The literature which was to afford material for the exercise of the penmen's skill was restricted within Christian boundaries. It was rarely that a scribe condescended to make copies of any of the literary work produced in pagan Rome or Greece. Occasional instances are found which offer exception to the rule, but as in the ninth century all the men who knew how to write were, in one form or another, servants of the Church, it was not to be expected that many among them would help to perpetuate the pernicious books of the dead heathens. Consequently many of the treasures of ancient literature perished. The Bible was the substitute; and innumerable copies were made in the East and the West of the book which has influenced the world more powerfully {53}than any other production of the wit of man. In the East, there was a more logical tendency to neglect the Old Testament and to copy only the New; in the West, it was the custom to multiply transcripts of the complete Latin Scripture as left by St. Jerome. Besides the Bible, there were the liturgical monuments. The Sacramentary which contained the order of sacrifice and adoration in the most solemn office of the Church, with all the prayers that preceded and followed the acts of offering and worship, required careful and frequent copying, so that it should not deviate in the smallest degree from the established model. The slight changes which constituted differences of use in this part of the liturgy, and which have distinguished the so-called Gallican, Mozarabic, Milanese, and Celtic churches as at least co-æval with (and possibly older than) the Latin church of Rome, began to lose their historic distinctness in the ninth century and soon faded away. The survival of belated and rare examples (by the grace of papal sanction) at Toledo and at Milan, is but an antiquarian curiosity without any significance. Rome triumphed in the ninth century, and the diversities in certain respects which have been dignified in England and elsewhere with the name of "use" since then, are simply local varieties in unimportant particulars.