could
be construed opposite to the doctrines of the supreme authority of this
council of Trent; where it seems to have been enacted, that all men,
literate and illiterate, prince and peasant, the Italian, the Spaniard
and the Netherlander, should take the mint-stamp of their thoughts from
the council of Trent, and millions of souls be struck off at one blow,
out of the same used mould.

The sages who compiled these Indexes, indeed, long had reason to imagine
that passive obedience was attached to the human character: and
therefore they considered, that the publications of their adversaries
required no other notice than a convenient insertion in their indexes.
But the heretics diligently reprinted them with ample prefaces and
useful annotations; Dr. James, of Oxford, republished an Index with due
animadversions. The parties made an opposite use of them: while the
catholic crossed himself at every title, the heretic would purchase no
book which had not been indexed. One of their portions exposed a list of
those authors whose heads were condemned as well as their books: it was
a catalogue of men of genius.

The results of these indexes were somewhat curious. As they were formed
in different countries, the opinions were often diametrically opposite
to each other. The learned Arias Montanus, who was a chief inquisitor in
the Netherlands, and concerned in the Antwerp Index, lived to see his
own works placed in the Roman Index; while the inquisitor of Naples was
so displeased with the Spanish Index, that he persisted to assert that
it had never been printed at Madrid! Men who began by insisting that all
the world should not differ from their opinions, ended by not agreeing
with themselves. A civil war raged among the Index-makers; and if one
criminated, the other retaliated. If one discovered ten places necessary
to be expurgated, another found thirty, and a third inclined to place
the whole work in the condemned list. The inquisitors at length became
so doubtful of their own opinions, that they sometimes expressed in
their license for printing, that "they tolerated the reading, after the
book had been corrected by themselves, till such time as the work should
be considered worthy of some farther correction." The expurgatory
Indexes excited louder complaints than those which simply condemned
books; because the purgers and castrators, as they were termed, or as
Milton calls them, "the executioners of books," by omitting, or