. When I say faith alone, I do not mean, as those inventors of novelties do, a mere credulity and confidence in God, to the exclusion of love and other Christian virtues. This indeed is necessary, and forms the first access which we have to God; but it is not enough. For we must also bring a mind full of piety towards Almighty God, and desirous of performing whatever is agreeable to Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit." Moreover, loyalty to the Church was with them a
