However, instances of the wantonness of Priests like this latter, in which a serious use was made of passages from the Books on which Religion is grounded, in order to forward schemes of a guilty nature, certainly cannot, in whatever light the subject be considered, admit of any justification: though on the other hand, when the national calamities produced by sophisms of this kind and the arts of Men of the same cloth, are considered, one cannot help wishing that they had constantly employed both these sophisms and their artifices in pursuits like those above-mentioned, and that, ensnaring a few female penitents (who were not perhaps, after all, extremely unwilling to be ensnared) and serving flagellations, had been the worst excesses they ever had committed. CHAP. XVII. _The Church at large also claims a power of publicly inflicting the discipline of flagellation. Instances of Kings and Princes who have submitted to it._ As it was the constant practice of Priests and Confessors, to prescribe flagellation as a part of the _satisfaction_ that was owing for committed sins, the opinion became at last to be established, that, receiving this kind of correction, was not only an useful, but even an indispensable act of submission: without it penitence was thought to be a body without a soul; nor could there be any such thing as true repentance. Hence the Church itself at large, became also in time to claim a power of imposing castigations of the kind we mention, upon naked sinners; and a flagellation publicly submitted to, has been made one of the essential ceremonies to be gone through, for obtaining the inestimable advantage of the repeal of a sentence of excommunication: the Roman Ritual expressly mentioning and requiring this test of the culprit’s contrition. These flagellatory claims and practices of the Western Christian Church, are, we may observe, one of the objections made against it by the Greek, or Eastern, Christians, as the learned M. Cotelier, a Doctor of the Sorbonne, observes in his _Monuments of the Greek Church_: ‘When they absolve a person from his excommunication (they say) he is stripped down to the waist, and they lash him with a scourge on that part which is bare, and then absolve him, as being forgiven his sin[95].’ Among the different instances of disciplines publicly inflicted by the Church, upon independent Princes, we may mention that which was imposed upon Giles, Count of the _Venaissin_ County, near Avignon. This Count having caused the Curate of a certain Parish to be buried alive, who had refused to bury the body of a poor Man, till the usual fees were paid, drew upon himself the wrath of the Pope, who fulminated against him a sentence of excommunication. And in order to procure the repeal of it, he found it necessary to submit to a flagellation, which was inflicted upon him before the gate of the Cathedral Church of Avignon.