=1. General.=--In this chapter, I am undertaking to present, not any comprehensive summary of political censorship, a task which would in fact require many volumes, but merely certain noteworthy examples of regulations issued under civil authority which will serve to indicate the general character of the censorship supervision of literature that was attempted by the State. I have grouped together here instances of Catholic censorship in which the ecclesiastics carried out their prohibitions under the authority of the State, or in which the State censorship regulations had been put into shape by the ecclesiastics. In the record of the so-called Protestant censorship, that is to say of the regulations adopted in Protestant States for the control of theological or religious literature, it is not practicable to separate the acts and utterances of the theologians from those emanating from the civil authorities, whether municipal or national. The larger number of the prohibitions of books having to do with theology or religion were naturally initiated by the divines, although even for this class of literature the civil authorities frequently did not hesitate to take into their own hands the responsibility of selecting the works to be condemned. The chief distinction, however, between the censorship methods of Protestant communities and those which came into force in Catholic States was the fact that for the former the censorship authorities were dependent for the enforcement of the prohibitions and penalties upon the machinery of the civil authority. The Protestant divines had at their command no such dread penalty as the ban of excommunication by means of which the Catholic ecclesiastics were able to enforce upon the faithful obedience to the commands of the Church. In the Protestant States, it was necessary for the divines, first, to convince the rulers of the essential importance of their particular creeds or forms of “orthodoxy,” in order to secure the enactment of the necessary laws or the issue of censorship edicts; and, secondly, to keep the magistrates up to the mark in the enforcing of the penalties prescribed.