“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together and burned them before all men.”[12] This reference to the action taken by certain men in Ephesus under the influence of the eloquence of St. Paul is frequently cited by upholders of the censorship policy of the Church of Rome. Some of the more artistically printed editions of the Index (such for instance as the first Roman edition of the Index of 1758) contain, as a vignette title, a representation of Paul’s converts casting into the flames their books of magic, and beneath the print the verse from the Acts. The fact that St. Paul was willing to have his disciples, in their zeal for their new-born faith, make a voluntary sacrifice of writings believed to be incompatible with this faith cannot, of course, in itself constitute a sufficient warrant for the claim developed later by the Church of the right to destroy all literature that its rulers considered to be pernicious, or for the still larger claim of authority to inflict extreme penalties on those who produced, multiplied, or possessed the works thus condemned. An admonition to get rid of unchristian books is one thing, and the imposition of excommunication (or of an unconscious liability to excommunication), on the ground of the reading of erroneous doctrine, is another and a very different thing. But the whole theory of Church authority and of excommunication was, of course, a matter of slow development through the ages that followed the preaching of St. Paul. It was in fact not until the 16th century that there came into existence anything that could be called a censorship policy or any attempt at a general censorship system; but from the earliest periods in the history of the Church there are instances of condemnations of individual writers, and of prohibitions, under severe penalties, of the manifolding or distribution of particular works. These prohibitions are usually the result of one of the series of fierce controversies about dogma that characterised the earlier centuries of the Church. They emanate for the most part from councils, but they are occasionally issued directly by the pope or by local bishops. In certain cases, they take the form of an imperial edict, but even in these the initiative comes from a council. It is probable that the influence either of the councils or of the emperor in restricting the multiplication or distribution of the writings that had been condemned was not very effective. The edicts and decrees may be considered as representing an expression of opinion (connected with one of the bitter theological controversies of the day) rather than as regulations to be enforced. There was in fact no machinery for the enforcement. The work of the copying scribes could not be supervised, as was possible later for the operations of the printers, and the manuscripts could be passed from hand to hand among the sectarians, without the intervention of a bookshop.