The Friar affected to hear her without emotion, and continued his sermon with great composure; only he would now and then lift up his eyes towards the top of the tree, as if he wanted to see what was the matter. At last, when he judged the fire was very near reaching the gun-powder, he pretended to be quite out of patience, he cursed the magpye, and wished St. Anthony’s fire might consume her, and went on again with his sermon; but he had scarcely pronounced a few periods, when the match on a sudden produced its effect, and blew up the magpye with her nest; which miracle wonderfully raised the character of the Friar, and proved afterwards very beneficial both to him and his Convent. CHAP. IX. _Corrections of a flagellatory kind, inflicted by force, were however, though in very early times, the common method of correcting offences of a religious nature; and the power of inflicting them was possessed alike by Bishops, and the Heads of Monasteries[51]._ It must be confessed, however, that though self-flagellations made no part of the rules or statutes belonging to the different monastic Orders, founded in those early ages of Christianity, the same cannot be said of that method of correction, when imposed by force upon such Monks as had been guilty of offences, either against the discipline of the Order, or against piety: an extensive power of inflicting such salutary corrections, having, from the earliest times, been lodged in the hands of Abbots, and the _Superiors_ of Convents. Nay more, we find that Bishops, during the very first times of Christianity, assumed the paternal power we mention, even with regard to persons who were bound to them by no vow whatever, when they happened to have been guilty either of breaches of piety, or of heresy. Of this, a remarkable proof may be deduced from the 59th Epistle of St. Augustin, which he wrote to the Tribune Marcellinus, concerning the _Donatists_. St. Augustin expresses himself in the following words: ‘Do not recede from that paternal diligence you have manifested in your researches after offenders; in which you have succeeded to procure confessions of such great crimes, not by using racks, red-hot blades of iron, or flames, but only by the application of rods. This is a method of coercion which is frequently practised by Teachers of the fine Arts upon their Pupils, by Parents upon their Children, _and often also by_ Bishops _upon those whom they find to have been guilty of offences_[52].’