Note 48 — CHAP. VIII.
Reading edition
Sir Robert Walpole’s Excise Scheme made a wonderful noise in this Nation; but we may safely suppose, that if flagellations, like those above-mentioned, had been made part of the project, the noise would have been still greater.
A fact, supplied by the Abbé Boileau himself, will be introduced in a subsequent Chapter, from which it appears, that Theodoret was not unacquainted with the practice of self-flagellation. The silence of that Author on the subject, in certain parts of his writings, only shews that that practice was not yet become, in his time, that settled method of atoning for past sins, which has been since adopted, and that a scourge had not yet been made a necessary part of the furniture of Devotees.