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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE
FLAGELLANTS
'
AND
THE
COVENANTERS
(New Edition).
BY
SALADIN.
Author of “God and His Book,” etc.
London :
W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�THE FLAGELLANTS.
From the era of its half-mythical Galilean down
wards, Christianity has laid incontestable claims to
be considered the Religion of Misery. A radical
doctrine of the faith is that this world is only a
Babelmandeb, or Gate of Tears to the “ glory that
shall yet be revealed.” The teaching’s recorded of
Christ have all the jaundiced acerbity of the Essenes.
The son of Mary was an ascetic, or nothing. Ac
cording to him, the end of the world was close at
hand. Its concerns and aims were despicable, and
the best that could be done was to regard its plea
sures as pernicious seductions and lay up “ treasures
in heaven,” as it would avail a man nothing should
he ** gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”
Strictly compatible with the teachings of Christ
were the doctrines of Cardinal Damiani, when he
wrote a panegyric upon the efficacy of self-inflicted
suffering, and those of the celebrated Dominic, when
he introduced penitential hymns, to be chanted to
a tune to which the self-inflicted lash kept time.
Hair shirts, protracted periods of fasting, and the
like, had long been m vogue as means to propitiate
an angry heaven ; but Dominic affirmed that twenty
recitations of the Psalms, accompanied by selfinflicted scourging, was equal to a hundred years,
of ordinary penitence.
Dominic flourished towards the middle of the
eleventh century ; but it was not till about two
centuries later (1260) that the seed of asceticism
he had sown sprang up to be a great and popular
tree of self-torture. It was in an age of gloom
and suffering and wickedness that, at Pergugia,
in Italy, a monk named Regnier, with wild and
bitter eloquence, preached Flagellation as the anti
dote that would restore an afflicted people to the
�The Flagellants.
3
favour of an angry God. Like Peter the Hermit
in the first Crusade, like Luther at the Reformation,
or Bernhardt of the Millenarian insanity, this
Regnier had rightly interpreted the spirit of the
times. He put in his sickle, and the corn was
already ripe for the harvest. The wars of Guelph
and Ghibelline, famine, pestilence, rapine, murder,
and misery had, after a thousand years of Chris
tianity, made Italy and the most of Europe feel
that life was, indeed, not worth living, but only
a horrid and mysterious burden, which was taken
up involuntarily, and which left those who bore it
such cravens that they had not the courage to lay
it down.
And so another violent epidemic of Lose you-r
Reason to Save your Soul fell upon Christendom
like a rinderpest. The memory and inspiration of
the Man of Sorrows was again to lay the load of
a great sorrow upon the shoulders of the world.
Once more, as, under the preaching of Bernhardt
and Peter the Hermit, rowdy and rascal, swash
buckler and sword-player, blackguard and blackleg,
worked themselves into a frenzy concerning one
Jesus, whose name has always been a spell-word
with miscreants from the time of the Christian cut
throats mentioned by Tacitus down to Booth’s latest
prize, the “ blood-washed soul ” of ’Arry Juggins
the burglar.
Two by two the holy ones of the whip-lash
marched through the gaping multitudes on the
crowded streets. Their heads wTere covered with
sackcloth ; their remaining article of attire was a
bandage round the loins, which rendered them a
little decent for God’s sake. Their backs and breasts
were entirely nude. The back bore a huge cross,
daubed upon J&B skin with red paint ; and another
cross was smeared upon the naked breast. On
through the town, and through the wilderness, in
long and narrow file, like the march of the ducks
from the dub to the dung-hill, marched those nasty
saints of God. The hand of each sacred fanatic
bore a heaw and horrible whip, the thongs tipped
with iron ; and, with this whip, every pious madman
lashed his own bare back till the thongs were clotted
and gory, and long lines of blood running down
�4
The Flagellants.
from the scapula to the pelvis defaced the red cross
which had been painted on the skin.
To what shall we liken the men of that genera
tion? To a crazy dog, refusing its food and chew
ing off its own hind legs to please its master. But
the analogy is imperfect, and the man flogging his
own back to please his Jesus is more irrational than
the dog chewing off his own hind legs to please his
master ; for the dog is positively sure he has a
master ; but the ablest Christian that has ever writ
ten has not been able to establish that his Jesus
really ever existed. The only record of him is in
four so-called “ Gospels,” written by nobodv knows
who, nobody knows where, and nobody knows when,,
and the statements of which are contradicted by
each other and are utterly unsupported by history.
A pretty source, indeed, from which to derive a
Jesus in whose honour you can flog your back 1
But backs always will be flogged, and noses ever
will be held close to the grindstone, till he with
the back and he with the nose takes the trouble to
cultivate his brain, and dares to confront, eagleeyed, the authorities that would make him a chattel
and a poor mad cats-paw in the hands of priest
and tyrant.
Jehovah has ever liked singing and dancing and
capers to his glory and honour. David, the “ man
according to God’s own heart,” danced naked be
fore deity and certain young girls ; and another
worthy sang to God’s glory with acceptance because
Jael had hammered a nail into her guest’s head
while he slept. So the Flagellants, besides tickling
their own backs with whips, deemed it would be
well to tickle Jehovah’s ears with music. Accord
ingly they sang while they flogged. If vou think
flogging your back is conducive to making you
rival the efforts of Sims Reeves, just try the ex
periment. Flog your back while you sing, and you
will find-that many a quaver flies off into a scream,
and that many a crotchet is dead-born. But the
Lord had just to content himself with such music
as- was obtainable under the circumstances. Cer
tain fragments of the hymns which the Flagellants
sang have been preserved. Here are brief speci
mens
�The Flagellants.
5
“Through love of man the Saviour came,
Through love of man he died ;
He suffered want, reproach, and shame,
Was scourged and crucified.
Oh, think, then, on thy Saviour’s pain,
And lash the sinner, lash again ! ” *
The following are a few lines from the metrical
rendering' into English of “ The Ancient Song of
the Flagellants ” :—
“Tears from our sorrowing eyes we weep,
Therefore so firm our faith we keep
With all our hearts, with all our senses :
Christ bore his cross for our offences.
Ply well the scourge, for Jesu’s sake,
And God, through Christ, your sin will take.
For love cf God abandon sin—
To mend your vicious lives begin ;
So shall we his mercy win.” t
Thirty-three days and a-half was the shortest term
in which a Flagellant must macerate and lacerate
himself ; and these thirty-three and a-half days were
meant to be mystically symbolical of the thirty-three
years and a-half which the third part of God, and
yet equal to the "whole of God, had lived on earth
4‘saving souls” and making three-legged stools,
lhe devotees fell down on their dirty knees in the
dirty streets, and, setting up their naked, putrid,
and horrible backs, prayed to Jah and Jesus and
Mary to have mercy on their souls, before having
taken the trouble to find out whether they had souls
or not. Jah and Jesus and Mary had, however,
something else to do than attend to kneeling lunatics
with voices like cross-cut saws and backs like half
cooked beef-steaks. But the cities, then as now,
had plenty of fools, and certain of them rushed out
at their doors or leapt from their windows for God’s
sake to join the ranks of those who lashed their
hurdies with thongs and prayed with their knees
in the gutter. When all Christendom had managed
to lash its back to its own satisfaction, it threw
down the whip, got up from its knees, and took
to swearing and sinning in the usual way.
But, some fifty years afterwards, Christendom
again took it into its head that its back would be
* Preserved by L’Evesque : quoted by Lingard.
t Dr. He:ker.
�6
The Flagelleiits.
all the better for a flogging. So, in 1296, the saints,
particularly those of Strasburg, Spires, and Frank
fort, took unto themselves whips, and began busi
ness in earnest. The Jews had good broad backs,
which they were impious enough never to whip,
and this mightily offended the Christian Flagellants.
The Jews did not see their way to whip their own
backs, so, in the most obliging manner, the Chris
tians offered to whip them for them. The Jews
preferred to look after their commercial enterprises
to tearing away with a scourge at their own dorsal
rafters ; and, for this deadly sin, they were foully
massacred. The wretches who did not scourge their
backs had scourged the third of deity and crucified
him. Down with them to Tophet! One Jew,
goaded to desperation by Christian persecution and
outrage, set fire to the Town Hall and the Cathedral
of Frankfort, and they were reduced to ashes. Down
with the seed of Iscariot and Barabbas ! The holy
ones flung away their whips, and, seizing sword,
hatchet, and knife, devoted some hours of horror
to the slaughter of man, woman, and child of the
seed of Israel. The God of Jacob looked on ; but,
apparently, did not see his way to interfere. In
Frankfort, of all the sons and daughters of Salem
whose ancestors had sung to the Lord by the streams
of Babel, none remained alive, except a small rem
nant that, bursting through the carnage, had
escaped into Bohemia. Christ had “ redeemed ”
these Christians (they were well worth it) by a
bloody sacrifice upon Calvary, and, out of com
pliment—like Catherine Medici in her sanguinous
bath—they set him in blood to the chin. Every
tree must be judged by its fruit. I hereby defy the
history of all the other faiths to produce a tree like
the Christian one, which, from the deepest root to
the topmost twig, is dyed with human gore.
After the Frankfort tragedy of 1296, Flagellantism
did not rear its head conspicuously till the year 1348.
To students of history the mention of this date re
calls the deepest and widest grave that was ever
dug to receive the slag and refuse of morality. The
“ Black Death ” took into her hands the besom
of destruction, and swept into the sepulchre twentyfive millions of human beings ! Europe fell upon
�The Flagellants.
7
her knees, and from Dirt appealed to Deity. But
the appeal was in vain. In every Christian city
there was a plethora of disgusting sewage and un
speakable stench. Cleanliness is, proverbially, next
to godliness ; but the citizens of mediaeval Europe
were so godly that they forgot to be cleanly. Out
side Mohammedan Constantinople there was not a
bath on the entire European continent, from the
Straits of Behring to the Straits of Messina. Pious
Ignorance and theological Intolerance sat to the
eyes in filth, which it would give my readers the
jaundice to describe ; and mankind perished as do
clouds of locusts when overtaken by a gale at sea,
or as perish at the end of autumn tens of thousands
of hives of bees, when imprisoned amid the fumes
I
of burning brimstone.
“ God in heaven, Mary and all the Saints, what
is the matter now? ” gasped Christendom, as, with
pale lips and phrenized eye, she, in whole cityfuls,
-staggered into the grave. Nothing practical, as
connected with this wretched “Vale of Tears,’’
suggested itself to the follower of Jesus. He was
beyond and above attending to the carnal conditions
of this despicable earth, and from the midst of his
priests and relics and shrines and miracles his whole
hope was in heaven, and his only court of appeal
his “ Maker and Redeemer.’’ But neither Maker
nor Redeemer could be induced to interfere ; and
graves were dug till there were none left to dig
them, and corpses were borne out of the streets
and houses till there were none left to bear them.
There were only the voice of prayer, the cry of pain,
and the rattle of the death-cart ; and in certain dis
tricts even these sounds died away. In the houses
the dead were left with the dead. There lay a dis
used cart and a skeleton horse. Grass and weeds
flourished in the streets where a busy traffic had
— rolled its tides, and there the wind waved ghastly
shreds of human apparel, still adhering to more
ghastly relics of human beings. There was high
carnival for maggot and fly, and dogs and swine
tugged and snarled among the entrails of those who
bad trusted in Jesus and neglected their dust-bins.
The New Testament was looked to as the anti
dote to the bane ; and, whatever may be its merits,
�8
' -
The Flagellants.
it is a poor manual of hygiene. Scrubbing is never
mentioned, and there is no reference to washing,
except to the washing of “ souls,” whatever they
may be, in blood. There is, moreover, allusion to
the washing- of a certain party’s feet with tears,
and then drying them with maiden’s hair ; but this
is a sentimental and not an efficacious lavation. It
is not on record that Mary or Tabitha, or anyone
else, ever washed the shirt or tunica which was
worn under the seamless garment of Jesus, and I
question if it was ever washed or changed from
the day on which he left the carpenter’s bench till
the day that, with his life, he expiated his sedition
and folly. Through all the horror of the Black
Death we hear of no wholesome and honest wash
ing with water ; but there certainly was a washing
of the streets with blood. It was surmised that
tlris visitation of the wrath of Heaven was instigated
by the sinfulness of the Christians in allowing the
Jews to live ; for it was the Jews who had crucified
the Lord ; and yet, according to the Christian theory,
if the Lord had not been crucified, the world would
inevitably have been lost. The Black Death was
accompanied with another merciless massacre of the
Jews. It was also accompanied by another pitiless
flogging of backs. So fanatically wild did this selfinflicted back-flogging become that many held that
the rite of Flagellation should, in the Christian
Church, supersede the rite of Baptism. Many liter
ally flogged away the flesh off their bones, and yet
the plague did not abate ; and the sky and the earth
were pregnant with supernatural terrors. A pillar
of fire hung over the pope’s palace at Avignon ;
a red ball of fire in the heavens blazed over Paris,
and Greece and Italy were shaken with an earth
quake. And the Christians flogged and prayed, and
prayed and flogged, and sang and slew, and slew
and sang, and still the plague went on.
Flageliantism was not without its serio-comic as
pect. I cannot say whether it copied from the game
of Leap-the-Frog, or whether Leap-the-Frog has
copied from it. In Leap-the-Frog each boy vaults
over his neighbour’s bended back, and then bends
his own, and so on the process goes till each has
vaulted over the back of all. The Flagellants lay
!
/
|
�The Flagellants.
9
in rows, and one ran along the row scourging
furiously as he went with a leathern scourge tipped
with iron, and then he lay down ; and so on and
so on, till each had flogged the naked backs of all.
In lying in the rows to be flogged, however, those
who wished to do penance for certain crimes had
to observe certain recognized postures indicative of
these crimes. If the crime was perjury, till it was
his turn to get up and flog, the penitent lay on his
side, holding up three fingers ; if it was adultery,
he lay flat with his face on the ground ; and so on,
different postures of the body were fixed upon to
indicate different crimes. The Flagellants, too, were
not without their grotesque impostures in the shape
of pious forgeries. At one of their assemblies they
actually read a letter which had been sent to them
direct from heaven, and in which Jesus Christ was
good enough to give them his favourable opinion of
the efficacy of flagellation. The “ Blessed Virgin ”
had, with maternal affection, given her son some
assistance in the composition of this celestial missive.
Unlike the Millenarian mania, the Flagellant craze
•extended even to England. In 1351 a deputation
of 120 continental Flagellants visited London ; but
insular stolidity did not see its way to carry its piety
to the extent of lacerating its own flesh with
scourges. Even on the continent the irenzy began
to exhaust itself. The leaders betook themselves to
desperate resources to buttress up a falling cause.
They set themselves to the task of restoring life
to a dead child, and performed the “ miracle ” so
clumsily that the performance hastened their dis
solution instead of giving them a new lease of in
fluence. In the hey-day of their fanaticism neither
king nor pontiff saw it prudent to interlere with
the Flagellants ; but when the tide turned against
them, king and pontiff turned against them too. . A
bitter persecution set in, and Flagellantism, like
most other isms, was called upon to furnish its roll
•of martyrs, and it heroically enough responded to
the' call. Its dying spasm—and it was a vigorous
and terrible one—was in 1414, and some time later
it finally expired in the dungeons and amid the
fagots of the Holy Inquisition. Mankind, in the
mass, continue to be fools ; but, in the last four
�10
2 he Couenanteis.
centuries, there has been some small advance to
wards sanity, and it is now somewhat difficult toget anyone to flog his own back for the love of God.
W. S. R.
THE COVENANTERS.
MONDAY, October 27th, 1884.
The House met at tour o’clock.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.
Answering Mr. Buchanan, the Marquis of Hartington said hehad communicated with Loid Wolseley as to the employment of a
greater number of Presbyterian chaplains with the Scottish regi
ments under his charge, adding that one at present at Alexandria
would be available, if his services were required.
Alas, that the world has not yet dispensed with'
the services of Presbyterian Beetles of god and gun I
I myself ran such a narrow escape of being a Scotch.
Beetle that this project of employing the ScarabceusScotorum in Egypt brings up to my memory sundry
of the bloodthirsty insects’ previous ravages scrolled,
over history’s panoramic canvas, and that in pig
ments of blackness and fire.
There, with hign cheek-bones and scowling browsr
with black gowns and Geneva bands, file past thedour and grim fanatics who barred the path of
Charles I., and of Laud, Juxon, and Wren. There
go they who, lor twenty-eight years, through steel!
and blood and heather, set their backs against thewall of Fate, and practically swore to lead Scotland
to Hell, rather than to Rome.
History has a pretty feasible hint that the shower
of clasp-Bibles that, on July 23rd, 1637, rained so>
murderously round the head of Dean Hanna, in
St. Giles’s Church, were flung by Scottish ministers,,
dressed in female gowns and mutches, and that
their pulpit-trained voices initiated the popular yell
of “Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ! A Pope! A Pope!
A Bellv-god ! Stone him ! ” It was the fanatical"
and hard-headed Presbyterian Beetles who, by their
wild biblically-phrased warnings, roused the Scottish
�The Covenanters.
11
peers to a vivid apprehension that, if Charles and’
Laud succeeded, the estates which had been con
fiscated from the Church at the Reformation would7
be .wrenched from the nobles and restored to Rome.
This was a potent argument ; for, whatever might
be the territorial lord’s desire for a place in the
kingdom of heaven, he would fight and sing psalms
for twenty years rather than lose a single acre of
his lands in the kingdom of Scotland. And thus
there was almost instantly arrayed ag-ainst the
Government a black phalanx of ninety Beetles,
walled round by John, Earl of Rothes ; John, Earl
of Cassilis ; Alexander, Earl of Eglington ; James,
Earl of Biome ; William, Earl of Lothian ; John,
Earl of Wemyss ; and John, Earl of Loudon ; Lord
Lindesay, Lord Yester, Lord Balmerino, Lord
Cranston, and large numbers of the gentry and
lesser nobility. These, of course, led with them
the psalm-singing yokels of their estates, primed
up by the Beetles to a perfect phrenzy of religious
fanaticism, which could not fail to be exceedingly
profitable to their lords and masters. There is no
patriotism in denying that Scotland’s desperate
struggle in the seventeenth century was carried out
bv the immoral instrumentality of Beetle and nobleprimed bumbkins, howling from Jeremiah and cant
ing from Ezekiel, grimly frantic with suffering and
fanaticism, who, singing psalms, mutilated the slain,
and dashed their texts and swords at the same time
through .the bodies of the dragoons of the Govern
ment. Scotland did all this drunk with divinity,
and I should respect her quite as much if she had
done it all drunk with whisky. And yet I should’
like to see the land in the whole world that can
afford to scoff at her. Man, up to this time, has
been a small and nasty animal at the best, and what
are magniloquently called his noblest motives will
not bear anything like rigid analysis. You are
kinder to mankind when you expect too little of
them, than when you expect too much. And it will.'
puzzle your ingenuity to expect less than you will
get.
1 The passage in Genesis, anent God’s making all
things very good, would have stood better on its
legs, if it had read, 4 God made all thing's verv good
�12
The Covenanters.
save man, and him he made mad.” It is teleology
alone that makes man madder than his “ earth-born
companions and fellow-mortals. ” Well might Burnsapostrophise the mouse :—
“ Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me :
The Present only toucheth thee ;
But, ah ! I backward cast my e’e
On prospects drear ;
And, forward though I canna see,
I guess and fear,”
It is all very well for writers of the school of Dr.
Lewins to abjure, teleology absolutely. It rises
superior to abjuration. The speculatively religious
instinct is strong in normal man, and I, for one,
rejoice, rather than lament that it is so. It is not
the religious instinct that has stultified and cursed
the race, but the diversion of that instinct into
baleful channels by interested sacerdotal and civil
chicane. Man has too little religion, rather than
too much ; but he has certainly too much theology
rather than too little.
"
fc' ’
But, back to the Black-Beetles of the Presbyterian
corner of the vineyard of the Lord. So well did
the interested leaven of religious sedition work, that
in June, 1638, the Hig’h Commissioner swaggered
up to Holyrood escorted by 20,000 men, most of
them mounted. There were present, moreover, 700
Beetles, the most sour and grim kind that ever
banged a bible for the love of God. Many of them
had buff coats under their Geneva cloaks, and,
according, to Burnet, many wore in their belts
swords, pistols, and daggers, that, for the love of
heaven, they might redden the earth with blood.
Madly Beetle-bitten, the peasantry flew to arms ;
every Beetle-box in the country breathed of fire and
slaughter ; the crackle of musketry was in every
sermon, the roar of cannon in every prayer ; the
sword-blade was sharpened on the pulpit, and the
kirk became a recruiting-ground for the battlefield.
We have now cast down the walls of Jericho ;
let him who rebuildeth them beware of the curse
of Hiel and Bethelite, ” was the refrain of a Tyrteeaa
sermon by Henderson, of Leuchars. Beetles Musfiet,
Row, Cant, Dickson, and a mighty host of mur
derous piety, took up the cry. It was thundered
■from hundreds of pulpits. The heather was, indeed,
�The Covenanters.
U
on fire. The Beetle struck the Bible with his fist
in the emphasis of bloodthirsty rhetoric, and his
voice found a terrible echo in the ring of the
armourer’s anvil, as the hammer clashed and clanged
upon the red-hot iron that was being fashioned into
bit and stirrup, helmet and sword-blade.
The Lords of the Covenant prepared for war..
Wheresoever the carcase of prey is, there shall the
eagles of militarism be gathered together. Hereto
fore Scotland had proved too stale and pacific to be
a fitting arena for the restless energies of her gentle
men of the sword and swashbuckling fire-eaters,
and they had accordingly poured in thousands from
the banks of the Forth, the Dee, and the Clyde to
the banks of the Elbe, the Oder, and the Danube,
to follow Gustavus Adolphus for gold and glory,
and write their names imperishablv in their blood
in the annals of the Thirty Years’ War, in which
the stubborn valour of the Scottish Legion filled
all Europe with their renown. The Beetles had now
wrung the coin out of the pockets of their frugal
countrymen at home, and their fighting countrymen
abroad rushed back to offer their steel blades and
their blood for the merks of the peasant and the
burgher. The world had no better soldiers than the
Scoto-Swedish officers of Gustavus, among the most
distinguished of whom were Sir Alexander Leslie,
Sir Alexander Hamilton, Sir James Livingstone,
Monroe, Baillie, and other heroes of Prague and
Fleura, and numerous battlefields in Polish Prussia,
Brandenberg, Westphalia, and Silesia. The Beetle,
the ancestor of him now wanted in Egypt, had done
it with a veng-eance. Every -fourth man in Scotland
was to consider himself a soldier. The sword of
the Lord and of Gideon ! The land was as busy as
a beehive declaiming sermons, whining prayers,
drawling psalms, and getting ready arms and muni
tions—bodv armour for the cavalry, buff-coats and
morions for pikemen, and muskets with rests for
the musketeers. A cannon foundry was, moreover,
established at the Potter Row, Edinburgh, under
the direction of Sir Alexander Hamilton, formerly
master of the cannon foundries of Gustavus
Adolphus at Urbowe, in Sweden. And all Beetledom was up on end, and raving to Jehovah to hurl
�14
*
The Covenanters.
• down the curse of Meroz upon those who failed
to gird up their loins and go forth to help the Lord
.against the mighty.
The old legend-book of Judah was clasped to the
very heart of Scotland. Its bloodiest and most ter
rible texts were interwoven with the common par
lance of mundane affairs, and preached from with
a wild and volcanic vehemence. “ And I will feed
them that oppress thee with their own flesh ; and
they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with
sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I, the
Lord, am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty
one of Jacob.” ‘‘The Lord hath a sacrifice in
Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of
Idumea.” “ Cursed be he who keepeth back his
sword from blood.” “ Thus saith the Lord God cf
Israel : Put every man his sword by his side, and
go in and out, from gate to gate, throughout the
camp, and slay every man his brother, and every
man his companion, and every man his neighbour.”
These were the sort of bases of Beetle-spun
harangues that scared the pee-wheet and the plover
-of the hills and moors. “ Now go and smite Amalek,
and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare
them not ; but slay both man and woman, infant
and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. And
Saul gathered the people together, and numbered
them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen,
and ten thousand men of Judah. And the Lord sent
thee on a journey, and said : Go and utterly destroy
the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them
until they be consumed,” was the fearful text from
which a certain Beetle of Hell preached, and incited
the Covenanters to, after the Battle of Philiphaugh,
enclose the defeated musketeers of Montrose in the
-courtyard of Newark Castle, and pour in volley
after volley of shot upon the defenceless and un
resisting mass, till not a man remained standing ;
and the gunpowder smoke cleared away and left the
court covered with blood and brains like the floor
of a slaughter-house, and the air rent with the
shrieks of those to whom Death had not yet come
in mercy to end their agony. After this holy
massacre, 1,000 corpses were interred in a spot
which to this day bears the shuddering- name of
�The Covenanters.
15
'The Slain Man's Lea. And so much did the
Presbyterian Beetles insist upon the curses that
-would overtake those who spared the A malekites,
the enemies of God, and so terribly did they em
phasise “ man and woman, infant and suckling,”
that the swords of the Covenant ripped open the
■bodies of the women with child, and transfixed the
unborn babe with the blade reeking with the blood
-of its mangled mother, that the Scripture might
*
be fulfilled.
So much for the antecedents of the Presbyterian
Beetles Mr. Buchanan inquires about so kindly, and
in regard to whom the Marquis of Hartington replies
that there is a spare one to be had at Alexandria.
Even now, it would seem, Scottish soldiers do not
feel they can slaughter properly for the Lord unless
they are under the beetlefications of an Ephraim
MacBriar or a Gabriel Kettledrummle !
How long, O Lord, how long, will it be accounted
glorious to drill a bayonet through a diaphragm,
and valorous to lodge a leaden pellet in the medulla
•oblongata? No religion whatever can be true whose
God is the God of Battles, and whose priests officiate
in the sanctification of slaughter. O that there were
.a righteous heaven, and that man’s objective Para•dise was correlative with man’s subjective desire I
Then would I call to this heaven to witness that
the torn banners and emblazoned rags of war are
hung up as trophies in the Christian churches and
^cathedrals—the relics and memorials of wounds and
misery and hate and death in the temples of “ the
Prince of Peace ” ! I have sat in a certain cathedral
and listened to the Gospel of goodwill to all man
kind, although, at the entrance, I had to pass dusty,
torn, and ghastly relics of some of the bloodiest
-engagements in India and the Peninsula. I yearn
for the religion that will account State murder and
■private murder alike unhallowed, and which will find
no room in its fanes for bannered rags in memorial
of burning towns, slaughtered men, shrieking
widows, and breadless orphans, more than for the
gory knives which were wielded by the miscreants
and murderers whose infamy is perpetuated in the
'Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.
*
W. S. R.
Gordon of Ruthven.
�NEW EDITION.
'
•
380 pp, cloth, gold lettered. Price 3s.; post free, 3s. 3d;
GOD-AND HIS BOOK.
By SALADIN.
Ix Two Volumes Complete.
New Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt lettered.
Vol. I., 260 pp. Price 2s. 6d. ; post free, 2s. gd.
Vol. II., 268 pp. Price 2s. 6d. 5 post free, 2s. 9d.
WOMAN :
Her Glory, Her Shame, and Her God.
By SALADIN.
Large Crown Svo, cloth, gold lettered, 265 pp.
Piice 3-.; post free, 3s. 3d.
THE
BOOK OF “AT RANDOM.”
By SALADIN.
Catalogue of Recent Works by Saladin free on application.
London: Il. Stewart & Co, $r, Farringdon St, E.C.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The Flagellants and the Covenanters
Creator
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: The Flagellants (p.[2]-10).--The Covenanters (p.10-15). The Covenanters is a new edition. Publisher's advertisements on back cover Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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W. Stewart & Co.
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[188-?]
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N587
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Religious practice
Protestantism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Flagellants and the Covenanters), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Covenanters
Flagellants
Flagellation
NSS
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Text
By One who Endured It.
BASED UPON A MS. IN THE POSSESSION OF
LONDON:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON STREET, E.C.
�I
1
89WAR1998 J
—i rm 0ffH.WlT1
IMr-v^»r'i**wninr*u)i/y^jCW<-yt >4^. r
RM
�i 3^ ;
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
A week or two ago, commenting on an exceedingly
polite and urbane letter addressed to me by Julia Hey
wood, nee Fraser, I hinted that I had more MSS. in the
strong and distinctive handwriting of her late father, and
that her provoking courtesy and politeness might tempt
me to publish them. I had hoped to be able to silently
recede from my minatory hint, and leave the soft-spoken
wife of the Rev. Mr. Heywood undisturbed by further
posthumous publication of her father’s MSS. I felt
somewhat regretful at having published “The Agonies
of Hanging” memoir of Major F------, and, in the
interests of peace and amicability, I said to myself:
“Poor Julia! in memory of young and happy days of
auld lang syne, I cannot vex her. When I was a
chubby-cheeked and callow boy, trudging to school with
my leathern satchel on my back, she was to me an elder
sister. When from boyhood I developed into a senti
mental, romantic, dreamy, and erratic lad, and left my
old haunts for roaring Glasgow and its then dingy uni
versity in High Street, it was unmistakeable that she
regarded me in a light more chivalrously tender than
that in which sisters regard their brothers. And—shall
I admit it ?—when in Glasgow I wrote her letters which
I should not be ashamed of even now, should she elect
to disentomb and publish them. Well I know that,
should she give them publicity, my readers would have
many a joke, numerous sneers, and not a few laughs at
�4
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
my expense; but I have got accustomed to being:
sneered at and innured to being laughed at, and the
reading at this mature date of the letters which, in my
burning adolescence, I addressed to Julia Fraser would
irradiate with the glow of boyhood my now murky sky,
awake the dormant throb of passion in my callous heart,
scatter my now barren path with the roses and honey
suckles I was wont to twine in her hair, and fling over
the thought-worn brow of middle life the romantic halo
of love’s young dream. But most likely Julia consigned
my letters to the fire many years ago. Letters signed
‘Heavenly Julia, Yours eternally, W. Stewart Ross,’
are not letters which a clergyman’s wife would be likely
to retain and cherish. I have taken some pains that •
fK Stewart Ross should be a name that clergymen
should have little reason to love. No doubt the wife of
the Rev. Mr. Heywood has destroyed my letters. Poor
Julia ! Many a time, over the midnight and post-mid
night gas, her dear idea and her poetic vision visited me
in my student’s lonely room. Her face peered out from
between the rolling lines of Homer ■ and even sines and
cosines, the processes of surds and the mysteries of the
calculus, were not strangers to the flutter of her skirts
and the perfume and flashing radiance of her hair.
Then, throwing my books aside, I would lift one of the
slippers she worked for me (I never wore these slippers ;
they were too sacred to be soiled by my study floor) and
kiss it, and—shall I own it?—bedew it with the tears of
a poetic, ardent, and impetuous boy. Julia, I am sorry
I published that scrap from your father’s writings. I
will publish no more !”
The above was my soliloquy on Monday evening last
as I sat with my elbows on my desk, burying my face in
my hands. My brain was full of old and tender
memories, my heart replete with unwonted emotions,
when my reverie was rudely broken by the sharp metallic
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
5
■clack-clack ! which announces that the postman is at
the door, and that letters are falling into the letter-box
—letters of praise and letters of blame—to the earnest
if erring man who writes over the name of Saladin.
The servant brought up the letters on a tray. There
was one that at once arrested my eye. It was in the, to
me, never-to-be-forgotten handwriting of Julia. I tore it
open and read it. It will be found reproduced in
another page. Rightly or wrongly, I cried “ Damn!”
*
struck my fist violently on the desk, and resolved to
place before the public more of her father’s MSS. I am
•to be led, but I am not to be driven; I will brook to be
advised, but I will not submit to be defied by either
man or woman. I reproduce “ The Thrashing Machine ”
in defiance of the parson’s horsewhip, the menace in
regard to the criminal court, and the fate of them who
joined in the gainsaying of Kor.
The MS., a printed copy of which I am about to
subjoin, was, along with a large bundle of others, for
warded to me by Julia herself. The messengerf who
carried the package is still alive'. I asked him to my
hotel last time I was in the North, and had a talk with
him about old times. I, moreover, still possess the note
Julia sent along with the packet. Since she went so far
as to suggest that I stole the MS. I formerly published, I
shall take ample care that she shall .not be able to allege
that I stole this one. In self-defence, I feel compelled
to publish the letter which accompanied the package :—Dunder Hall, Tuesday evening.
Beloved Ross,I—Herewith receive, by the hands of Andrew, a
bundle of Dad’s scribbles. He was a daft man, and you are a daft
lad (but a dear, dear ducky all the same !), and let us hope that the
* See Appendix.
+ Andrew Edgar.
t She always called me Ross. I objected to being called Willie.
It had been the name borne by a previous lover of hers.
�6
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
daft darling will understand the daft Dad. Do whatever you like
with the scribbles. Dad used nasty blue paper, and browned it all
over with whiskey and snuff, or I should have used the whole clam*
jawphery to put my hair in curls. You can light the school fire
with them or light the world with them, whichever way you please.
The Irvings have got a gig. I have finished Grant’s “ Harry
Ogilvie.” Glorious 1 The hair-comb ran a long way into my
head : it was too bad of you. The ode is splendour (sic)—better
than that you wrote to pale-faced Agg ; but the fifth line won’t fit
the piano—nearly breaks it. Put that line right, like a dear.
Caught cold sitting on that damp stone, although you put your
handkerchief on it. Friday—old place—old time. It wil be
eternity till then. Don’t bring again that devil of a dirty dog.
Kisses when we meet. Don’t forget your .great coat and your
strong boots. With sincerest love, from everlasting to everlasting,
I am, beloved Ross,
Yours,
Julia.
MAJOR F----- ’j MS.
Ever since my boyhood I have busied myself in
humanitarian pursuits. Even when I was a little fellow
in the sixth form I went out one evening and saw two
broad-haunched, broad-shouldered, rosy-faced, yellow
haired, spanking huzzies driving home the cows of a
neighbouring farmer. They were the very sort of lassies
who had borne sons for Bannockburn. Either of them
could have taken the ordinary Cockney clerk and bent
him over her knee as easily as a Cockney clerk would
bend a hazel wand. On went the cows before and the
girls behind. The former lowed as they had done in
Bashan or Arcadia three thousand years before, and the
latter sang—sang as the angels sang when the world was
newly born, and before singing-masters, or even crotchets
and quavers, had yet been invented. The Ettrick Shep
herd’s songs had just begun to take root in his native
* A wrongly-spelt word of Northern etymology, ancl with little
or no meaning.
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
7
land, and it was one of his songs that his two country
women sang as, with loose hair and swinging step, and
their petticoats kilted to their knees, they strode up the
loaning behind the cows :—
“ ’Tis not beneath the burgonet,
Nor yet beneath the crown ;
’Tis not on couch of velvet,
Nor yet on bed of down ;
It is beneath the spreading birk,
In the glen without a name,
Wi’ a bonnie, bonnie lassie,
When the kye come hame.
What is the greatest bliss
That the tongue o’ man can name ?
’Tis to woo a bonnie lassie
When the kye come hame. ”
I am not sure but it was on that occasion I first fell in
love. The odorous breath of the cows, the fragrance
which the zephyr wafted from the valley below where the
bean was in bloom, the solemn hush of the twilight
hour, and that idyllic song of the milk-maids warmed me
and charmed me till I wandered far away from the school
to the byre into which the cows and the lassies dis
appeared. I, too, went into the byre, the lassies taking
little notice of me, doubtless thinking me too young to
engage their serious attention in any way.
“Jenny,” at last faltered T timidly to the lassie that
had charmed me most; “Jenny, I love you;” and, in
the words of the refrain of a song that ran in my head,
and will you “ meet me by moonlight alone ?”
Jenny set down her milk-pail from her lap, and, fling
ing back her wealth of unkempt hair, looked up at me
with her beaming, healthy, happy, and innocent face,
and said, with a bewitching smile, “Yes, little boy, I
will meet you; but who is to milk the cows ? If you
can invent something to milk the cows, I will meet you.”
“ Thank you, dear Jenny,” said I; and I timidly
�8
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
kissed the upturned face of the milk-maid. “ I will not,
Jenny,” quoth I, waving my hand in adieu; “ I will not
return till I have invented something to milk the cows
while we are gone.”
With the vague uneasiness of premature love, I
wandered back through the dewy grass and through the
bean fields, and arrived at the school too late for evening
prayers, but not too late to receive a sound thrashing
for being absent without leave. I was packed off to bed
sobbing and supperless, and lay nearly all night awake
thinking about Jenny, and planning the invention for
milking the cows while she should “ meet me by moon
light alone.” All next day I had a practice sum on the
one side of my slate and plans for a milking-machine on
the other. Whenever an usher came near I pretended
to be working at the practice sum; but I was really
engaged upon the milking-machine. At the end of
three days I had struck upon a plan which I felt sure
would work. All that was now wanted was to get the
proper materials together, and the little box of tools
which my father had put into my school trunk, guided by
my mechanical ingenuity, would do the rest. My father
had always believed me to be possessed of mechanical
talent. I was now developing that talent in a direction
he little dreamt of, and for a purpose of which I could
hardly venture to hope he would approve. All I needed
by way of material was some pieces of wood, an indiarubber tube, a piece of rope, a penny-worth of tin-tacks,
and seven stripes of leather. During the play-hours,
extending over a week, I hid myself in a deserted barn
and constructed my machine, ever dreaming of yellow
haired Jenny, and humming to myself:—
“ What is the greatest bliss
That the tongue o’ man can name ?
’Tis to woo a bonnie lassie
When the kye come hame,
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
9
When the kye come hame,
When the kye come hame,
’Tis to woo a bonnie lassie
When the kye come hame.”
At length, duly equipped with my milking-machine, I
-strode off to the byre, regardless of discipline and flogging
and extra task and everything sublunary save Jenny. I
felt proud I had suffered for her sake, and I was prepared
to suffer again. I reached the byre, got behind Jenny
who was milking, and triumphantly set down my milkingmachine, which, to tell the truth, looked a queer cross
between a three-legged stool and a sou’-wester, and a
baby-jumper and a sausage-machine. Jenny turned
round and looked at me, and glanced at the machine,
and then held her sides and laughed till the tears ran
down her cheeks. The other milk-maid caught up the
tune and laughed almost as immoderately.
Drawing myself up to my full height, “ Jenny,” said I
sternly, “ I am here in redemption of my promise, and
to demand of you the fulfilment of yours. I guarantee
that this machine will milk the cows, and I claim of you
that you ‘ meet me by moonlight alone.’ ”
“ Great God,” said the other milk-maid, “ the boy is
clean cracked 1”
“ Madam,” rejoined I fiercely, “ I am a gentleman,
and I did not come here to be insulted. This lady
made a vow to me, and by heaven she shall redeem it,
or I shall know why.”
The two milk-maids opened their mouths at me as
well as their eyes, and stared at me in incredulous bewil
derment.
“ Of course, of course,” at length spake Jenny, with an
arch smile; “I will ‘meet you by moonlight alone,’
according to my promise, if you will make that thing
[pointing to the machine] milk the cows while we are
•gone.”
�IO
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
“That/7zz>?£-,” said I with pride and firmness, “will
do the work while we are gone.”
“ Set it to its work, then,” answered Jenny, still with
wild bewilderment on her sun-burnt but honest and
happy countenance.
'‘iThe lady is won” murmured I in triumph; and I
lifted my machine and proceeded to attach it to the
udder of the cow. The animal resisted my attentions,
and seemed to have somewhat set her face against
vaccine innovations. I succeeded, nevertheless, in
attaching the machine to her udder.
“Now!” exclaimed I; and I gave the leather a tug
and the rope a pull, and set in motion the fly-wheel
which I had taken off a disused grindstone. The tug
and the pull and the wheel were more than the cow
could stand—perhaps more than any cow before or
since has been expected to stand. She ventured one
mad stare at myself and the apparatus, and then lashed
out devilishly with her feet. I was lifted clean off the
ground and dashed up against the opposite wall, and the
milk-pail and my most ingenious machine were kicked
to shivers and scattered over and around me. I stag
gered up with a fractured skull and a broken arm, and,
observing the thick milk lying white all around me, I
took it to be the whole of my brains, or mayhap my
immortal soul, scattered over the pavement; and, with a
despairing cry, I fell back insensible.
When I recovered my senses I found myself in my own
bed at school, with my father standing over me. He
had been sent for, and had come more than three hun
dred miles. The doctor was also there, and an old
chrone of a nurse, besides a great number of basins and
bowls and medicine bottles and poultices and jugs with
flowers, and wet towels. When I was sufficiently re
covered to receive it, and when my father was gone,
quite in the interests of the school, I got my ever-
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
II
memorable thrashing, that the discipline of the establish
ment might be vindicated. That thrashing fructified into
incalculable good : it set me to planning and devising
my thrashing machine, the greatest invention since Napier
invented logarithms. It is of this thrashing machine,
God willing, I propose to speak. But I may just mention
that, as regards my first and incipient venture, the milkingmachine, the splinters and fragments of it were picked,
up carefully ; but a piece of leather belonging to it, and
as large as a shoe-sole, was never found—neither were
two of my front teeth. My firm impression is that both
that piece of leather and my two front teeth were knocked
down my throat, and that they remain somewhere inside
my person till the present day. A German surgeon I
once met at Baden-Baden (a Herr Pulvermacher) inclines
to the same opinion. He placed some curious acoustic
contrivance of his own upon my naked back, and, apply
ing his ear to it, assured me that he heard distinctly the
two teeth biting away at the piece of leather. I have a
strange pain in the part, and, on a very quiet night,
when I have had enough whisky, but not too much, I
myself have heard a sound appallingly like the two teeth
biting the leather. But let that pass, and let this serve
as prolegomena to the conception, process, and com
pletion of the triumph of my life, The Thrashing
Machine.
I found I was in for a terrific hammering. It seems
that, in my unconscious state, I had two or three timesevery day risen up in bed and whispered, “Jenny, my
love,” kissed a viewless form, and then sang :—
“ See yonder pawky shepherd
That lingers on the hill ;
His yowes are in the fauld,
And his lambs are lyin’ still ;
But he downa venture hame,
�12
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
For his heart is in a flame
To meet his bonnie lassie
When the kye come hame,
When the kye come hame,
When the kye come hame,
’Tween the gloamin’ and the mirk,
When the kye come hame.”
These recurring outbursts of love and song had, the
surgeon alleged, made me much worse. On one occasion,
as I got enthusiastic in the refrain of my bucolic melody,
it seems I had torn the bandage from my head and flung
it right in the face of Mrs. Fergusson, the principal’s
wife. My wounded scalp bled afresh, and I fell back in
a state of syncope; but Mrs. Fergusson did not stay to
attend to me. One or two drops of blood from the
bandage had lighted upon her face. She rushed out of
the room screaming, and vehemently advised her hus
band, Dr. Fergusson, that I was “ a horrid little pig,” that
I had assaulted her, and that she would not live in the
same establishment with me.
“Thrash,” screamed she; “thrash the insubordinate
and cracked little blockhead, and send him home. He
is not fit to be in the school.”
The Doctor, if he had not had a wife, would not have
been a bad sort of fellow: he was a scholar, a pedant,
but on the whole a gentleman; albeit an act of juvenile
indiscretion on his part had made it necessary for him
to marry a village dressmaker. Dr. Fergusson governed
the school, and this quondam dressmaker governed Dr.
Fergusson.
“ My dear, it shall be done,” said Dr. Fergusson sub
missively, as he wiped away the blood-drops off his wife’s
face with his snuffy handkerchief. “ I agree with you;
he is monstrum nulla virtute redemptum a vitiis. I will
thrash him.”
If the Doctor had not promised “ I will thrash him,”
I strongly suspect he would have got thrashed himself.
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
IS
All the boys remembered the day he came into the
school minus one of his side whiskers. It was no joke
to disobey the impetuous caprices of the quondam
dressmaker who was now Mrs. Fergusson.
In a day or two I was considered well enough to get
thrashed. I was, with shabby solemnity, arraigned
before the entire teaching staff and all the boys in the
school. Mrs. Fergusson sat by her husband’s side, busy
hemming an apron : she surmised that her presence was.
necessary to give him the essential constancy, courage,
and cruelty.
“ Donald Fraser,” began the Doctor sternly, “ you are
unworthy, sir, of the attention of my staff and myself
unworthy of the kindness of your more than mother,
Mrs. Fergusson [here the lady referred to laid down her
seam, took off her spectacles, and wiped her eyes]
unworthy of the young gentlemen who have been pol
luted by being doomed to associate with you ; unworthy,,
sir, of these benches ; unworthy of this ancient academy,
which has been the alma mater of many who have sub
sequently been ornaments to the Army, the Church, and
the Law. [Here Mrs. Fergusson beat the floor with her
heel by way of applause; and all the boys, with the
single exception of myself, battered the boards with
their feet, and hurrahed, and kicked up such a cloud of
dust that, in my weak state, I felt choking and faint.]
It is not for your sake, Fraser, that I put myself to the
trouble of administering a flagellation. Before me lies
a task, not a pleasure. Virtute non armis fido. Your
offence has been inexpressibly flagrant. Twice you have
been absent without leave—absent for a purpose which
I would describe as diabolical if it were not that I have
an impression that you are of unsound mind. You
were found in a cow-house four miles away, lying in a
cataplasm of cow’s milk and fool’s blood, the staves of a
broken milk-pail, and the shivered fragments of an idiotic.
�14
A FEVRm. FLOGGING.
contrivance of yours. In the name of omnipotent God,
sir, what were you doing there ? How, sir, did you dare
to drag the reputation of this ancient seat of learning
over the filthy floor of a cow-house ? How, sir, did you
come to exchange expressions of precocious amativeness
with an unlettered woman of the people? No boy who
has the privilege to attend a seat of learning like this,
august with the classic memories of nearly half a cen
tury, but should sing from the bottom of his heart the
noble ode which opens, Odi prefanum ntlgvs, ef arceo.
Even with the oldest of you it is time enough to think
of ladies: but, when the time comes, look only and
alone to a lady bred and a lady bom [here Mrs. Fcrgusson primmed her mouth, straightened her hards,
perked back her head, and posed as " a lady bred and
a lady bom
and speak to no other woman wha-ever,
unless it be to command her to wash vour shirr or
blacken your boots.”
“ Hear, hear F cried Mrs. Ferguson.
“But,” continued the Doctor, “you have actually
gone and compromised me and the school and vour
family and yomselt, by precocious advances to a miser
able plebeian of the feminine gender. In your delitiirm
you spoke of Jenny. Jenny is not such a mnv as
should be in die mouth of any youth who has walked
through the classic groves of this establishment. sir.
Phyllis, or Chloris. or Calpumia, or Clytemnesma. are
such names as alone should escape your Kps. yborr
is vulgarity and desecration. [ His own wife's name was
Mary Ann.] Then, sir, you kept humming a ditcv
wrirten by a shepherd, and fit only for plcueh-bovs.
‘ To wee a txxutie ssssae
When the kye cosrse tiirae'—
provincial crtveh sir. with which you have polluted vour
mouth and contaminated the atmosnhere of this classic
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
15
• establishment. Your stripes, sir, which shall be many,
would have been few if, in your delirium, you had
sung:—‘ Supprime jam I'aerymas, non est revocabilis istis,
Quern semel umbrifera navita lintre tulit. ’
Sir, you shall be beaten with many stripes in vindication
of the outraged reputation of this seat of learning, and
then you will be forever and ignominiously expelled, a
mensa et thoro. Divest yourself of the garment that
■envelopes the part of your somatic entity upon which,
from time immemorial, flagellation has been conven
tionally laid.”
At this point Mrs. Fergusson pretended to turn her
eyes away, and many of the smaller boys began to sob
audibly, for an expulsion flogging at Angel Turret in
the good old days was something you would carry the
memory, and perhaps the marks, of to your grave. I
let the curtain fait over the sickening details of how I
was stripped, strapped, and flogged till I fainted ; and
how, next morning, I was stuffed inside the school
master’s lumbering carriage, my boxes being on the top,
and driven to the mail coach, that I might be despatched
en route for home.
My father was neither to hold nor to bind. He took
me into the library, and examined my stripes carefully
with a candle, muttering strange oaths as each blue weal,
red line, or yellow star revealed itself to his indignant
scrutiny. He rushed out to the stables and instructed
the coachman to get ready the carriage at once. My
mother met him in the hall, and asked anxiously, “Where
are you going, dear ? Whatever is the matter ?”
“ Going 1” rejoined he, angrily ; “ do you know that
that snuffy old rascal at Angel Turret—the Devil’s Turret
they should call it—has all but murdered your boy ? I
start to-night to punch his infernal old head. I’ll teach
the pedantic old compound of snuff and Latin and
�i6
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
barbarity what it is to print the American flag with a
stick upon the foundation of any boy of mine. I’ll twist
the truculent old savage’s neck for him.”
“No, you won’t,” said my mother; “you won’t do
anything of the kind and she placed her arm in his
and endeavoured to lead him back to the dining room,
for she was well aware that, if he were permitted to visit
I)r. Fergusson, he would be likely, by his choleric temper
and heavy hand, to get himself into serious if not in
superable difficulties.
“ Come with me,” she murmured persuasively, gently
drawing him in the direction of the dining room. But
he was in an ungovernable rage, all the more deep-seated
and determined and dangerous because it was not paiticularly demonstrative; and he shook my mother off
as if she had been a viper, and simply said, with an
inflexible firmness : “ Woman, I have made up my mind,
and go I shall.”
My mother waxed pale with dread, and, with the
utmost exertion of her persuasive force, induced him to
go into the parlour and have a cup of tea, previous to
his setting out on his journey, which she was apprehen
sive might end in murder. Grimly he sipped a cup of
tea. “ Now I am in for anything from pitch and toss to
manslaughter,” muttered he through his teeth; but
beyond this he uttered not a word. A servant announced
that the carriage was ready. He set down the tea-cup
with a clank and sprang to his feet. But, on the instant,
somehow, and from somewhere, a brass kettleful of
boiling water was upset upon his feet, almost filling his
Hessian boots. He uttered a roar of pain, and, without
opening the glass door, crashed through it, and in an
instant was upon the lawn. Here he swore like a fiend
and jumped mountain high with agony. For an instant
. he stood on the margin of the fish-pond. It struck me
like an inspiration that, if he could get some cold water
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
17
introduced into the boiling water in his boots, all would
be well with him. There was not a moment to lose. I
made a short and mad race, and came up against him
like a battering ram; and he was, in what I conceived
to be mercy, knocked heels over head into the fish
pond.
She never confessed it, but I have a strong suspicion
that my mother upset that kettle by preconcerted accident,
in order to circumvent a journey that she apprehended
would end in manslaughter, if not indeed in murder.
Be that as it may, my father was in bed for a fortnight
in a raging fever. I had indeed taken him out of hot
water and cooled him down a bit; but, as it turned out,
the cooling had been all too suddenly effected. By the
time he had fairly recovered he had apparently given up
all idea of visiting Dr. Fergusson and Angel Turret; he
never again mentioned them, nor referred to them in
any way.
During the time my father was confined to bed with
burnt feet and fever I had leisure to attend to and medi
tate upon the many stripes on my person, the outward
and visible signs of an inward grace which I fear I did
not possess. I was seized with an overpowering desire
to behold with my own eyes the stripes by which the
honour of Dr. Fergusson and his academy had been
vindicated. My father had examined these stripes, and
had compared the part on which they were inflicted to a
representation of the American flag, the glorious gon
falon of the stripes and stars. I must behold these
stripes by which the honour of Angel Turret had been
vindicated and my own moral redemption secured. I
twisted myself round like an acrobat; and, if I could
only have twisted myself round two inches further, I
believed I could have had a full view; but, as it was, I
had no view at all. It occurred to me that, if I kept
trying on frpm day to day, I would gradually overcome
�i8
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
that difficulty about the two inches. I, however, tried
and tried three days in succession, but without success,
and on the third day I took cramp while I was in the
very acme of my distorted attitude; and, unable to
screw myself back to my normal position, for over five
minutes I yelled with pain. My cries brought my mother
and the scullery-maid to my bed-room door; but I had
taken the precaution to lock it before I commenced my
experiments, or these two persons would have found me
in an exceedingly awkward predicament. As soon as
the cramp relaxed its grasp I straightened myself up,
hurriedly redressed myself, and opened the door with a
bland smile.
“ Donald, Donald, in the name of heaven,” exclaimed
my mother, “ what is the matter with you ? Your cries
were heartrending.”
“ Oh, nothing the matter with me, mother—all right
—I was experimenting,” stammered I, with some confu
sion of manner.
“ Experimenting 1” cried my mother, “ your screams
were as terrible as if you had, all of a sudden, tumbled
into hell. What kind of experiment requires yelling of
that kind ?”
“ Well, you see I was experimenting on the acting of
Hamlet.’ That scene where the Dane leaps into the
grave of Ophelia, in my opinion, requires fearful yelling.”
“ Boy, you are clean cracked. First you did some
abominable thing at school—Lord knows exactly what it
was; next you attempt to drown your own father ; and
then, in your attempt at acting ‘ Hamlet,’ you bid fair to
burst your own wind-pipe and shout the whole of us
deafand my mother slammed the door and hurried
downstairs.
I was still determined to behold the stripes for which
I was indebted to the strong right arms of Dr. Fergusson
■and his principal assistant. I tried ingenious combina
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
19
rtions of double mirrors and triple mirrors, and I, by this
means, succeeded in seeing all parts of my body except
the very part I desired to examine. Discomfiture I
But I was still determined, ingenious, and resourceful.
.Sitting on the top of the garden wall was a tom-cat
•engaged in his toilet. Now, when a cat sponges himself
•with his tongue he sponges himself all over, from the
■very hat-crown to the boot-heel, as it were. One toilet
.attitude the tom-cat struck gave me a wrinkle. Like
.the ancient Greek geometer, I exclaimed “ Eureka!”
I apprehended that my task could be accomplished if I
■could only place my heel on the back of my neck.
Then an astonishing field of view wrould open before my
prying and intelligent vision. Sir Isaac Newton had
struck upon the law of gravitation from seeing an apple
fall; I, the product of a later and more go-ahead age,
had, from observing a cat at his toilet, struck upon the
law by which I could survey the stripes which the
learned Dr. Fergusson had inflicted that the prestige of
Angel Turret might be vindicated and my own moral
regeneration secured.
Preparatory to my new experiment I stripped myself
and sparred and attitudinised before a mirror, and,
without egotism, it really did appear to me that I was an
•exceptionally handsome lad, and peculiarly suggestive
•of a Greek athlete or agonistes. I arrayed myself in a
■pair of bathing drawers and sat down upon the hearth
rug in order to experiment in the way of placing my
heel behind my neck, that, with mortal vision, I might
behold the stripes with which my moral iniquities had
been healed. At the first trial I managed to put my
great toe in my mouth. At the end of half-an-hour I
.succeeded in making the said great toe touch my ear
Eldorado was all but reached ! I became inordinately
excited and I resolutely determined to succeed. One
desperate duck till my neck cracked, and one reckless
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
20
wrench upward of the leg till knee and pelvis cracked in.
chorus—and the deed was done ! My heel was placed
firmly and solidly on the back of my neck! But no
undiscovered worlds and unexplored hemispheres or
American or other flags met my adventurous vision:
the drawers were there—frightful oversight, irreparable
blunder ! I felt in a state of distress and blindness, and
hastened to remove the heel which I had placed upon
my neck. I was utterly powerless to do so. In a short
time I had not even the power to try to remove my
heel. I tumbled sidewise upon the hearth-rug, and lay
moaning in absolute misery. I felt I was dying—dying
a martyr to research after a certain fundamental truth ;
dying, unlamented, deserted, unappreciated, and no one
would ever divine the cause in which I had perished.
No marble tomb for me, and a brilliant name among
the world’s great discoverers, and those who passed
through the furnaces of tribulation to the throne of the
immortals. In my deadly distress I remembered the
words of young Norval:—“ Cut off from Nature’s and from Glory’s course,
Which never mortal was so fond to run.
*
*
*
*
Some noble spirits, judging by themselves,
May yet conjecture what I might have been.”
In the collapse of my previous experiment I was able
to scream ; but now that last solace of the sufferer was
denied me. My chin was pressed firmly down upon
my throat, and I could make only a low, croaking noise,
resembling the jeremiad of a frog, rather than the wail
of a human being. My plight was terrible. Nobody
would miss me now till supper time, if even then ; and
by that time I should be beyond the reach of mortal
assistance. By the merest accident, the maid had
neglected to “ make ” my bed at the proper time; and,
before I had lain five minutes—which, however, seemed
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
21
.-an eternity—in my helpless and desperate condition, she
entered the chamber to “make” the bed. She stared
at me, uttered a scream, and hurried out of the
room.
“ O ma’am,” she said to my mother, in breathless ex
citement, “the young master is in his room, and has
made himself into a Isle of Man halfpenny, with feet
.all round ; and he is groaning horrible. O ma’am, I
have got quite a scunner. I never see’d the like. Come,
ma’am; he is a-dyin’ by inches.”
My mother rushed up the stairs three steps at a time,
and, beholding my extraordinary plight, she held up her
hands in bewildered horror, and exclaimed :
“ What next ? What part of the play of ‘ Hamlet ’ can
Z7zzk be meant to represent ? What have I done that
divine providence should give me a son like this ? He
is knees and elbows all over, like an octopus. He will
drive me cracked !” and she rushed out of the room and
sent for the parson and the doctor. The former prayed
for me, while the latter, by main force, extracted my
heel from the back of my neck. Then they two retired
to my father’s bedroom, where he was still lying, bad
with burnt feet and fever; and all three got drunk
together. You may think all this unimportant; but it is
not. It all had its bearing upon the magnum opus of my
life, The Thrashing Machine, and that you shall see
before many more lines have proceeded from my gifted
pen.
I was not even yet defeated. Every fresh repulse I
sustained served only to render me the more determined
to behold and study the stripes with which my moral
delinquencies had been healed. These stripes, still
sharply painful, should I inadvertently forget they were
there and sit down all of a sudden, were all that resnained to me to hallow the memory of far-off Jenny
�22
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
and the literal shattering of my idol which the cow had
so irreverently kicked to splinters. But Jenny and the
milking-machine alike became half-obliterated in my wild
and all-absorbing desire to read the primitive hieroglyphy
which Dr. Fergusson and his principal assistant, a B.A.
of Oxford, had written upon me with rods. They were
two learned men. I must see what, in their wisdom,,
they had written with sticks, using my skin for parch
ment. The results of their labour, I determined, should
not be lost to the world,
I, with the unconventional and rare ingenuity which
has ever been my distinguishing trait, sat down upon a
large plate of salt, that I might learn and note from the
spasms and yanks of pain the particular directions and
crossings and re-crossings and notches and stars and
scars of the stripes with which my morals had been so
learnedly, if not humanely, healed. I went down to the
pantry when the butler happened to be out; and I filled
my pockets with finely powdered salt, and concealed as.
best I could under my coat a large silver tray. With
the salt and the tray I retired to my bedroom. I filled
the tray full to the brim with the salt, and levelled it off
beautifully with a comb. Then down I sat with a jerk
but, by the King of Heaven, up I rose with another jerk !
I uttered a savage yell, and ran tearing across the floor
as if all the fiends had been behind me. I had had my
arm broken, my skull fractured, and my two teeth kicked
down my throat; but, in insufferable pain, this salt ex
periment beat all my previous experiences hollow. I
beg humbly to recommend its adoption by the Great
Spiritual Enemy of Mankind as something worthy of the
liveliest corner in the Infernal Pit. Into the room rushed
my mother and her maid.,
“ Donald, Donald dear, in the name of all that is
sane, what is the matter now ?”
“ ‘Hamlet ’ again, mother!” exclaimed I bitterly, hardly
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
2S
knowing what I said; for the pain, although subsiding,
was still intense.
“ But you gag ‘Hamlet ’ horribly,” rejoined she, half in
literal earnest and half in pitying irony; “ I distinctly
heard you cry out, ‘ O Almighty thunder ! I cannot
read the writing with the stick 1 I have sat down on
hell, and here am I!’ What part of ‘ Hamlet ’ is that ?
It is not to be found in Shakespeare’s version.”
I explained that Hamlet was mad, and that, in my
contemplated representation of the character, I should
give a rendering which would astonish the world.
“Astonish the world! I should think so,” rejoined
my mother curtly, and left the room.
I had managed to place a pillow over the tray with the
salt, or I might not have been able to give my explana
tions so readily, or to have got rid of her so easily.
Labor omnia vincit. The gate of hell itself cannot
prevail against the unconquerable might of the human
will. Even the fiery fury of the trayful of salt had not
burnt out of me the indomitable resolution to read the
cryptograms which the learned Dr. Fergusson and his
assistant, Morris, had written with sticks. The gardener
was an exceedingly intelligent young man. Pencil and
compasses were hardly ever out of his hands. His busi
ness was to design flower-beds, rockeries, and fountains ;
but he could draw nearly anything that is in heaven
above, on earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.
I would take him into the summer-house and engage
him to produce, on a sheet of drawing-paper, a facsimile
of the stripes with which my moral delinquencies had
been healed. I hastened out to the garden, gave my
instructions, and, within three hours from the inception
of the idea, it was a consummated fact. The annexed
cut is, accurately, but on a reduced scale, and without
colours, a copy of the document, plan, map, or what you
will, with which the gardener furnished me :—-
�24
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
Never did panting lover read a missive from his mistress,
never did young poet read his first verses in type, with
more ecstatic rapture than warmed and thrilled me now
that I had the stick-writing of a great seat of learning
unrolled before me in all its mysterious splendour. I
admit it was utterly incomprehensible. Would to heaven
I could interpret its esoteric lines, its occult angles, and
its mysterious stars ! But I knew that Dr. Fergusson
was a learned and earnest man, who would not write
flippantly or in vain; and that, therefore, in that mystic
scribble, which had been subsequently retraced by the
flame-pen of the salt, lurked the key to unlock that
problem in ontology, the Origin of Evil, and the sword
with which to cut the Gordian Knot of Evil’s Final
Eradication. I gazed on the map-document with that
absorbing dream-worship with which we regard that
which at once awes our senses and baffles our reason.
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
25
Although I could not read the inscription now that I had
it before me, the consciousness of possessing it was to
me a profound, if inexplicable, pleasure. What could
be the portentous significance of that blue fading away
into that green ; of that umbre black losing itself in that
flaming yellow; of that ominous ttJ, and that fearful □ ?
I would be at the bottom of all this, or perish in the
.attempt. I worked at the problem till I felt the wheels
of my brain cracking and the belts giving way. But, at
last, an inspiration as magnificent as that which had
impelled me to employ the gardener to make the copy
of the cryptogram now struck me with the divine impulse
to employ a certain servant of the Most High to trans
late it. About six miles distant from my father’s house,
Dunder Hall, lived a man of God and Learning such as
the world has all too seldom seen. He had preached
himself out of his kirk, and all but preached himself into
a lunatic asylum, for it is with a lunatic asylum the
world rewards all possessors of mental energy and moral
force which cannot be weighed or measured in the bushel
of vulgar common sense or yoked into the mill of com
monplace to grind out half-crowns.
I begged two guineas from my ever-indulgent father
and enclosed them, along with the inscription, to the
learned and pious, albeit impecunious, servant of the
Most High. I explained to him that I was anxious to
have a translation. I made him aware that the cryptogramic hierogram was the work of two elegant scholars,
James Fergusson, M.A. of Edinburgh and LL.D, of
Yale, and Arthur Morris, B.A., of Brazenose College,
Oxford, and editor of an approved edition of Thucydides.
I permitted the learned and reverend servant of the Most
*
High to infer that the copy I sent him, and which the
* The Rev. Dr. Hamilton, author of “ Key to the Apocalypse ”
and “ The Contents of the Seven Phials.”
�26
A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
gardener had made, was the original. I, somehow, had
not the face to take him the original and lay it before
him. Thank heaven I had just taken the copy in time,
for, under the influence of a salve made of bees-wax,.
fern roots, and alum, the original was rapidly becoming
illegible and passing away, leaving only a tabula rasa
behind.
Within a week from the day I sent off the inscription,
a messenger from the scholar handed it back to me with
the translation thereof! I rushed upstairs to my room,
locked the door from the inside, and eagerly tore open,
the scholar’s packet. A guinea tumbled out upon the
floor. I set my foot upon it till I had time to lift it. I
had now before me a prize grander than a Dijon pyramid
of guineas. A private note ran thus :—
The Cottage, Thursday morning.
Donald Fraser, Esq.
*
Dear Sir,—The writing with a sight of which you honoured,
me, although exceedingly important at this crisis of the Church,
is not at all difficult to decipher. I devoted to it only oneday of prayerful reading and one day of philological synthesis and
analysis. I got at the key to the cryptogram all the readier as the
whole inscription bore a striking resemblance to that upon an
Assyrian tile which Dr. Ravenstein brought from the Land of Moab
seven months ago. Having had to devote only two days tothe translation, it would be avaricious on my part to retain the twoguineas you were generous enough to enclose; but, as I am not
abundantly blessed with the world’s wealth, I have taken the liberty
to retain one of the guineas, and I sincerely trust that you will not
consider the fee for the trifling service it has been my privilege torender you exorbitant.
With prayers that the translation may be blessed to the saving of'
your soul and the souls of those who are of your household,
I am, Dear Sir,
Your most respectful, humble servant,
•
James Hamilton.
The Rev. Dr. Hamilton had evidently thought that the inscrip
tion had been sent him by my father.
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
27
PROLEGOMENAL CLARIS.
(T) The lines have all a tendency from east to west.
They are simply the rays of the sun-god, ^(lrrrjp, Mises
Saotes, He., He. I give due weight in detail to their
respective ray-weight and deflection from the horizontal.
(2) The distinctive marks are all grammalogoi, Phallic
symbols (crux ansata), signs of the Zodiac, oriental,
ancient Egyptian, and Ptolemaic, Hebrew characters, in
which W and H are conspicuous, and tt, which, with its
indication of the relation of the diameter of a circle to
its circumference, affords, in the hands of esoteric erudi
tion, a key to the whole position.
(3) The great character to the left is of course Hl/N,
which, taken with 1TJJ (the virgin) and Zo (the crab) and
TT (the twins), all of which are readily discernible in
the inscription, render the solution easy to the occultist'
scholar.
TRANSLATION.
BY THY LEFT HAND, O AMMON, GREETING.
GREAT
VINDEMIATRIX, ARISE IN THE EAST.
THERE
WAS SILENCE IN HELL ABOUT THE SPACE OF HALF AN
STAR,
HOUR. WO, WO, SON OF POMPONIUS MELA, WITH THE
IRON IN THE GROIN AND THE FOUNDATIONS BEATEN
LIKE AN ANVIL OF MULCIBER. THE RAYS THEREOF
FLEW. Zeus hflijv STRUCK THE NETHER HEEL J THE
MOUTH WAS THAT OF A LION, THE FEET WERE THOSE
OF A SHE-BEAR, AND THE TAIL THAT OF A FROG. FOR
*
n SHALL JUDGE AMONG THE NATIONS, AND AT THE
END OF A TIME AND THREE TIMES AND ONE-EIGHTH
OF A TIME THE EARTH SHALL HOWL AS THE MOON
DROPS DOWN UPON IT IN BLOOD. HOWL FOR THE
CIVET, CRY ALOUD FOR THE MUSTARD PLANT. FOR
THE CRAB AND THE VIRGIN AND THE TWINS MOURN
WITH TAMMUZ IN BAAL-PEOR. THE HERON AND THE
WEAZEL LAMENT IN BACTRIA FOR ANUBIS AND RA AND
SET-TYPHON
AND
SEKRU
AND
TUM
AND
PHTHAH.-
�A FEARFUL FLOGGING.
MOURN, FOR THE LEGS AND THE TEETH ARE BROKEN.
MISES HARMACHIS AND OANNES COME ; THE GRAVES
OPEN J THE WORLD ENDS.
GLORY TO pH ! BEAT
THE WIND WITH RODS, 12 I
AND YEARS 9,999-
CUBITS, AND
FOR DAYS
My countenance fell. The original, even as I sat
upon the salt, was nearly as intelligible as the translation
that now lay before me. What could possibly be the
use of James Fergusson, M.A., and Arthur Morris, B.A.,
troubling in my interest to write with sticks, didactics,
and apothegms utterly beyond the range of my scholar
ship and the scope of my intelligence ? Of the “ founda
tions beaten like an anvil ” I had a vivid comprehension ;
while “ beat the wind ” was intelligible, but rather vague ;
and “ rods ” of “ 121 cubits ” were certainly a great deal
too long for actual, practical flogging. And could they
not, at Angel Turret, have flogged a boy like me without
referring me to, as far as I was concerned, such unknown
monsters as Ra and Set-Typhon and Turn and Phthah ?
No wonder the thrashing did me no good ! No wonder
that I felt quite as wicked as ever ! I resolved to devote
some years to deep meditation on the philosophy of
flogging. And any one who is privileged to follow the
coruscations of my gifted pen may have the glory to
find out for himself the magnificent result at which I
^ultimately arrived.
(To be continued, if Julia—Mrs. Heywood—
shoiild see fit to again provoke Saladin.)
�APPENDIX.
ANOTHER LETTER FROM MRS. HEYWOOD.
Sir,—I have read your vile paper. I took the tongs, and with
them carried it out at arm’s length to the dust-bin. I feel defiled.
I shall ask my husband, a feeble but earnest servant of God, to
appoint a clay of humiliation and prayer throughout his parish.
Then I shall ask him, if he loves me, the wife of his bosom, to horse
whip you to within one inch of your life. He is strong in the arm of
the flesh, and will thrash you as if you were a rat; and the God of
Jacob, the mighty one of Israel, has, in answer to my prayer, pro
misecl to assist him. You shall perish in the gainsaying of Kor.
My father never hanged himself with the----- of any creature.
You forged the whole infamous thing, and you have provoked the
holy one of Israel to anger. I shall be at you at the criminal court.
I never saw you save once, and I wish I had never seen you. The
devil tempted me, and I tattooed on my left arm—
I Love Ross Alone and Forever.
My husband has seen the inscription two or three times, and has
each time kicked up a dust and preached in a way that has emptied
the church and drawn upon him the displeasure of the bishop. I
have tried to take out the tattooing with poultices of vaccine excre
ment, black soap, and steel filings ; but it will not come out. I
shall have my arm amputated rather than bear about with me your
accursed name. Last time the Rev. Mr. Heywood saw it he hurled
a heavy clasped Bibleat my head. The holy book, glory be to
God, missed my head ; but it knocked down Jesus Christ and
three of the saints, and it took £4 5s. 3d. to repair them. I
enclose you the account, and, if you have a soul in your body, you
will pay it.
My father, whose memory you foul with burlesque and whose
grave you desecrate, would not have trusted you with a brass six
pence, far less with his Julia’s honour. Beware of the curse of
Hiel the Bethelite ! There shall be a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a
great slaughter in the land of Idumea, for you stole my father’s-
�3°
APPENDIX.
MS. and then forged it. I will yet number you and your readers
in Telain, when the mighty one cometh from Teman and Ur of the
Chaldeans. I am my father’s daughter, you viper. You say he was
hanged with a murderer’s intestines, which is a falsehood ; and I
pray God that you may .yet see the day when you will be hanged
with his daughter’s garters, which she weareth under the knees
thereof (sic). My husband shall chastise thee with whips, and the
Lord shall rain down upon thee hail-stones and coals of fire. Blow
ye the cornet in Gibeah and the trumpet in Ramah : cry aloud at
Beth-aven !—Yours, with loathing and contempt,
Julia Heywood (nee Fraser).
The Vicarage, Sunday evening.
P.S.—You may insert this or not, as you like ; but, if you do not,
the husband of my bosom has made arrangements to have the whole
•matter of your vile slander published in the Church Times and the
Christian World, and also brought into the police-court.—J. H.,
nee F.
���
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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A fearful flogging : by one who endured it; based upon a MS. in the possession of Saladin
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 30 p. : ill. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Stamp on front cover: Bishopsgate Institute. Reference Library. Appendix: Another letter from Mrs Julia Heywood (nee Fraser). Date of publication from KVK (OCLC WorldCat). Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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W. Stewart & Co.
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[1894]
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N585
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Religious practice
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A fearful flogging : by one who endured it; based upon a MS. in the possession of Saladin), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Christianity
Flagellation
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THE
FLAGELLANTS,
SALADIN.
[reprinted
from
“the secular review.”]
♦
London:
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
�Price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE SECULAR REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED
BY SALADIN.
The Secular Review is the recognised organ of cultured
Freethought in England, and its contributors comprise some
of the leading scholars and foremost thinkers of the country.
Subscription
...
...
2s. Z^d. per Quarter.
Publishing Office : 41, Farringdon St., London, E.C.
Price 2s. Post Free.
In Limp Cloth.
POEM S:
GENERAL, SECULARISTIC, AND
SATIRICAL.
By LARA.
Dedicated to Saladin.
“ Contains specimens of the most biting satire penned since
the days of Pope.”
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
Recently Published.
Price is. 6d. Post Free.
AN EXAMINATION OF THE
HYLO-IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY
demonstrating the true basis of
AGNOSTICISM,
By WILLIAM BELL McTAGGART.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�E ^072
[reprinted
THE
from
“the
secular review.”]
FLAGELLANTS.
From the era of its half-mythical Galilean downwards,
Christianity has laid incontestable claims to be con
sidered the Religion of Misery. A radical doctrine of
the faith is that this world is only a Babelmandeb, or
Gate of Tears to the “ glory that shall yet be revealed.”
The teachings recorded of Christ have all the jaundiced
acerbity of the Essenes. The son of Mary was an
ascetic, or nothing. According to him, the end of the
world was close at hand. Its concerns and aims were
despicable, and the best that could be done was to
regard its pleasures as pernicious seductions and lay up
“ treasures in heaven,” as it would avail a man nothing
should he “ gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”
Strictly compatible with the teachings of Christ were
the doctrines of Cardinal Damiani, when he wrote a pane
gyric upon the efficacy of self-inflicted suffering, and those
of the celebrated Dominic, when he introduced peni
tential hymns, to be chanted to a tune to which the selfinflicted lash kept time. Hair shirts, protracted periods
of fasting, and the like, had long been in vogue as means
to propitiate an angry heaven ; but Dominic affirmed
that twenty recitations of the Psalms, accompanied by
self-inflicted scourging, was equal to a hundred years of
ordinary penitence.
Dominic flourished towards the middle of the eleventh
century; but it was not till about two centuries later
(1260) that the seed of asceticism he had sown arose
to be a great and popular tree of self-torture. It was in
an age of gloom and suffering and wickedness that, at
Pergugia, in Italy, a monk named Regnier, with wild and
�2
THE FLAGELLANTS.
bitter eloquence, preached Flagellation as the antidote
that would restore an afflicted people to the favour of
an angry God. Like Peter the Hermit in the first
Crusade, like Luther at the Reformation, or Bernhardt
of the Millenarian insanity, this Regnier had rightly
interpreted the spirit of the times. He put in his sickle,
and the corn was already ripe for the harvest. The wars
of Guelph and Ghibelline, famine, pestilence, rapine,
murder and misery had, after a thousand years of Chris
tianity, made Italy and the most of Europe feel that life
was, indeed, not worth living, but only a horrid and
mysterious burden, which was taken up involuntarily, and
which left those who bore it such cravens that they had
not the courage to lay it down.
And so another violent epidemic of Lose your Reason
to Save your Soul fell upon Christendom like a rinder
pest. The memory and inspiration of the Man of
Sorrows was again to lay the load of a great sorrow upon
the shoulders of the world. Once more, as, under the
preaching of Bernhardt and Peter the Hermit, rowdy
and rascal, swashbuckler and sword-player, blackguard
and blackleg, worked themselves into a frenzy concern
ing one Jesus, whose name has always been a spell
word with miscreants from the time of the Christian
cut-throats mentioned by Tacitus down to Booth’s latest
prize, the “blood-washed soul” of ’Arry Juggins the
burglar.
Two by two the holy ones of the whip-lash marched
through the gaping multitudes on the crowded streets.
Their heads were covered with sackcloth ; their remain
ing article of attire was a bandage round the loins, which
rendered them a little decent for God’s sake. Their
backs and breasts were entirely nude. The back bore a
huge cross, daubed upon the skin with red paint; and
another cross was smeared upon the naked breast. On
through the town, and through the wilderness, in long
and narrow file, like the march of the ducks from the
dub to the midden, marched those nasty saints of God
The hand of each sacred fanatic bore a heavy and
horrible whip, the thongs tipped with iron ; and, with this
whip, every pious madman lashed his own bare back till
the thongs were clotted and gory, and long lines of blood
�THE FLAGELLANTS.
3
running down from the scapula to the pelvis defaced the
red cross which had been painted on the skin.
To what shall we liken the men of that generation ?
To a crazy dog, refusing its food and chewing off its own
hind legs to please its master. But the analogy is im
perfect, and the man flogging his own back to please
his Jesus is more irrational than the dog chewing off his
own hind legs to please his master; for the dog is positively
sure he has a master; but the ablest Christian that has
ever written has not been able to establish that his Jesus
ever existed. The only record of him is in four socalled “ Gospels/’ written by nobody knows who, nobody
knows where, and nobody knows when, and the state
ments of which are contradicted by each other and utterly
unsupported by history. A pretty source, indeed, from
which to derive a Jesus in whose honour you can flog
your back ! But backs always will be flogged, and noses
ever will be held close to the grindstone, till he with the
back and he with the nose takes the trouble to cultivate
his brain, and dares to confront, eagle-eyed, the authori
ties that would make him a chattel and a poor mad catspaw in the hands of priest and tyrant.
Jehovah has ever liked singing and dancing and
capers to his glory and honour. David, the “ man
according to God’s own heart,” danced naked before
God and certain young girls ; and another worthy sang
to God’s glory with acceptance because Jael had
hammered a nail into her guest’s head while he slept.
So the Flagellants, besides tickling their own backs with
whips, deemed it would be well to tickle Jehovah’s ears
with music. Accordingly they sang while they flogged. If
you think flogging your back is conducive to making you
rival the efforts of Sims Reeves, just try the experiment.
Flog your back while you sing, and you will find that
many a quaver flies off into a scream, and that many a
crotchet is dead-born. But Jehovah had just to content
himself with such music as was obtainable under the
circumstances. Certain fragments of the hymns which
the Flagellants sang have been preserved. Here are
brief specimens :—
“ Through love of man the Saviour came,
Through love of man he died ;
�4
THE FLAGELLANTS.
He suffered want, reproach, and shame,
Was scourged and crucified.
Oh, think, then, on thy Saviour’s pain,
And lash the sinner, lash again !”*
The following are a few lines from the metrical rendering
into English of “The Ancient Song of the Flagellants ” :—
“ Tears from our sorrowing eyes we weep,
Therefore so firm our faith we keep
With all our hearts, with all our senses :
Christ bore his cross for our offences.
Ply well the scourge, for Jesu’s sake,
And God, through Christ, your sin will take.
For love of God abandon sin—
To mend your vicious lives begin ;
So shall we his mercy win.”+
Thirty-three days and a half was the shortest term in
which a Flagellant must macerate and lacerate himself;
and these thirty-three and a half days were meant to be
mystically symbolical of the thirty-three years and a
half which the third part of God, and yet equal to the
whole of God, had lived on earth “ saving souls ” and
making wheelbarrows. The devotees fell down on their
dirty knees in the dirty streets, and, setting up their
naked, putrid, and horrible backs, prayed to Jah and
Jesus and Mary to have mercy on their souls, before
having taken the trouble to find out whether they had
souls or not. Jah and Jesus and Mary had, however,
something else to do than attend to kneeling lunatics
with voices like cross-cut saws and backs like beef
steaks. But the cities, then as now, had plenty of fools,
and certain of them rushed out at their doors or leapt
from their windows for God's sake to join the ranks of
those who lashed their hurdies with thongs and prayed
with their knees in the gutter. When all Christendom
had managed to lash its back to its own satisfaction, it
threw down the whip, got up from its knees, and took
to swearing and sinning in the usual way.
But, some fifty years afterwards, Christendom again
took it into its head that its back would be all the better
for a flogging. So, in 1296, the saints, particularly those
* Preserved by L’Evesque ; quoted by Lingard.
+ Dr. Hecker.
�THE FLAGELLANTS.
5
of Strasburg, Spires, and Frankfort, took unto themselves
whips, and began business in earnest. The Jews had
good broad backs, which they were impious enough
never to whip, and this mightily offended the Christian
Flagellants. The Jews did not see their way to whip
their own backs, so, in the most obliging manner the
Christians offered to whip them for them. The Jews
preferred to look after their commercial enterprises to
tearing away with a scourge at their own dorsal rafters ,
and, for this deadly sin, they were foully massacred.
The wretches who did not scourge their backs had
scourged the third of God and crucified him. Down
with them to Tophet! One Jew, goaded to despera
tion by Christian persecution and outrage, set fire to the
Town Hall and the Cathedral of Frankfort, and they
were reduced to ashes. Down with the seed of Iscariot
and Barabbas 1 The holy ones flung away their whips,
and, seizing sword, hatchet, and knife, devoted some
hours of horror to the slaughter of man, woman, and
child of the seed of Israel. The God of Jacob looked
on; but, apparently, did not see his way to interfere.
In Frankfort, of all the sons and daughters of Salem
whose ancestors had sung to the Lord by the streams
of Babel, none remained alive, except a small remnant
that, bursting through the carnage, had escaped into
Bohemia. Christ had “ redeemed ” these Christians
(they were well worth it) by a bloody sacrifice upon
Calvary, and, out of complement—like Catherine Medici
in her sanguinous bath—they set him in blood to the
chin. Every tree must be judged by its fruit. I hereby
defy the history of all the other faiths to produce a tree
like the Christian one, which, from the deepest root to
the topmost twig, is dyed with human gore.
After the Frankfort tragedy of 1296 Flagellantism did
not rear its head conspicuously till the year 1348.
To students of history the mention of this date recalls
the deepest and widest grave that was ever dug to receive
the slag and refuse of mortality. The “ Black Death ”
took into her hands the besom of destruction, and swept
into the sepulchre twenty-five millions of human beings !
Europe fell upon her knees, and from Dirt appealed to
Deity. But the appeal was in vain. In every Christian
�6
THE FLAGELLANTS.
City there was a plethora of disgusting sewage and unspeak
able stench. Cleanliness is, proverbially, next to godli
ness ; but the citizens of mediaeval Europe were so godly
that they forgot to be cleanly. Out of Mohammedan
Constantinople there was not a bath on the entire Euro
pean continent, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits
of Messina. Pious Ignorance and theological Intoler
ance sat to the eyes in filth, which it would give my
readers the jaundice to describe; and mankind perished
as do clouds of locusts when overtaken by a gale at sea,
or as perish at the end of autumn tens of thousands of
hives of bees, when imprisoned amid the fumes of burn
ing brimstone.
“ God in heaven, Mary and all the Saints, what is the
matter now ?” gasped Christendom, as, with pale lips and
phrenzied eye, she, in whole cityfuls, staggered into the
grave. Nothing practical, as connected with this wretched
vale of Tears,” suggested itself to the follower of
Jesus. He was beyond and above attending to the
carnal conditions of this despicable earth, and from the
midst of his priests and relics and shrines and miracles
his whole hope was in heaven, and his only court of
appeal his Maker and Redeemer. But neither Maker
nor Redeemer could be induced to interfere; and graves
were dug till there were none left to dig them, and corpses
were borne out of the streets and houses till there were
none left to bear them. There were only the voice of
prayer, the cry of pain, and the rattle of the Death-cart;
and in certain districts even these sounds died away. In
the houses the dead were left with the dead. There was
a disused cart and a skeleton horse. Grass and weeds
flourished in the streets where a busy traffic had rolled
its tides, and there the wind waved ghastly shreds of
human apparel, still adhering to more ghastly relics of
human beings. There was high carnival for maggot and
fly, and dogs and swine tugged and snarled among the
entrails of those who had trusted in Jesus and neglected
their dustbins.
The New Testament was looked to as the antidote to
the bane; and, whatever may be its merits, it is a poor
manual of hygiene. Scrubbing is never mentioned, and
there is no reference to washing, except to the washing of
�THE FLAGELLANTS.
7
“souls,” whatever they may be, in blood. There is,
moreover, allusion to the washing of a certain party’s feet
with tears, and then drying them with maiden’s hair; but
this is a sentimental and not an efficacious lavation. It
is not on record that Mary or Tabitha, or any one else,
ever washed the shirt or tunica which was worn under
the seamless garment of Christ, and I question if it was
ever washed or changed from the day on which he left
the carpenter’s bench till the day that, with his life, he
expiated his sedition and folly. Through all the horrors
of the Black Death we hear of no wholesome and honest
washing with water; but there certainly was a washing
of the streets with blood. It was surmised that this
visitation of the wrath of the Almighty was instigated by
the sinfulness of the Christians in allowing the Jews to
live ; for it was the Jews who had crucified the Lord;
and yet, according to the Christian theory, if “ the Lord ”
had not been crucified, the world would inevitably have
been lost. The Black Death was accompanied with
another merciless massacre of the Jews. It was also
accompanied by another pitiless flogging of backs. So
fanatically wild did this self-inflicted back-flogging become
that many held that the rite of Flagellation should, in
the Christian Church, supersede the rite of Baptism.
Many literally flogged away the flesh off their bones, and
yet the plague did not abate; and the sky and the earth
were pregnant with supernatural terrors. A pillar of fire
hung over the Pope’s palace at Avignon; a red ball of
fire in the heavens blazed over Paris, and Greece and
Italy were shaken with an earthquake. And the Chris
tians flogged and prayed, and prayed and flogged, and
sang and slew, and slew and sang, and still the plague
went on.
Flagellantism was not without its serio-comic aspect.
I cannot say whether it copied from the game of Leapthe-Frog, or whether Leap-the-Frog has copied from it.
In Leap-the-Frog each boy vaults over his neighbour’s
bended back, and then bends his own, and so on the
process goes till each has vaulted over the back of all.
The Flagellants lay in rows, and one ran along the row
scourging furiously as he went with a leathern scourge
tipped with iron, and then he lay down ; and so on and
�8
THE FLAGELLANTS.
so on, till each had flogged the naked backs of all. In
lying in the rows to be flogged, however, those who wished
to do penance for certain crimes had to observe certain
recognised postures indicative of these crimes. If the
crime was perjury, till it was his turn to get up and flog,
the penitent lay on his side, holding up three fingers ; if
it was adultery, he lay flat with his face on the ground :
and so on, different postures of the body were fixed upon
to indicate different crimes. The Flagellants, too, were
not without their grotesque impostures in the shape of
pious forgeries. At one of their assemblies they actually
read a letter which had been sent to them direct from
heaven, and in which Jesus Christ was good enough to
give them his favourable opinion of the efficacy of Flagel
lation. The “ Blessed Virgin ” had, with maternal affec
tion, given her Son some assistance in the composition
of this celestial missive.
Unlike the Millenarian mania, the Flagellant craze ex
tended even to England. In 1351 a deputation of 120
continental Flagellants visited London; but insular
stolidity did not see its way to carry its piety to the extent
of lacerating its own flesh with scourges. Even on the
continent the frenzy began to exhaust itself. The
leaders betook themselves to desperate resources to
buttress up a falling cause. They set themselves to the
task of restoring life to a dead child, and performed the
“miracle” so clumsily that the performance hastened
their dissolution instead of giving them a new lease of
influence. In the hey-day of their fanaticism neither
king nor pontiff saw it prudent to interfere with the
Flagellants ; but when the tide turned against them king
and pontiff turned against them too. A bitter persecu
tion set in, and Flagellantism, like most other isms, was
called upon to furnish its roll of martyrs, and it heroically
enough responded to the call. Its dying spasm—and it
was a vigorous and terrible one—-was in 1414, and some
time later it finally expired in the dungeons and amid
the fagots of the Holy Inquisition. Mankind, in the
mass, continue to be fools ; but, in the last four centuries,
there has been some small advance towards sanity, and
it is now somewhat difficult to get any one to flog his
own back for the love of God.
�Post Free Three-Halfpence.
Price One Penny.
FROM THE VALLEY
OF
THE SHADOW OF DEATH.
By SALADIN.
IN
BRUNO
MEMORI AM
STEWART
ROSS,
Died igth November, 1882, aged two years and five weeks.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
Recently Published.
Post free Twopence-halfpenny.
WITCHCRAFT
IN CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES.
By SALADIN.
Being an Address delivered at the Inauguration of the Secular
Society at Stockport, November 19th, 1882—the Marquis of
Queensberry in the Chair.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C
Price 2s. post free.
Elegantly printed in colours.
SONGS BY THE WAYSIDE
OF AN AGNOSTIC’S LIFE.
By Himself.
“It is not an irreverent Agnosticism that is uttered in these pages,
although, without doubt, it is terribly heterodox ; but the author evidently
feels and think, which is more than can be said of some of our versifiers.”
—Scotsman, July 21st, 1883.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�Now ready, price id., post free l%d.,
THE DIVINE
INTERPRETATION OF
SCRIPTURE:
A REPLY TO CARDINAL MANNING.
By Saladin.
Being a Paper read at the Cassadaga Conference, New York,
by S. P. Putnam, Secretary, American Liberal League.
“ This trenchant and incisive impeachment of the pretensions
of our greatest enemy, the Romish Church, was well worth re
printing, and we hope it will have a large circulation.”—Free
thinker.
16 pp., with Illustration, price One Penny, post free Threehalfpence,
THE
CRUSADES.
By Saladin.
i6 pp., price One Penny, post free Threehalfpence,
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION,
By Saladin.
In neat wrapper, price One Penny, post free Threehalfpence,
THE FLAGELLANTSBy Saladin.
In neat wrapper, price One Penny, post free Threehalfpence,
THE
COVENANTERS.
By Saladin.
The Publishers will be pleased to forward an assorted parcel of
ioo copies of the above Pamphlets (carriage paid) for distribution
on receipt of ys. 6d.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Flagellants
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Reprinted from the Secular Review. "By Saladin" [title page], the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Publisher's advertisements inside and on back cover. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
W. Stewart & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N586
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religious practice
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Flagellants), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Flagellants
Flagellation
NSS