The reformers who succeeded Wicliffe, Jerome, and Huss had been waxing bolder day by day, and had even repulsed a large army sent against them by his Holiness and led by Cardinal Cesarini and a host of German princes, since which they had boldly and openly preached against the papal supremacy, and were in many districts publicly distributing copies of the writings of Aristotle and Averroes. The Church and the Papacy were thus in real and imminent danger, for hitherto the people had believed whatever the priests had told them, whereas now they appeared determined to investigate the whole matter themselves and to dispense with the services of the priestly mediator. At such a time the discovery of the “Annals” came as a windfall to the Church; every one apparently accepting them as having been originally written by Tacitus; and every author, from this time forward, quoted them repeatedly. The strangest thing about the affair is that no one even thought of questioning the genuineness of the writings, especially when it must have been well known that not one historian or writer, from the time of Tacitus, who lived in the first century, down to the end of the fifteenth century, when the “Annals” (so-called for the first time by Beatus Rhenanus in 1533) were discovered, had ever once quoted or even referred to them; not even Christian writers had as much as once noticed them, which they could not have failed to do had such valuable evidence of the sufferings of their brethren really existed. Besides the “Annals” other MSS. were produced by pious monks and passed off as ancient writings, until at length the Vatican and other papal libraries were literally swarming with them; but all these writings paled into insignificance before such a record as the “Annals,” which was destined henceforth to be the chief evidence in support of Christianity. Together with the passages in the writings of Josephus, which were forged beyond doubt by Eusebius, Bishop of Cæsarea, and the doubtful letter of the younger Pliny to the Emperor Trajan, which time most assuredly will prove to be as great a forgery as the other two, the Church had now heathen testimony in abundance to prove that the religion was divinely instituted and that many suffered death in defence of it. Neither Averroism nor Arianism could shake this testimony, which would be a powerful prop to the religion for centuries to come. It remained for Dr. Lardner and others, in the commencement of last century, to expose the forgery in Josephus; to the present century has been reserved the honour of unveiling the real authorship of the forged “Annals” of Tacitus; and to future searchers after truth is left the duty of discovering the real perpetrator of the forged letter which has hitherto been known as from Pliny to Trajan.