Machiavelli, and correcting offensive texts, especially historians. Several such corrected editions were published at the time, and many things were reprinted with large omissions. But no Index Expurgatorius, no notification of what called for modification, was ever published by Rome, officially; and when we use the term, we are thinking of Spain, where it grew into a custom. The best way to suppress a book is to burn it, and there were, accordingly, frequent bonfires of peccant literature. One man, Konias, is said to have thus destroyed 60,000 books, principally Bohemian. Freedom of speech and sincerity of history were abolished for many years. In connection with this repressive policy, and as its counterpart, a scheme ripened to place Rome, with its libraries, its archives, its incomparable opportunities of gathering contributory aid from every quarter of the Church, at the head of ecclesiastical literature. The Calendar was reformed. The text of the Canon Law was corrected. The Latin Vulgate was revised by Pope Sixtus himself, and every further attempt to improve it was energetically put down. Collections of councils and editions of Fathers were projected, and Baronius, of the Oratory, began the greatest history of the Church ever written, and carried it down to the eleventh folio volume. In this manner the foundations were laid of that later scholarship, that matured and completed Renaissance, by which the Catholics recovered much of the intellectual influence that had passed to other hands, and learning assisted policy in undoing the work of the reformers.