Page:An Index of Prohibited Books (1840).djvu/40

xxxiv abstraction. A true son of Rome is seldom at a loss for resources. The page preceding the substitution is 234; the next would be 235; but the careless printer might naturally mistake the middle number and make it 245. Here is a new confusion in an unsuspicious place. Then, next to this substituted leaf is another quite new, and blank, with only a general title of what follows, with no page, and with the signature (to get on) Hh, when it should in order be Gg iii. Then we land on the next article with its due and original page 245, which was provokingly anticipated by the careless printer, and the signature Hh iii another advance. The second of the two substitutes here mentioned is set off on p. 234, and we shall find the first likewise performing the same act. For, let the reader know, another substituted leaf was necessary, which is the last, being the last of the Index; and that Index being a particular one of the first and main article, the Life by Palladius, there followed another, at the end of which was the Privilegium. That last Index would let out all. It was therefore dismissed, and with it the last leaf of the former Index, in order, with a new leaf, to get in the Privilegium at the end. This is done; the substituted page is found set off on the recto of the substituted leaf immediately following p. 234, while, at the same time, it receives the impression, of which we were in quest, of the very page, falsely numbered 245.

It is seldom that fraud presents us with so many subsidiary points of detection, so minute, so accidental, and yet so decisive.

This instance of disgraceful exposure, it might have been expected, would have taught Roman editors a little caution. But the instance exactly similar in the case of Baluzius's edition of Cyprian, and in which nearly the same phenomena are visible, proves that the Church of Rome, on even a moderate temptation, does not know how to act honestly.

At pp. 106, 7, where Ferrari is referred to as declaring, that the reading of prohibited books, even where the prohibition is not enforced, is yet, and nevertheless, a violation of a precept of the Church, it should perhaps have been added, that such violation is in the Papal code a mortal sin, subjecting to eternal