that in English-speaking countries there does not exist upon any large or popular scale such bitter and active propaganda against Christianity and Christian morality as are unhappily at work abroad, nor is there that widespread prevalence of aggressively anti-Christian and pornographic literature which the infidel and anti-clerical press pours forth like a pestilential sewer in certain continental countries. The Church has wisely taken into account the special character and circumstances of Catholics in the English-speaking countries, and the significance which as expressing the more modern development of social and political life they promise to possess in the future. For centuries, the provisions of the Index in their more rigid sense have not been practically applied to these countries, and to a very large measure these provisions have been left in abeyance with the perfect knowledge of the Supreme Authority.... The Constitution published by the Holy See, in January last, was naturally issued to the Church at large, and when it appeared in the Catholic press of England it necessarily elicited from both clergy and laity the question whether this new Constitution was or was not intended to supplant the _status quo_ which had hitherto existed among us. The reply to the enquiry addressed to Rome by the Cardinal Archbishop and bishops of England, conceded the most ample powers for dispensation, so that, owing to the ‘special circumstances of the country,’ the bishops in England were fully authorised ‘to modify the rigour of the law by their prudence and counsel according as the case might demand.’ Rome’s reply was thus as ready and as liberal as could well be desired.... “No Catholic forgets or can ever allow himself to forget that the Index is at most an institution which has been called into existence by the practical prudence of the Holy See to safeguard and to hedge around with specific regulations the observance of a moral law that is as old as Christianity itself and that, even if the regulations of the Index were abolished to-morrow, would remain in all its force in the Catholic Church. If the faithful Catholic in the course of his reading finds by experience that a given book is of a kind to undermine his faith or to work injury to his morals, he knows that he is bound by the very fact to deal with it as he would with a proximate occasion of sin, and to cast it aside. Christianity by its very condition means discipline. In it the unbridled freedom of thinking, saying, reading, and doing what we like is exchanged for the higher and holier freedom of union with the mind and with the life of Christ. The moral law of the Church is everywhere and always with us and every good Christian carries about with him inside of his own conscience a Constitution of the Index....”