The power of Confessors of _disciplining_ their penitents, became in process of time so generally acknowledged, that it obtained even with respect to persons who made profession of the Ecclesiastical life, and superseded the laws that had been made against those who should strike an Ecclesiastic. To this an allusion is made, in the lines of that Poet of the middle age, who has put the _Summula_ of St. Raymund into Latin verses. ‘You are guilty of sacrilege if you have violated holy things, if you have struck a person in religious Orders, or of the Clergy; unless it be a holy beating, such as is performed by a Teacher with respect to his Disciple, or a Confessor with respect to a person who confesses his sins[90].’ Attempts were, however, made to put a stop to these practices of Priests and Confessors; and so early as under Pope Adrian I. who was raised to the Purple in the year 772 (which by the by shews that the power assumed by Confessors, was pretty ancient) a regulation was made to forbid Confessors to beat their Penitents. ‘The Bishop (it is said in the _Epitome_ of Maxims and Canons) the Priest, and the Deacon, must not beat those who have sinned[91].’ But this regulation proved useless: the whole tribe of Priests, as well as the first Dignitaries of the Church, nevertheless continued to preach up the prerogatives of Confessors and the merit of flagellations; and Cardinal Pullus, that Chancellor of the Roman Church who has been mentioned in the foregoing Chapter, did not scruple to declare, that the nakedness of the Penitent, and his situation at the feet of his Confessor, were additional merits in him in the eye of God, as being additional tokens of his humility[92]. All these different practices of stripping and flagellating Devotees and Penitents, at length gave rise to abuses of a very serious nature; instances of which take place, we may say, every day. Numbers of Confessors, in process of time, have made such religious acts as had been introduced with a view to mortification, serve to gratify their own lust and wantonness. They have tried to inculcate the same notions, as to the merit of flagellations, into the minds of their Devotees of the other sex, as they had brought even Kings and Princes to entertain; and at last have made it a practice to inflict such corrections on their female Penitents, and under that pretence, to take such liberties with them, as the blessed St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Loyola, had not certainly given them the example of.