Page:The spiritual venality of Rome.djvu/94

78 tion of 1612,) and from a passage of C. d'Espense, which will be produced^ that these books were made no matter of secrecy, but were publicly and openly exposed to sale. But we may, and have been, told, that these works have been formally and publicly con- demned by papal authority in the Indices Pro- hibitorii. This is a matter worth inquiring into : it is both a literary and a papal curiosity. By the year 1564^ when the Trent index was compiled and published, (to say nothing of preceding Indexes^) twenty-seven of the edi- tions of the TaxsB, above enumerated, had appeared^ and there were probably more^ now unknown — and yet no notice whatever was taken of them, not of a single instance 1 The £rst notice which ttw» taken of them, or rather of something like one of them, was in the year 1570^ just a century after the appearance of the first edition, and thaty not in a Roman Index, but in an Appendix to the Roman one, published by the authority of the King of Spain. And in what terms does it there appear? Praxis et Taxa officinso pcEuitentiariae Papae (p. 76)*^ work, which, if it ever existed under that title, was probably never, and is certainly