“One of the great book collectors of New York has recently secured from his foreign agent a copy of the new edition of the Index _Librorum prohibitorum_ issued under the directions of Leo XIII. It is seldom that a copy of an official Index or record of books, the perusal of which is prohibited to Catholics, comes into the hands of an outsider. The copies printed are reserved for the use of the readers of the Church. It is necessary in order to secure a copy, to pay a high price. This particular copy, for instance, was estimated as worth from $40 to $50, while a little later, in connection with the greater difficulty of securing copies, it might easily have cost $400. The history of the famous Index is interesting. Its intellectual originator was the Emperor Charles V of Spain whose production bears date about 1550. In 1554, the Pope Paul IV took into his own hands the matter of the supervision of literature. This has since been retained under the direct control of the pope. Many hundreds of books which are not specified and mentioned in the catalogue are prohibited under the general decrees, which decrees, first issued by Benedict XIV in 1744, from that date on are repeated in the succeeding Indexes. It is well known that no Catholic ventures, under penalty of excommunication, to possess or read books which are contained in the Index unless he may secure a specific privilege or permission. It is not so well known that the catalogue is itself three centuries old and that it contains thus far the name of no single American writer, not even Thomas Paine or Robert Ingersoll. There are, however, in the lists dozens of works of the English classics and hundreds of French books which belong to the world’s classics. Here for instance are to be found Bossuet and Pascal. The latter always believed himself to be a good Catholic. Among the English names placed under the ban are Gibbon, Hume, Hallam, and Goldsmith.”[169] Hilgers amuses himself, and with justice, with the mass of errors that have been crowded into the few paragraphs cited from the article. It is his conclusion that if an American writing in the city of Rome could be so thoroughly ignorant of matters that were easily within his reach, the impressions of Americans elsewhere and of Protestants generally concerning the purpose, the history, and the nature of the Index are probably equally erroneous. The conclusions of the German Jesuit concerning the literary policy of the Church of Rome as expressed in its latest Index, may conveniently be supplemented by a statement (written in November, 1898) by a scholarly American priest, on the present policy and methods of the Roman censorship. This statement comes in a personal letter to myself and I am, therefore, not at liberty to bring into print the name of the writer.