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The monks of Santa Croce determined that thirty psalms, said or sung, with an obligato accompaniment of one hundred stripes to each psalm, making in all three thousand, would be received as a set off for one year’s purgatory: the whole psalter, with fifteen thousand stripes, would redeem five years from the vast crucible, and twenty psalters, with three hundred thousand stripes fairly entered, would be equal to a receipt in full for one hundred years.

This Dominic the Cuirassier, being very ambitious, tasked himself generally at ten psalters, and thirty thousand lashes a day, at which rate he would have redeemed three thousand six hundred and fifty years of purgatory per annum. In addition to this, however, he used to petition for a supplementary task of a hundred years. Being, as he hoped, already a creditor to a large amount in the angel’s books, and as no good works can be lost, he recited and lashed away for the benefit of the great sinking fund of the Catholic Church, with more spirit than ever. During one Lent he entreated for, and obtained, the imposition of a thousand years; and St. Pietro Damiano affirms that, in these forty days, he actually recited the psalter two hundred times, and inflicted sixty millions of stripes; working away with a scourge in each hand. In an heroic mood he once determined to flog himself, in the jockey phrase, against time, and at the end of twenty-four hours had gone through the psalms twelve times, and begun them the thirteenth, the quota of stripes being one hundred and eighty-three thousand, reducing purgatory stock sixty-one years, twelve days, and thirty-three minutes. It still remains to be proved, how he could recite verses and count lashes at the same time, or consistently have continued to wear his cuirass, which would have nullified the infliction of so many stripes.