During the period before the Council of Trent, the work of the compilers of the Roman Indexes was chiefly based upon the Indexes which had originated in Spain or in the Netherlands, while there is, as said, occasionally ground for perplexity at the absence from the Roman lists of works of undoubted heresy which had been duly condemned by the censors of Valladolid or Louvain. It is not easy to understand why the Papacy, having recognised the necessity for the exercise of control over literary production, and over the operations of the printing-press, should have permitted the system of Indexes to be initiated anywhere but in Rome, and should have further permitted, apparently without reprimand or protest, so large a proportion of the long series of Indexes to be compiled and published by ecclesiastics who, while claiming to be defending the true faith and to be carrying out the policy of the Church, were not acting under the direct supervision or authority of Rome. Independent action in such an all-important matter as the direction of public opinion as expressed through printed literature might have been considered a dangerous precedent and undoubtedly did constitute an important factor in strengthening the separate authority of the State churches of Spain and of France. Joseph Mendham finds in the Indexes the literary policy and the doctrinal policy of the Church of Rome. He writes: “The Indexes issued by the Church of Rome may be regarded as a grand Index of the sentiment, spirit, and policy of an ecclesiastical empire, claiming with the most critical exactness the terrific appellation of the Mystery of Iniquity. “To no power but modern Rome is equally applicable the encomium of the poet on the ancient: _Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hae tibi erunt artes; passisque imponere morem: Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos._ Aen. VI, 852. “The other class of Indexes, the expurgatory, contains a particular examination of the works specified and indicates the passages condemned to be expunged or altered. For these Expurgatory Indexes, publicity was so little desired that it was the chief thing guarded against.... The copies were intended for the possession and inspection only of those to whom they were necessary for the execution of their provisions.... It was not thought desirable that the dishonest dealings of the writers of these censures should be known either to the authors who were injured and who would thus have an opportunity of justifying themselves, or to readers whose judgment must in many instances be at variance with that of the censors.”[3]