“When Pope Calixtus began His reign, and saw so many excellent books, five hundred of them resplendent in bindings of crimson velvet with clasps of silver, He wondered greatly (it should be remembered that printing was not invented), for the old canonist only was used to books written on linen (?) and stitched together. Instead of commending the wisdom of His predecessor, He cried, on entering the library, _See now where the treasure of God’s Church has gone_. Soon He began to disperse the Greek books. He gave several hundred to the Cardinal of Ruthenia. As this latter was in his dotage, the volumes fell into his servants’ hands. Things which had been bought for golden florins[11] were sold for a few pence. Many Latin books came to Barcelona: some through the Bishop of Vich, powerful Datary of the Pope; some as gifts to Catalan nobles. Calumny (which, by the bye, ranks as mortal sin in modern catechisms,) appears to be habitual to the faithful. In this particular the fifteenth century meets the twentieth on common ground. To speak truth in a paradox, the proximate occasion of the sin of calumny is hatred of sin. Roman Catholics, like Bishop Vespasiano, are, from their conception, imbued and saturated with the idea of the hideousness of sin, not of its stupidity and unprofitableness. It is their bogey, their forbidden fruit, the covert strictly preserved and labelled Trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the Law. Consequently, Roman Catholic human nature is violently fascinated by the bogey; has singularly well informed itself of the nature, colour, shape, condition, and location, of the forbidden fruit; has minutely investigated every inch of ground and every blade of grass, and every bird and bush in the strictly preserved covert, simply and solely in order that it may avoid poaching, sampling the forbidden fruit, or becoming a prey for the bogey. When one has the duty of avoiding a thing, it is well to know what the thing is which one must avoid; but it is quite easy to know more than enough. All this intimate realisation of the hideousness of sin, this systematic cataloguing of its divisions and sub-divisions, with elaborate excursions along its divers ramifications, certainly inspires a loathing of the intensest kind. It also has another effect. It induces an exaggerated consciousness of virtue. When human nature knows, and is able to describe, with a wealth of detail ordinarily inaccessible, the horrible things which it does not do, it becomes “puffed up,” in the words of St. Paul. This condition of “unctuous rectitude,” inspired entirely by a horror of sin, is a proximate occasion of the sin of calumny. Roman Catholic human nature, not unconscious of its own integrity, when confronted by an antipathetic personality, instantly conceives of the latter as a sinner. I am right—you disagree with me—therefore you are wrong—is the absurd syllogism or logical process which it uses.