The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

For what City will be given in the whole World, as widely as it extends, which has not at some time changed its banners, or been defiled by the depravity of heretics, or torn by the claws of domestic schisms, or separated and moved from the System of its Origin? The glorious City of Venice alone, which your Wisdom, O Conscript Fathers original: "P. C." referring to the Roman Senate/Venetian Council, governs most religiously, and from which you derive the happiness of government to other noble and most ample Lands, Cities, and Provinces of your dominion spread by Land and Sea, preserves the modesty of Religion and Liberty intact, a chaste virgin, and an unblemished flower. You yourselves, MOST SERENE PRINCE and most excellent Senate, provide the causes for these goods in your laws; in the very first elements of the Prologue of your Statutes, you profess in Christian words and sentiments that God, from whom all power comes, and through whom Kings reign and Princes command, is the author of your happiness. He who has attentively pondered this idea of piety, which you have drawn from Holy Scripture, according to the prologue of your same laws—which is compiled from the texts of Scripture itself—will easily understand it. At the same time, he will perceive that the Catholic sentiment of the Republic breathes filial obedience to the Sacred Principate toward the written Word of God, and sets before itself eternal laws as the norm for prosperously directing the dominion.

Rightly, therefore, does my Franciscan Religion, intending to return most humble thanks for the continuous benefits received by the MOST SERENE REPUBLIC, and to set forth its debt in public, through me, the least of your subjects—yet one whose ancestors’ blood, and indeed my own, is infused into your service—dare to offer these Theses of Sacred Scripture in these General Chapters to the sight of your most glorious throne, which has deserved well a thousand times of God and the Christian cause under the title of faith dilated among defeated enemies. And in this Capitol of the City and the World, in which the virtue of many of your Progenitors triumphed, it has chosen Your Serenity and the Conscript Fathers as Protectors of the Holier Study to which you are addicted, for your glory and our ornament.