One of the most important, and also one of the most difficult, parts of the undertaking was the securing of the various privileges required to authorise the sale of the work, and to protect it from infringement in the several countries in which a demand for it was expected. A general privilege was first obtained from the governor of the Netherlands acting in behalf of the King, and this secular authorisation was supplemented by a certificate of orthodoxy issued by the theological faculty of Louvain, which was naturally prepared to approve of its own work. The Pope, Pius V, or his advisers, took the ground, however, that any general circulation of the Scriptures might prove dangerous, and in spite of the approval given to the work by Louvain, he refused to sanction its publication. This refusal blocked the undertaking for some years and brought upon the publisher Plantin serious financial difficulties. The history of this work presents a convenient example of the special difficulties attending the publishing enterprises of the time. The examiners or censors, whether political or ecclesiastical, were prepared to make their examinations and to arrive at decisions only when the book in question was already in printed form. It was necessary, therefore, that the outlays for the editing, the typesetting, and the printing should be incurred before the publisher could ascertain whether or not the publication could be permitted. It was quite possible also that the plan of the publication might be approved by one authority, while the work, when completed, might fail to secure the sanction required on the part of some other or succeeding authority. With Plantin’s Bible, the history took a different course. Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pius V, was finally persuaded to give his approval to the work and, in 1572 (that is to say four years after the book was in readiness), he issued a privilege for it which gave to the publisher exclusive control for the term of twenty years, and which brought upon any reprinter excommunication and a fine of two thousand livres. The editor, Montanus, after finishing his editorial labours and supervising the printing of the final sheets of the Bible, was obliged to devote some years to travelling from court to court and to a long sojourn in Rome, before he could secure the privileges required for its sale. Even after the work had secured the approval of Gregory, it was vigorously attacked by a group of the stricter Romanists, led by Leon de Castro, professor of Salamanca. De Castro took the ground that the Vulgate had been accepted by the Church as the authoritative text, and that all attempts to go back to the original Hebrew, Greek, or Syriac must, therefore, be sacrilegious. As early as 1520, Noël Beda, Dean of the Sorbonne, had taken similar ground in connection with the editions of the Bible printed by Henry Estienne. Beda contended that the study of Greek and Hebrew would bring