retary of the Index, separately. In
this way an attempt was made to control what people read, committing
to oblivion works of Protestant scholars, and of such men as
Machiavelli, and correcting offensive texts, especially historians.
Several such corrected editions were published at the time, and many
things were reprinted with large omissions. But no Index
Expurgatorius, no notification of what called for modification, was
ever published by Rome, officially; and when we use the term, we are
thinking of Spain, where it grew into a custom. The best way to
suppress a book is to burn it, and there were, accordingly, frequent
bonfires of peccant literature. One man, Konias, is said to have thus
destroyed 60,000 books, principally Bohemian. Freedom of speech and
sincerity of history were abolished for many years.

In connection with this repressive policy, and as its counterpart, a
scheme ripened to place Rome, with its libraries, its archives, its
incomparable opportunities of gathering contributory aid from every
quarter of the Church, at the head of ecclesiastical literature. The
Calendar was reformed. The text of the Canon Law was corrected. The
Latin Vulgate was revised by Pope Sixtus himself, and every further
attempt to improve it was energetically put down. Collections of
councils and editions of Fathers were projected, and Baronius, of the
Oratory, began the greatest history of the Church ever written, and
carried it down to the eleventh folio volume.

In this manner the foundations were laid of that later scholarship,
that matured and completed Renaissance, by which the Catholics
recovered much of the intellectual influence that had passed to other
hands, and learning assisted policy in undoing the work of the
reformers.

The natural and inevitable centre of the movement which is known as
the Catholic Reformation, but which, for reasons already indicated, is
better called the Counter-Reformation, was Rome. It was an enterprise
requiring consistency in the objects aimed at, variety in the means,
combination with the Powers and avoidance of rivalry, an authority
superior to national obstacles and political limitations. At first
the initiative did not reside with the Papacy. Farnese, in whose
pontificate the transition occurred from the religion of Erasmus to
the religion of Loyola, allowed men to act for him whose spirit
differed from his own. He long put off the Portuguese demand for a
tribunal like