“We are prepared to place upon any inquirer the responsibility of determining whether the Congregation of the Index in the whole series of its operations has ever committed an essential blunder.... The policy and method of ecclesiastical censorship as carried out through the Index is the most moderate, the most tolerant, and the wisest that could be conceived.... The Congregation of the Index secures in the shaping of its judgments the service of the scholarship and of the consciences and capable labour of wise and devout counsellors; and its decisions may be accepted as the conclusions of a scientific Areopagus which is entitled to the fullest respect and the most implicit obedience; and he who does not render such obedience is a stranger to, and an opponent of, the spirit of the Church. ... It is through the Index that the Holy See exercises one of the most important of its functions.”[181] In 1868, in an article having to do with the Council of the Vatican, the _Katholik_ says: “The sting of the Index (to its critics) rests in this, that it represents a judgment exercised by the highest authority in matters of faith over individual knowledge. It is the sting of infallible truth.... The Index has from the beginning been the most trustworthy teacher of sound theology and defender of true Faith.” Bishop Baillès of Luçon, writing in 1864, says: “The Index contains no single book the condemnation of which was not arrived at under general rules.... It may be considered as itself one great book in which are characterised with more or less precision all the errors, heresies, and schisms of the ages--a book which for all devout scholars may be accepted as a trustworthy chart on which have been marked with a skilled and trusted hand all sunken rocks and other perils of the deep. The Index is the incomparable master work of the wisdom of the Church.” Baillès says further: “No bibliographical work can be considered as complete until it has been collated with the Index.... The date of the prohibition of a book, taken in connection with the date of its first publication, indicates the time during which it has become more pernicious.... The Index is to be classed as the most essential of critical bibliographies, one which no library should be without.” Bishop Plantier of Nismes, in a pastoral letter of 1857, describes the Congregation of the Index as “the throne of good sense, the magistracy of truth, and a tribunal each utterance of which constitutes an indispensable service to true philosophy.”[182] Minister Jules Ferry, speaking in the French Senate, May 31, 1882, says: