TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of each chapter. Many of the footnotes are long and spread over several pages. Several footnotes have footnotes themselves. In this book the Table of Contents is at the end of the book. Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book. MEMORIALS OF HUMAN SUPERSTITION; Being a Paraphrase and Commentary on the _HISTORIA FLAGELLANTIUM_ of the Abbé Boileau, Doctor of the Sorbonne, Canon of the Holy Chapel, &c. By One who is not Doctor of the Sorbonne. _Honni soit qui mal y pense._ THE SECOND EDITION. [Illustration: _Page._ 391.] LONDON: Printed for G. ROBINSON, N^o 55, Pater-noster Row. M DCC LXXXIV. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE PARAPHRAST AND COMMENTATOR. The Abbé Boileau, the author of the _Historia Flagellantium_, was elder brother to the celebrated Poet of that name. He filled, several years, the place of Dean of the Metropolitan Church of Sens, and was thence promoted to the office of one of the Canons of the Holy Chapel in Paris, which is looked upon as a great dignity among the French clergy. While he was in that office (about the year 1700) he wrote, among other books, that which is the subject of this work[1]. This book, in which the public expected, from the title of it, to find an history of the particular sect of Hereticks called Flagellants, only contained an aggregation of facts and quotations on the subject of self-disciplines and flagellations in general among Christians (which, if the work had been well done, might however have been equally interesting) and a mixture of alternate commendation and blame of that practice. The Theologians of that time, however, took offence at the book. They judged that the author had been guilty, in it, of several heretical assertions; for instance, in saying, as he does in two or three places, that Jesus Christ had suffered flagellation against his will: and they particularly blamed the censures which, amidst his commendations of it, he had passed upon a practice that so many saints had adopted, so many pontiffs and bishops had advised, and so many ecclesiastical writers had commended.