Page. 391.
LONDON:
Printed for G. ROBINSON, No 55, Pater-noster Row.
M DCC LXXXIV.
THE
INTRODUCTION
OF THE
PARAPHRAST and COMMENTATOR.
THE Abbé Boileau, the author of the Historia Flagellantium, was elder brother to the celebrated Poet of that name. He filled, several years, the place of Dean of the Metropolitan Church of Sens, and was thence promoted to the office of one of the Canons of the Holy Chapel in Paris, which is looked upon as a great dignity among the French clergy.
While he was in that office (about the year 1700) he wrote, among other books, that which is the subject of this work[1]. This book, in which the public expected, from the title of it, to find an history of the particular sect of Hereticks called Flagellants, only contained an aggregation of facts and quotations on the subject of self-disciplines and flagellations in general among Christians (which, if the work had been well done, might however have been equally interesting) and a mixture of alternate commendation and blame of that practice.
The Theologians of that time, however, took offence at the book. They judged that the author had been guilty, in it, of several heretical assertions; for instance, in saying, as he does in two or three places, that Jesus Christ had suffered flagellation against his will: and they particularly blamed the censures which, amidst his commendations of it, he had passed upon a practice that so many saints had adopted, so many pontiffs and bishops had advised, and so many ecclesiastical writers had commended.