A periodical which was in existence for a few years during the last decade of the 18th century appears to have had some such purpose as this writer considers important. The _Giornale Ecclesiastico_, a weekly journal published in Rome from July, 1785, to June, 1798, presented, together with Church news and general information, a weekly review of books. The journal included further the decrees issued, during this period of fourteen years, by the censorship authorities of Rome, against the books selected for condemnation. The first volume recorded in these decrees is a treatise entitled _Was ist der Pabst?_ published anonymously but identified as the work of Eybel. It receives the honour of a condemnation, not in the ordinary form, but in an elaborate “constitution” printed over the signature of Pope Pius VI. The treatise had been issued at a critical time when the Pope found ground for alarm at the reformations announced by Joseph II. One of the works condemned in the later decrees was the _Pensées_ of Pascal, with Voltaire’s notes. [Sidenote: The Infallibility of the Pope] The criticism has been made more than once on the part of Protestant historians of the Index that the record of the conflicting decisions given by successive popes in regard to literary productions itself constitutes a substantial argument against the reasonableness of the doctrine of infallibility. This doctrine became officially one of the dogmas of the Church at the Council of the Lateran in 1870. It is the understanding that, while the declaration of the dogma was made this year for the first time, under the necessary interpretation of such dogma, it would be held to apply to the utterances of all the popes preceding Pius IX. The orthodox interpreters of Catholic doctrine point out, however, that the claim for infallibility does not cover all classes of papal utterances. Father Searle, for instance (writing in New York, 1895), makes the following statement in regard to the orthodox interpretation of this dogma: