nt meetings of the
cardinals, who at long intervals voted for the interdiction of some
hostile book, deeply regretting that they could not suppress them all;
and finally came the Pope, approving and signing the decrees, which was a
mere formality, for were not all books guilty? But what an extraordinary
wretched Bastille of the past was that aged Index, that senile
institution now sunk into second childhood. One realised that it must
have been a formidable power when books were rare and the Church had
tribunals of blood and fire to enforce her edicts. But books had so
greatly multiplied, the written, printed thoughts of mankind had swollen
into such a deep broad river, that they had swept all opposition away,
and now the Index was swamped and reduced to powerlessness, compelled
more and more to limit its field of action, to confine itself to the
examination of the writings of ecclesiastics, and even in this respect it
was becoming corrupt, fouled by the worst passions and changed into an
instrument of intrigue, hatred, and vengeance. Ah! that confession of
decay, of paralysis which grew more and more complete amidst the scornful
indifference of the nations. To think that Catholicism, the once glorious
agent of civilisation, had come to such a pass that it cast books into
hell-fire by the heap; and what books they were, almost the entire
literature, history, philosophy, and science of the past and the present!
Few works, indeed, are published nowadays that would not fall under the
ban of the Church. If she seems to close her eyes, it is in order to
avoid the impossible task of hunting out and destroying everything. Yet
she stubbornly insists on retaining a semblance of sovereign authority
over human intelligence, just as some very aged queen, dispossessed of
her states and henceforth without judges or executioners, might continue
to deliver vain sentences to which only an infinitesimal minority would
pay heed. But imagine the Church momentarily victorious, miraculously
mastering the modern world, and ask yourself what she, with her tribunals
to condemn and her gendarmes to enforce, would do with human thought.
Imagine a strict application of the Index regulations: no printer able to
put anything whatever to press without the approval of his bishop, and
even then every book laid before the Congregation, the past expunged, the
present throttled, subjected to an intellectual Reign of Terror! Would
not the closing of every lib