The complaints of our Author with respect to the loose which Painters have been used to give to their own fancy, when they have treated religious subjects, are well grounded; and persons who have travelled in Catholic Countries cannot but have taken notice of the freedom that prevails in their Church-pictures: hence a number of stories are related among them of Nuns, or other Women, who have fallen in love with naked figures of Angels and Saints, and of Men who have been led into extravagances by the passion they had conceived for certain statues, or pictures. As to errors concerning facts merely, and faults against the _Costume_, which our Author seems more particularly to allude to, in this Chapter, they are certainly very frequent in the works of Painters: even the first among them, such as Paul Veronese and others, are reproached with capital ones. On this occasion the Writer of this Commentary thinks he may relate what he himself has seen in a Country Church in Germany, in which a Painter, who had intended to represent the Sacrifice of Isaac, had so far availed himself of the _potestas quidlibet audendi_, mentioned above, that he had represented Abraham with a blunderbuss in his hand, ready to shoot his son, and an Angel, suddenly come down from Heaven, pouring water on the pan. CHAP. II. _No persons, under the antient Law, inflicted on themselves, with their own hands, voluntary flagellations, or received them from the hands of other persons._ Flagellation, there is no doubt, is a method of coercive punishment very antiently used among Men. We find it mentioned in the Old Testament, in the fifth chapter of _Exodus_: it is said in that chapter, that the Ministers of Pharaoh, who required from the Israelites a certain number of bricks every day, having found them to have failed in supplying the usual number, ordered them to be flogged; and that the latter complained of this harsh usage. V. 14. “And the officers of the children of Israel, which Pharaoh’s Task masters had set over them, were beaten[7], and demanded, Wherefore have you not fulfilled your task in making brick, both yesterday and to-day, as heretofore?” 15. “Then the Officers of the children of Israel came and cried unto Pharaoh, saying, Wherefore dealest thou thus with thy servants?” 16. “There is no straw given unto thy servants, and they say to us, Make brick: and behold we are beaten, but the fault is in thine own people.”--Now, I think that no commentary is necessary to prove that the flagellations mentioned here were not in any degree voluntary on the part of those who underwent them.