This Index of Benedict represents the beginning of what may be called the modern policy of the Catholic Church in regard to the censorship of literary production and the control or supervision of the reading of the faithful. By the middle of the 18th century, the Church authorities were finally prepared to admit the impracticability, with any such commissions or examining bodies as could be maintained, of making an individual examination of each work produced from the printing-press. Such a conclusion might with better wisdom have been arrived at a century earlier. The most direct evidence of the futility of the attempts on the part of the Congregation of the Index, of the Roman Inquisition, and of the local inquisitors to inform themselves intelligently concerning the nature, the orthodoxy, and the probable influence for good or for bad of the increasing mass of books brought into print from year to year, is presented by the Indexes themselves. The work of the compilation of these successive Indexes was placed in the hands of scholarly men, and, in the large majority of cases, of men whose integrity of purpose and devotion to the higher interests of the Church need not be brought into question. These devout and scholarly compilers were, however, willing to put into print, under the authority of an infallible Church, instructions for the reading of believers which the most faithful of Catholics must have found difficulty in obeying with any consistency. The Index lists are marvels of bibliographical inaccuracy. The names of the authors, frequently misspelled, are entered almost at random, at times under their surnames or locality-names, sometimes in the vernacular, sometimes in the Latin forms. This method, or lack of method, necessarily resulted in duplicate entries, while the copyists, instructed to transfer for printer’s copy for a later Index the titles from an earlier, succeeded not infrequently (possibly in the desire to avoid duplications) in omitting altogether writers and books of unquestioned heresy. More serious, however, than these bibliographical blunders, the responsibility for which rested in part at least with copyists or with compositors, were the errors which were undoubtedly due to editorial ignorance. It was increasingly impossible for the compilers to secure personal knowledge of the contents of more than a very small proportion of the books which were to be passed upon and classed as either safe or pernicious. Descriptions or impressions of current publications such as are available to-day through reviews were, prior at least to the middle of the 18th century, non-existent. The judgment arrived at concerning an unfamiliar book depended in part on the name of the author, and in part on that of the printer or the place of publication. Certain printing offices and certain publishing centres came to be associated in the minds of the Roman censors with heretical opinions.