Excerpt from Newson's German Reader The pupil passes, as a rule, from the beginner's book to the reading of stories which are foreign to his thought. He is provided with a german-english dictionary. He is given a lesson so long that he cannot assimilate it. Little work is assigned for preparation which will help to a mastery of the vocabul and idioms. He may have a few sen tenoes in glish, based upon the text, to translate into German, an exercise which is apt to signify little more than a series of mental gymnastics and the cultivation of memory. It is no wonder that the teacher awakes, after two or three ears of this kind of work, to find that his pupils 100 at German through the same glasses as at Caesar or the cam basis, and think the modern language a snap, because they can translate it more easlly and guess at the construction with deadlier accuracy. Modern languages, so taught and so regarded, W111 not take the place of Latin and Greek as preparatory studies. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access to knowledge unimpeded by any religious authority. But how would the history of freedom change if these conceptions were false? In this panoramic study of Catholic book culture in Germany from 1770–1914, Jeffrey T. Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression. Catholic readers disobeyed the book rules of their church in a vast apostasy that raised personal desire and conscience over communal responsibility and doctrine. This disobedience sparked a dramatic contest between lay readers and their priests over proper book behavior that played out in homes, schools, libraries, parish meeting halls, even church confessionals. The clergy lost this contest in a fundamental reordering of cultural power that helped usher in contemporary Catholicism.