The general policy seems to have been that it was safer to condemn a few books not assuredly either pernicious or heretical, than to run the risk of omitting from the lists any single work which might constitute an influence against the authority of the Church. The selections were also largely influenced by the doctrinal issues and by the party prejudices that arose between the great Orders of the Church. The direction of the censorship work in Rome, both of the Inquisition and of the Congregation, has, since their institution, remained in the hands of the Dominicans. The natural result was a strong bias of opinion and of action against the writings of the Jesuits and of the Franciscans. When, as occasionally happened, the two latter Orders secured representation on the boards of examiners, opportunity was taken to pay off literary scores against the Dominican writers. Of these three great bodies in the Church, the Jesuits included by far the larger proportion of scholarly workers and were responsible for the larger mass of dogmatic and theological literature. It is the books of the Jesuits, therefore, that furnish the largest number of titles to the lists of prohibited doctrinal works by Catholic writers. Up to the time of Benedict, the authorities who had directed the work of the compilers had thought it necessary to give consideration to the literature produced by Protestant writers, as far as they could secure knowledge concerning the character of the books, or could secure at least information as to their existence. Such knowledge and information were at best but imperfect and fragmentary. The selections from Protestant writers that appear in the Indexes of Pius IV, Paul IV, and Clement VIII impress one as curiously haphazard. It is difficult to understand under what instructions the work of the compilers was done. The names of the larger heretics of the Reformation period, such as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, find place in the greater number of the Indexes, although even with these larger names there are occasional curious omissions. In no one of these earlier Indexes, however, in which the attempt was made to present a complete list of the doctrinal writings of these leaders of the Reformation, have the compilers been successful in making a list that was either complete or correct. It is possibly on the ground of some consciousness of probable omissions that, after having inserted in the alphabeted lists the titles (more or less correctly worded) of certain books, it was thought safer to make a second entry by the name of the author, followed by the term “_Opera omnia_.” With the second and third groups (considered in the order of their relative importance) of the Protestant doctrinal writers, the selection both of the writers themselves and of their books becomes much more incidental or accidental. In certain instances, the most important controversial production of such an author is left