This revival of letters, untrammelled by Church censorship, was, of necessity, seriously interfered with during the ravages of the “Thirty Years War.” A considerable period elapsed after the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, before the disasters and destructions of this long contest were sufficiently made good to enable the natural interests and activities of the people to resume their course. By the beginning, however, of the 18th century, the larger intellectual activities of the Protestant States of Europe had made themselves clearly apparent. The literary production of these States not only greatly exceeded in mass that of the Catholic States, but included a very much larger proportion of what might be called the world’s books, that is to say, of books which exerted a continued and increasing influence from generation to generation. The great works of imagination, the records of noteworthy scientific discoveries, the histories accepted as authoritative, the treatises in higher metaphysics, were produced, of course not exclusively, but in very much greater proportion, in the countries which had either thrown off altogether the authority of Rome, or which, as was the case with France, while still classed as faithful to the Church, had practically refused to accept the supervision of the Roman Church over their national literature. It may be concluded that the theory upon which the censorship of the Church was based is incompatible with the natural and complete development of the literary potentialities of a people and interferes with the production of higher literature in direct proportion to the effectiveness with which it may be applied. It may further be concluded that, excepting in the case of Spain, the ecclesiastical censors did not succeed in hampering very largely the literary production even in Catholic States, although, as before pointed out, the general influence of the Church appears always to have worked against the full intellectual development of the communities that remained in the faith and that accepted the ecclesiastical authority. The wider enquiry as to the extent of the influence of the Church censorship, during the three centuries of its greatest activity, upon the literary production of Europe, that is to say, the question as to how far, in case no censorship had been attempted, this literature would have been different in character from or greater in importance than, that which actually came into existence, must, I judge, remain unanswered.