Of the original work, the circulation, considering the bulk and the costliness of the volumes, was unprecedented. The printing was done at the Papal Press, the same press which had originally been organised by Paul Manutius. The cost was borne by the papal treasury and the full weight of the authority of the influence of the Church was given to securing the widest possible distribution. As a result, edition after edition was taken off by the demands from the libraries of the monasteries, the cathedral chapters, and the Jesuit colleges and also by individual prelates and princes, who had remained in the orthodox fold.[42] The amount of the original labour put into the book by Baronius must have been enormous, as his texts, his notes, and even his extracts were all made with his own hand. According to his own statement, the continuous labour could never have been supported, had it not been in the first place for the stimulating authority of S. Philip Neri, and secondly for the special aid given by the Virgin, the saints, and the apostles Peter and Paul. Pattison sums up the purpose and the result of the work as follows: “Baronius exhibited the visible unity and impeccable purity of the Church founded upon Peter and handed down inviolate; such at this day as it had ever been ... the _Annales_ transferred to the Catholic party the preponderance in the field of learning, which ever since Erasmus had been on the side of the innovators.” It was the turn of the Protestants to feel the need of an antidote to Baronius and an attempt to supply this need was made in the _Exercitationes_ of Casaubon. Casaubon’s work, however, never passed beyond the status of a fragment, although this fragment was sufficiently ponderous to form eight hundred folio pages. According to the Protestant authorities, Casaubon had no difficulty in showing the great lack of accurate scholarship on the part of Baronius and in pointing out in the earlier portions of the _Annales_ (it was only the first two volumes that were considered in his _Exercitationes_) an enormous number of errors and misstatements. It was in fact difficult to understand how the task of writing the early history of the Church could have been undertaken (even with the aid of S. Peter and S. Paul) by an author who was ignorant both of Greek and of Hebrew. The volume of _Exercitationes_ did not, however, secure any such general circulation or wide-spread influence with Protestant readers as had been gained among the Catholics by the great series of _Annales_. There was no ecclesiastical authority to induce the purchase as an act of piety and no ecclesiastical machinery available to further circulation.