having shed a tear. To such young heroes
columns were erected in a public place. The
custom outlived even the liberty of the
Lacedemonians; and, in the time of Tertullian, the father
of the Church, this festival was kept. The
Thracians had adopted a like custom.

There existed philosophical sects in Greece
who instructed the youths in inurement to
work, want, and pain. These philosophers and
their pupils flogged themselves severely, or tore
off parts of their skin with instruments made
for the purpose; for which they were often
ridiculed by the philosophers of other schools.

In Italy the feast of Lupercal had been kept
before the building of Rome. It fell on the
15th of February, and was in honour of Pan. The
skins of the sacrificed animals were cut into
strips, with which the young men, after having
beaten themselves, ran through the streets of
Rome to whip all women they met. It was
thought to be well with the woman who received
a blow. The old religion, the republic, and the
empire perished; but this merry festival was
kept up by the Roman ladies.

Moses introduced the whip into the law of
the Jews. The instrument consisted of three
strings, two of which were short, but the
middle one long enough to embrace the
whole body. The strokes were limited to
thirteen, as one stroke more would have been two
stripes beyond the law. None of the Jewish
writers recommended self-torment till the year
in which two rabbis compiled the Babylonian
Talmud, which introduced many new
superstitions into the Jewish rite. One of them
was the voluntary flogging, afterwards called
by the Christians " discipline." The Jews
proceeded in this manner: Two persons, feeling
repentant, retired to a corner of the synagogue.
Having confessed to each other their sins, one
of them threw himself on the ground, lying north
and south. His comrade then applied to his back
thirty-nine stripes with a leathern strap, while
the prostrate one, incessantly repeating the
thirty-eighth verse of the seventy-eighth psalm,
struck his breast with his fist whenever the lash
fell. When one had received his allowance, the
two men changed places, and the ceremony
was repeated as before.

This practice became general in the eleventh
century. One of its chief patrons was the
Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Peter de Damiani. In
his works he refers to the exploits of a monk,
Dominicus, with whom he was personally
acquainted. This monk often got through the
penance of a hundred years in six days.
According to the rules of his monastery, three
thousand strokes were one year's penitence;
Dominicus, therefore, gave himself three
hundred thousand strokes in less than a week. To
accomplish this feat, he armed both his hands
with rods, and Damiani tells us that the body of
the holy man looked " like the herbs which an
apothecary has crushed in a mortar for a ptisan."
Becoming used to the rods, Dominicus
substituted for them a more solid whip, with several
leather tongues. This kind of devotion was
not only the rule in all the monasteries and
nunneries, but spread over the whole Christian
world. The devotees differed upon the question
whether it was better to slash the back or the
lower parts of the body. Both ways, the upper
and the lower discipline, were equally practised.
Even princes and princesses were flogged by
their severe spiritual directors. The widow of
a Landgrave of Hesse and Thuringia, Elizabeth,
daughter of King Andreas II. of Hungary,
suffered much from the severity of her confessor,
Conrad of Marburg. He was suspected of being
the lover of the princess, and when one of her.
friends, Schenk von Argula, hinted at this
rumour, she folded back a part of her dress,
saying, " You may see the kind of love this holy man
bears to me, and I to him." Her skin was torn,
and bleeding from a severe whipping she had
just had for a trifling disobedience.

About the middle of the fourteenth century,
a desperate longing for penitence came over the
world, first manifesting itself in Perugia, by
a great pilgrimage of penitents, who flogged
at themselves cruelly. A flogging epidemic
spread over Italy and Germany. Ten thousand
penitents, headed by the clergy, with crosses
and banners, overran the country. At first
laughed at, and even refused entrance in the
towns, they ended by infecting others with their
insane zeal. At this time the Black Death was
raging, and the end of the world was believed to
be at hand. In Germany almost one half of the
population died. The fanatics accused the Jews
of having poisoned the wells, and these were
persecuted and murdered by the mob, who were
assisted by the pilgrims. The fanaticism became
so ungovernable as to be dangerous to the
Church, and Pope Clement VI. condemned the
flagellators in a bull. Nevertheless, their practices
were continued for many years, though
Church and State combined to put them down.
At last, the Church resolved to patronise and
take under her own control the brotherhoods of
flagellators. In Rome there existed no less than
a hundred of sucli fraternities, and they were
also to be found in other Italian towns, in France,
and Germany, flourishing especially during the
sixteenth century; when the Jesuits patronised
them. King Henry III. of France once ran
through the streets with his courtiers, barefooted,
and clad in sackcloth, all flogging themselves.
Many confessors abused this custom of
penance, and the discipline is not yet wholly
out of date. Within the present century, scenes
occurred in the neighbourhood of Salerno as
atrocious as any that could have happened half
a thousand years ago.

Flogging in schools was customary, both
among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Then,
as they do now sometimes, masters abused
their authority. Plutarch and Quintilian wrote
against this manner of punishing children. In
monasteries the novices were treated cruelly,
and, while monks and priests were everywhere
chosen as teachers, the custom of flogging pupils
was a thing of course. It was not even thought
improper for a young monk to apply the rod to