The Father sums up his arraignment of the censorship of the State by a bitter reference to the methods pursued by the Protestant Government of Prussia with its Catholic subjects in Poland. What answer can an instructor make in a school in Posen when a child asks why he is forbidden to read the Polish Catechism? The instructor can only say that the modern State is all powerful, and that in the execution of its self-imposed task of crushing out nationality, it is willing to take the responsibility not only for the interpretation of science, but for the shaping of belief.[87] “Whence,” says Hilgers, “do the civil authorities secure the right to compel Catholic children to accept instruction from heretical books; and to prohibit the use in Catholic families, outside even of the walls of the official institutions, the use of Catholic books and documents? Here is a censorship tyranny with which in the history of Rome there is nothing to be compared.” CHAPTER IX THE BOOK PRODUCTION OF EUROPE AS AFFECTED BY CENSORSHIP 1. General. 2. The Universities. 3. Italy. 4. Spain. 5. France. 6. Germany. 7. The Netherlands. 8. England. 9. The _Index Generalis_ of Thomas James, 1627. =1. General.=--Four men, Columbus, Luther, Copernicus, and Gutenberg, stand at the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary stones marking the entrance of mankind into the higher and finer epoch of its development.[88] It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the larger contribution to this development or has done the most to lift up the spirit of mankind and to open for man the doors to the new realms that were awaiting him. The Genoese discoverer opens new regions to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast space of Western oceans, and, in adding to the material realm controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its thought, and fancy. The reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the bonds that had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in securing for them again their rights as individual Christians, conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into direct relations with their Creator. The great astronomer shatters, through his discoveries, the fixed and petty conceptions of the universe that had ruled the minds of mankind, and in bringing to men fresh light on the nature and extent of created things, widens at the same time their whole understanding of themselves and of duty. The citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained intelligence and given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a death-bringing ball, but in the form of life-quickening letters which were to bring before thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s thinkers. Each one of the four had his part in bringing to the world light, knowledge, and development.