"Backsliding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spirits, could not be treated quite in the same way as the more peaceful habitants of Lower Canada. The duty of the priest was to look after the souls of his sovereign's subjects, to baptize, marry, and bury them, to confess and absolve them, and keep them from backsliding, to say mass, and to receive the salary due him for celebrating divine service; but, though his personal influence was of course very great, he had no temporal authority, and could not order his people either to fight or to work. Still less could he dispose of their laud, a privilege inhering ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Shrewsbury, then too aged and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern innovations ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... courtier throwing up his pension,— A lawyer working without a fee,— A parson giving charity,— A truly pious methodist preacher,— Are not, egad, so out of nature. Had nature made thee half a fool, But given thee wit to keep a school, I had not stared at thy backsliding: But when thy wit I can confide in, When well I know thy just pretence To solid and exalted sense; When well I know that on thy head Philosophy her lights hath shed, I stand aghast! thy virtues sum to, I wonder what this world will come to! Yet, whence this strain? shall I repine That thou ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... and contention amongst themselves. They had turned aside, it seems, from "that path of simplicity they had been blessed in, to walk in a politic path," and were, accordingly, afflicted, "as the wages of their backsliding hearts," with tumults, and jealousies, and divisions. But the godly officers, says the pious record of Adjutant Allen, met at Windsor Castle! "and there we spent one day together in prayer; inquiring into the causes of that sad dispensation. And, on the morrow, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... first generation of the conquerors had passed away, their successors lapsed into the universal polytheism, with its attendant idolatry and immorality. Instead of thinking of the Israelites as monsters of ingratitude and backsliding, we come nearer the truth, and make a better use of the history, when we see in it a mirror which shows us our own image. The strong earthward pull is ever acting on us, and, unless God hold us up, we too shall slide downwards. 'Hath a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods? but My ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
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