By 1540, the ecclesiastical control of the printing-press (exercised through the authority of the university) had become an established and an obstructive fact. A necessary result of the antagonism of the Church to critical scholarship was to drive into the ranks of sympathisers with the reformers, if not into Protestantism itself, very many of the scholars who at the outset were not reformers and who were not keenly interested in the theological issues of the period, but who felt a natural indignation at the reiterated interference with scholarly undertakings on the part of very ignorant men. The scholars engaged in preparing for the public critical editions of the world’s literature asked to be let alone, but they asked in vain. In 1546, the doctors of the Sorbonne secured the insertion in the prohibitory Index of Louvain of the edition of the Bible that had just been printed by Robert Estienne; but later in the same year, the King prohibited the printing or the circulation in France of the Index of Louvain. The King also issued a brief ordering the divines to withdraw their strictures upon the Estienne Bible. With the death of the King in 1547, the prohibition of the Bible was, however, renewed. In 1552, Estienne, deprived of the protection of King Francis, is finally compelled to close his printing office and to remove to Geneva. Estienne did not, however, find Protestant Geneva a place of liberal toleration. The year after his arrival, he witnessed the burning, under the authority of Calvin, of the heretical scholar Servetus, and more than once during the later years of his work in Geneva, the Estienne publications came under the condemnation of the Calvinistic censorship. Henry Estienne (the second) completed, in 1562, the publication of certain theological works which had been left unfinished in Geneva at the time of his father’s death. Among these, were an Exposition of the New Testament and an Exposition of the Psalms. The editor, a certain Marloratus, a Huguenot minister at Rouen, was unfortunately, before the printing was completed, hanged as a heretic, under the direction of the Duke of Guise, but the books themselves were not suppressed nor was the publisher interfered with. The faculty of the Sorbonne appears for the time to have suspended its censorious watchfulness over heretical publications, perhaps because it found its hands sufficiently full with the active work of suppressing, by fire, gibbet, and sword, the heretics themselves. Henry found it later, however, good policy to divide his publishing undertakings, executing at Paris reprints of the classics and works in general literature, and reserving for his press at Geneva theological works which were likely to give offence in a period of “religious irritation.” This term is, I may mention, Maittaire’s, and it is perhaps not too strong a description of a period in which a divine who had taken no part in politics could be hanged simply for editing a Protestant commentary.