use that should be made of it in future.  It issued officially, as I have already stated, in 1564, the fifth year of the pontificate of Pius IV., with warning to all universities and civil and ecclesiastical authorities that any person of what grade or condition soever, whether clerk or layman, who should read or possess one or more of the proscribed volumes, would be accounted ipso jure excommunicate, and liable to prosecution by the Inquisition on a charge of heresy.[120] Booksellers, printers, merchants, and custom-house officials received admonition that the threat of excommunication and prosecution concerned them specially.

[Footnote 120:  Paulus Manutius Aldus printed this Index at Venice in 1564.]

The first rules deal with the acknowledged writings of Protestant heresiarchs.  Those of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, whether in their original languages or translated, are condemned absolutely and without exception.  Next follow regulations for securing the monopoly of the Vulgate, considered as the sole authorized version of the Holy Scriptures.  Translations of portions of the Bible made by learned men in Latin may be used by scholars with permission of a bishop, provided it be understood that they are never appealed to as the inspired text.  Translations into any vernacular idiom are strictly excluded from public use and circulation, but may, under exceptional circumstances, be allowed to students who have received license from a bishop or Inquisitor at the recommendation of their parish priest or confessor.  Compilations made by heretics, in the form of dictionaries, concordances, etc., are to be prohibited until they have been purged and revised by censors of the press.  The same regulation extends to polemical and controversial works touching on matters of doctrine in dispute between Catholics and Protestants.  Next follow regulations concerning books containing lascivious or obscene matter, which are to be rigidly suppressed.  Exception is made in favor of the classics, on account of their style; with the proviso that they are on no account to be given to boys to read.  Treatises dealing professedly with occult arts, magic, sorcery, predictions of future events, incantation of spirits, and so forth, are to be proscribed; due reservation being made in favor of scientific observations touching navigation, agriculture, and the healing art, in which prognostics may be useful to mankind.  Having thus broadly defined the literature which has to be suppressed or subjected to supervision, rules are laid down for the exercise of censure.  Books, whereof the general tendency is good, but which contain passages savoring of heresy, superstition or divination, shall be reserved for the consideration of Catholic theologians appointed by the Inquisition; and this shall hold good also of prefaces, summaries, or annotations.  All writings printed in Rome must be submitted to the judgment of the Vicar of the Pope, the Master of the Sacred Palace, or a person