In the historical sketch of the operations of the Index, Hilgers touches but lightly upon the examples of inconsistencies or difficulties in the enforcement by the Church of the control over literature. He makes no mention of the many contests that arose between the different ecclesiastical bodies. He hardly touches upon the fact that the Index came to be from time to time an expression of theological differences between the great Church bodies or Orders such as, for instance, the Jesuits and the Dominicans or the Jesuits and the Franciscans. He has nothing to say about the instances in which the utterances of successive popes came into conflict with each other. He also barely makes mention of the contentions, maintained in Spain as in France, of the right of the national Church, acting in co-operation with the national Government, to decide what principles should be maintained for the supervision of the literature of the nation. His big treatise, comprehensive in many respects, is very curious in its omissions. In dwelling upon the beneficent influence of this Church censorship, he omits altogether the record of the control of this censorship by the Inquisition in Spain. He has nothing to say about the imprisonment or execution of Spanish heretics whose crime had consisted in the production, the selling, or the reading of books classed as heretical. If the reader had no other knowledge of the Index than that which came to him by the history as presented by Hilgers, he would have before him simply a record of an administration of fatherly beneficence on the part of wise advisers, of a pleading with the perverse that they should be saved from the consequences of their own perversity; of actions furthering all scholarship that was in itself wholesome and sound, and of the discouragement simply of such perverted intellectual efforts as tended to lead men away from their duty to their Creator and to undermine the moral conduct of their own lives.