After the Council of Trent, there was for a series of years a decided increase in the efforts of the authorities, political as well as ecclesiastical, throughout Catholic realms, to repress the production and the circulation of heretical and dangerous literature. In the Spanish Low Countries, the regulations under the administration of Alva were especially stringent. In the years 1566–7, in Antwerp alone, four printers were banished, one was sentenced to the galleys for a term of six years, and one was hanged. Mendham remarks, in regard to the Council of Trent: “The Roman, beyond any other professedly Christian sect, is bound to its peculiar faith and discipline by original engagements the most sacred, the most precise, the most extended, the most rigorous. And it is there that we are to look for its true and distinguishing character. No greater mercy of the kind was ever vouchsafed to the Christian world by a compassionate Providence than the Council of Trent. However cautious the managers of this Council, they were obliged by many motives to speak out and declare themselves in canons, in decrees, in anathemas, and above all in a Creed, none of which can be recalled or concealed. The Indexes which emanated in great measure from this Assembly stand forth a specimen and illustration of the true character of the religion of Rome.... “How can he who accepts the creed and oath of Pius IV, as the rule of his faith, or actually professes and swears it, and therein solemnly engages to _believe and profess all things defined_ more especially by the Council of Trent, from which all the subsequent Roman Indexes flow, feel himself at liberty, not as to the respect, but as to the degree of respect, due to the deliberate and constantly renewed expression of judgment on religious subjects by the most sacred of all human authorities?”[136] It is the conclusion of Dejob that it was possible for a believer living during the sixteenth century under the direct influence of the Vatican to remain a good Christian, even to the point of intolerance, but that he could hardly, under the existing conditions, attain to real scholarship.[137] * * * * *