The vulgar, however, have generally too much credulity to be sufficiently competent to judge of the truth or falsehood of what is set before them, and too many evidences still exist of their folly with regard to relics. Cologne, on account of its numerous religious houses, relics, &c., was called the Holy City. The chapel of St. Ursula there became very famous for being the depository of her bones and those of the eleven thousand virgins, her companions, who came from England in a little boat to convert the Huns, who had taken possession of Cologne in 640, and who, unmoved by the sweet eloquence of so many virgins, quickly silenced their arguments by putting them all to death. Some doubt arose many years since, whether any country could have spared so many virgins: and a surgeon, somewhat of a wag, upon examination of the consecrated bones, declared that most of them were the bones of full-grown female mastiffs--for which discovery he was expelled the city. The horrors of Hindoo penance may be thought equalled by the voluntary sufferings of some of the earlier saints in the calendar, when fanaticism and ignorant credulity went hand-in-hand. The most remarkable of these early fanatics was, perhaps, St. Dominic the Cuirassier, thus named from an iron cuirass which he wore next his skin, and which was never taken off, till it was necessary to replace it by a new one. Conceiving that he had incurred the guilt of simony, he not only refrained from performing mass, but resolved to do penance the rest of his life; the result of this determination is so well described in the pages of a leading periodical,[7] that it is transferred with slight condensation. The first step towards this perpetual penance was, to enter into the congregation of Santa Croce Fonte Avellana, whose exercises were so rigorous that one of their amusements was to flog each other after the services. It was a general belief that the pains of purgatory might be mitigated by certain acts of penance and an indulgence from the Pope. The monks of Santa Croce determined that thirty psalms, said or sung, with an obligato accompaniment of one hundred stripes to each psalm, making in all three thousand, would be received as a set off for one year’s purgatory: the whole psalter, with fifteen thousand stripes, would redeem five years from the vast crucible, and twenty psalters, with three hundred thousand stripes fairly entered, would be equal to a receipt in full for one hundred years.