It is true that in Catholic States, such as France, Austria, or Bavaria, the authority of the Crown and the machinery of the civil power were frequently utilised to carry out censorship regulations that had been framed by the ecclesiastics; but even with the citizens of those States (as far at least as they were Catholics) the most pertinent influence in insuring obedience for the prohibitions of the Index was the dread of being deprived of the rites of the Church. Excommunication meant that the adults were prohibited from marriage and their children were deprived of baptism; it meant that for the living there was no communion, for the dying, no absolution, and for the dead, no burial in consecrated ground. Life without the sacraments was full of fears, and with the deprival of absolution and of Church burial, death took on new terrors. These same influences were, of course, all-important also in securing the active co-operation even of the most worldly and most skeptical of the civil rulers in creating and in maintaining the machinery for controlling the operations of the printers and booksellers and for enforcing adequate civil or criminal penalties against heretical delinquents who were not amenable to the authority of the Church. In the States in which in this fashion the co-operation of Catholic rulers could be secured in support of the censorship policy of the Church universal, the administration of such censorship was, of course, more consistent, and it is fair to say less arbitrary (at least outside of Spain) than in the Protestant States in which the principles of prohibition changed from decade to decade with the changes of administration or as one theological faction or another secured influence with the rulers. In 1904, the Jesuit Father, Joseph Hilgers, published, under the title _Der Index der verbotenen Bücher_, a treatise presenting, from the point of view of an earnest upholder of the authority of the Roman Church, an historical study of the Roman Index. The immediate text for the production of this treatise of the learned Father was the publication, in 1900, of the second Index of Leo XIII, of which Index the Father gives a comprehensive description and analysis. Father Hilgers takes the ground that it was impossible for the Church, without neglecting its manifest duty, to avoid accepting the responsibility for the supervision and control of literary production and of the reading of the faithful. The pope, says the Father, is, as the head of the Church on earth, the direct representative of God. It is through him that God makes known his wishes and the principles upon which the life of the faithful is to be guided. It is for the shepherd of the flock to preserve the flock from poison. The shepherd is charged not merely with the right living of his sheep during their earthly career, but with the much larger responsibility of seeing that their lives are so shaped that they shall secure a blessed hereafter.