Another instance of the manner of the devotion of the Eastern Christians, is supplied by the passage in St. John Climax, that has been recited at pag. 121. Both the Opposers, and the Promoters, of the practice of self-flagellation, have gone too far in their interpretations of that passage. The latter have asserted that it expressly alluded to religious disciplines, performed in the same manner, and with the same views, as they now are in modern Monasteries; while the former have been as positive that it meant no such thing as _beating_ or _scourging_, and is only to be understood of the lamentations of the Monks in the Monastery in question, that is, in a bare figurative manner. The passage in St. John Climax is this: ‘Some among the Monks watered the pavement with their tears, while others, who could not shed any, beat themselves.’ The expression used in this passage, to say that some among the Monks beat themselves, is certainly as precise as any the Greek language can supply; yet neither does it supply a sufficient proof that they performed, in the above Monastery, regular and periodical flagellations of the same kind with those that have been since used in the Western Monasteries, in the times of Cardinal Damian, and the Widow Cechald: the self-flagellations alluded to, in the passage we speak of, appear to have been of the same kind with those performed by the Saint of the Mountain of Nitria who has been abovementioned, and were calculated to enable those who could not weep, to weep plentifully. But among the Western Christians, as the extensive Country over which they became in time to be spread, without any intervening opponents, afforded a vast field for innovations of every kind, they, as hath been above said, went the greatest lengths in their opinions concerning the usefulness of the practices we mention, to which the History of their Religion had at first given rise. In the first place, mortifications of the kind here alluded to, were used among them from notions of much the same sort with those entertained by the Eastern Christians, that is, with a view of sanctifying themselves by their repentance, and assisting their compunction.