"Desecration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Irk: this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago a railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... her aunt's arms, raised a face that stickily testified to her Uncle Amzi's plentiful provision of candy, and was kissed. Mrs. Waterman, formulating a plan of campaign, took a step toward Susan as though to save the child from this desecration of its innocence; but a glance from Amzi gave ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... last, the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of desecration, of pollution, you see"—he ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... made use of (by a strange stroke of irony) as an apostle of education. Projects are on foot for erecting his statue in positions of honour. Yet we see still in our own neighbourhood, as well as elsewhere, traces of the almost universal desecration of our holy places perpetrated by the fanaticism which he fostered and guided. Was Henry VIII. an Iconoclast, in shattering the monasteries? No less was the crime of Puritanism in dismantling our churches and stripping them of treasures which were beyond price. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... himself; and both, as it happened, fitted in perfectly to the second ideal possibility. To get married with a view to turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... lover, the husband, who are given the key of the sanctuary do not always know how to use it. For myself, without claim, without merit, simply by chance I had been allowed to look through the half-opened door and I had seen the saddest possible desecration, the withered brightness of youth, a spirit neither made cringing nor yet dulled but as if bewildered in quivering hopelessness by gratuitous cruelty; self-confidence destroyed and, instead, a resigned ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... "Desecration—desecration?" quoth she, staring on me great-eyed and biting at her scarlet nether lip. "Ha, dare ye say it, dog?" And crying thus, she hurled the pistol at me with aim so true that I staggered and came nigh falling. Stung by the blow I turned on her in a fury, but she leapt to her ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... should marry. The question was no longer whether this was possible, but only which was the better match and how the matter would be regarded at court. There were, it is true, some rigid individuals unable to rise to the height of such a question, who saw in the project a desecration of the sacrament of marriage, but there were not many such and they remained silent, while the majority were interested in Helene's good fortune and in the question which match would be the more advantageous. Whether it was right or wrong to remarry while one ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... might have had the decency to have waited until his master was laid in the grave. He felt helpless, powerless. He could not doubt that Bullard was playing with him. And in view of the promise to his master he could do nothing to prevent the crime, the desecration as he felt it to be. He could do nothing but look on in silence while they searched, until they found—But stay! he might as well despoil the spoilers when ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... foothills came the faint echoes of a coyote's shrill "ki-yip-yapping"—again and again, as if endeavouring to convey some insidious message. George continued to stare at the pictures. Gad! what a strange fantastic mind the man must have! he mused—what rotten, erratic desecration to shove pictures indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... which intercepts the sight, and prevents it from taking in the whole fall at once. This unsightly object has stood where it now stands since the day of creation, and will probably remain there to the day of judgment. It would be a desecration of nature to remove it by art, but no one could regret if nature in one of her floods were to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... of horror at the act itself, Henry Montagu realized that the desecration was his own thought, his own impulse carried into fierce determination, he sank weak and dizzy into the chair that the boy had left. But again he mastered his frightened mind and thrust away from it the sinister oppression of omen and coincidence. Unwillingly but helplessly, he was letting into his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... paying no heed to her evident resentment, "I have lost my tobacco in the marine disaster, but luckily I have my pipe. I admit the scenery is beautiful here, if we could only see it; but darkness is all around, although the moon is rising. It can therefore be no desecration for me to smoke a pipeful of tobacco, and I am sure the tobacco you keep will be the very best that can be bought. Won't you grant my ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... turned round with it to Meetuck in the hope of obtaining some information. But Meetuck was gone. While the sailors were breaking into the grave, Meetuck had stood aloof with a displeased expression of countenance, as if he were angry at the rude desecration of a countryman's tomb; but the moment his eye fell on the shred of cloth an expression of mingled surprise and curiosity crossed his countenance, and without uttering a word he slipped noiselessly into the hole, from which he almost ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... very river in his operations against Babylon. On the ground over which he now flew mighty armies had fought, kingdoms had been lost and won, four or five thousand years ago. The passage of so modern a thing as an aeroplane seemed almost a desecration of the spirit of antiquity, an insult to the ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... Henry VIII. ordered inquiries to be made into the condition and property of the abbey. Altho he recognized the monarch as supreme head of the church, he respected the Glastonbury traditions and met the "visitors" in a spirit of passive resistance. With the object of preserving them from desecration, the abbot had concealed some of the communion vessels, and for this offense the venerable man was tried and condemned to death. His head, white with the touch of eighty years, was fixt upon the abbey gate, and the rest of his body quartered and sent to Bath, Wells, Bridgwater, and Ilchester. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Job, "I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could have touched it at all without desecration. "How ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... just begun to run between the Circus and Putney, passing the Redcliffe Arms. Already, within a year, the time was historically distant when a policeman had refused to allow the automobile of a Member of Parliament to enter Palace Yard, on the ground that there was no precedent for such a desecration. The new motor-buses, however, did not run at night. Human daring had limits, and it was reported that at least one motor-driver, succumbing to the awful nervous strain of guiding these fast expresses through the traffic of the West End, had been taken to the lunatic asylum. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... personage of high rank at Cologne. It excites considerable attention among virtuosos.——The English, undeterred by the indignation which has been poured out upon Lord Elgin by BYRON and others for rifling Athens of its antiquities for display at home, are practicing the same desecration in regard to the treasures discovered in Nineveh by Mr. Layard. It is announced that the Great Bull and upwards of 100 tons of sculpture excavated by him, may be expected in England in September for the British Museum. The French Government are also making extensive collections ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... think I have no right to complain, but still I am not better satisfied than the child that has eaten its cake and wants to have it too. And I suppose there are many who would call me wretched, and say that my life, with my sorrowful marriage—which was no marriage, but a desecration of that holy state, and a sin—and my hopeless love, is a broken life. Certainly I feel it so. And yet I don't know. With his nature it seems to me that some wrong-doing was inevitable. Do you think my suffering might be ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... extending from the shore up into the mountainous hinterland, thousands of close-crowded acres of heavy green palms." This was in May, 1908. Vailima was at that time the residence of the German Governor (a desecration since happily removed); but the LONDONS were able to explore the gardens and peep in at the rooms whose planning STEVENSON had so enjoyed. Later of course they climbed to the lonely mountain grave of "the little great man"—a phrase oddly reminiscent of one in an unpublished letter of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... aeroplane. But these mountain railways fill me with satisfaction and gratitude. When the Jungfrau railway was first projected, some athletic Englishmen with heavy boots and ice-axes, protested against the "desecration" of regions till then accessible only to them and to me, and others of our age and strength. They declared that the scenery would be injured by the railway and its troops of "tourists." As well might they protest against the desecration caused by the crawling of fifty house-flies on the ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Peace. The nation's critics may continue their indictment, and, pointing out the crises of the hour, paint in dismal hues a picture of the problems never to be solved except by shot and shell. Her skeptics, blinded by thought of the errors of the past, may prophesy the desecration of her honor and the disappointing failure of her hopes. The press may pen a graphic story of the military spirit of the age, and frowning patriarchs relate the deeds of golden days gone by. But ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... — N. misuse, misusage, misemployment^, misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine to crack ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sheltered from the leaden storm, and awaiting the longed-for order to advance and sweep the field at the front. From the grim, gray walls of the great church and convent, which for weeks had been strictly guarded by order of the American generals against all possible intrusion or desecration on part of their men, came frequent flash and report and deadly missile aimed at the helpless wounded, the hurrying ambulances, even at a symbol as sacred as that which towered above its altars—the blood-red ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... dirty desecration of the shrines to which we make our summer pilgrimage, and bear with the sacrilege meekly, perhaps laugh at the wicked generation of pill-venders, that seeks for places to put up its sign. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... the shoulders of a young story writer—between us, be it said, he made a mistake in not combing it oftener—imparted to his brothers the subject for his new novel, which should have made the hair of the others bristle with terror; for the principal episode in this agreeable fiction was the desecration of a dead body in a cemetery by moonlight. There was a sort of hesitation in the audience, a slight movement of recoil, and Sillery, with a dash of raillery in ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... ancestral worship of a people cut off from the advancing civilisation of their time. Luckily for the archaeologist, superstitious beliefs and folk-lore tales have preserved the graves of the Stone Age inhabitants of the country from desecration. As in Norway so in the Isle of Man, and in the ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... argument of most subtle reasoning, to prove that every effort to abolish the office in Spain had been entirely useless: it would exist, and if not publicly acknowledged, would always be liable to abuse and desecration; that the only means of exterminating its secret, and too arrogant power, was to permit its public establishment, and so control it, that its measures should be open to the present, and to every successive sovereign. He allowed the necessity, the imperious necessity of rooting out ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... as had been the custom. This innovation was made by him in his picture of the death of General Wolfe, and created no little disturbance. His friends, including Reynolds, protested against such a desecration of tradition; even the King questioned him, and West replied that the painter should be bound by truth as well as the historian, and to represent a group of English soldiers in the year 1758 as dressed ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... alone will hardly suffice. It is necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis, it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination aside and to substitute ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... of phrase, and whose self-respect even in youth was so profound that it resembles the reverence paid by other men to a far-off and idealized character,—that he should be treated in this offhand familiar fashion by his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, a violation of good manners no less than of the laws of biographic art. Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the insupportable ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... theological opposition as such was ended. Occasionally appeared, it is true, a survival of the old feeling: the Rev. Dr. Laing referred to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey as "a proof that England is no longer a Christian country," and added that this burial was a desecration—that this honour was given him because he had been "the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the species and the ape ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... that she is "fighting for the independence of the small nations," including, of course, Belgium. In further evidence of her humanity she has taken to spraying our soldiers in the West with flaming petrol and squirting boiling pitch over our Russian allies. It is positively a desecration of the word devil to apply it to the Germans whether on land, on or under water, or ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... those wince who feel a sense of their own backslidings. When the Bishop had ended, I determined to walk once through the bazaar just to make sure that there were no lotteries nor games of chance—a desecration of our MITES now too, too frequent. As I was returning through the throng, alas! of PLEASURE-SEEKERS, and wishing that I might scourge them out of the schoolroom, Mr. Crawley met me, in company with a lady ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... little it deserves the name! Our English storms are nothing but babies compared with the appalling blasts which sweep down upon us from the north. In summer the furious seas dash against the cliffs as if to protect them from the desecration of human encroachment. The fine snow filters in between the roof and ceiling of this building, and in a "mild," such as we are now experiencing, it melts, and endless little rivulets trickle down in nearly ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... allied politicians who had made such methods possible. He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own country,—professors, parsons, pacifists and ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... gentlemen, that they shall so plead with you that you will report to the Senate unanimously in favor of the sixteenth amendment, which we ask in order that the women of these United States who shall come after us may be saved the desecration of their homes which we have suffered, and our country may be relieved from the disgrace of refusing representation to that half of its people that men call the better half, because it includes their wives ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... other parts restored at a cost of L6,700, but the architecture was never the same afterwards. Of course the disappointed Romanists attributed the disaster to the Divine anger, and Bishop Pilkington, of Durham, preaching next Sunday at the Cross, to the still continued desecration. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... impulse. When we had finished the first waltz, I left her in the company of one of her Milwaukee friends and started out in quest of some acceptable male partner whose touch of her I should not feel to be a positive desecration. I had reached about the middle of the hall when an affectionate slap on my shoulder caused me ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the crypt was not at that time in the centre of the nave, and the fact that it could be reached from the north side without going into the church would make the desecration seem a far less scandalous proceeding ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... noticed the light flutter of the linen pieces as they were being held aloft, for he involuntarily glanced up. For a moment his tired eyes looked out upon the desecration, then ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn. The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene. O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the sacredness ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... dropped her face in her hands. For quite unbidden, with a shock of surprise and pain that made her heart stand still for a moment, and then set it beating wildly, a name had come to her lips—the name of one so wise and good in her esteem that to speak it at such a time, even in her thoughts, seemed desecration. ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... It would be unpardonable desecration to enter the chamber of Father Beret's soul and look upon his sacred and secret trouble; nor must we even speculate as to its particulars. The good old man writhed and wrestled before the cross for a long time, until at last he seemed to receive the calmness and strength he prayed for so ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... supply his grave-clothes. The Marechal de Chaulnes and the Due de Luxembourg, his brothers, with whom at his first entrance into life he had shared his slender income, and whom in his after days of prosperity he had alike ennobled and enriched, looked on in silence at this desecration of his remains, lest by resenting the outrage they should incur the displeasure of the King; and it is on record that the Abbe Rucellai and one of his friends alone had the courage and generosity to furnish the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy. Offerings are still laid upon the grave. In Traitor's Bay, Mr. Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son's. And the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an English ship and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it called the Puritans to prayer, till at last it also summoned the priest-led Indians and 'habitans' across hundreds of miles of winter and of wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration,—this fateful bell still hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and vespers for nearly two centuries the children of those who fought so pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... flowers came down in a pink shower, and in this way in half a minute every bird made a twig bare where he could sit perched at ease. There were millions of blossoms; only one here and there would ever be a peach, yet it vexed me to see the parrots cut them off in that heedless way: it was a desecration, a crime even ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... would never allow the walls of the chapel to be desecrated by such a notice. The bailiff, a most respectable and temperate man, did his utmost to pacify the excited mob. He reasoned with them as best he could; and assured them that no desecration was intended—that he was only carrying out the law, which required that the notice should be posted on the chapel walls. But his voice had no more power than if he had spoken to a storm of wind; they leaped ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... happened to have her handkerchief in her hand, and stuffed it into her mouth so tightly that she came near suffocating. Judge Owen still stood in the doorway, his face judicially severe and portentous, as if he felt that some awful desecration had been committed, for which the full severity of the criminal law could scarcely be ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... brambles and in all covered with a rank vegetation. It had been a very sultry day, and the blaze of the meridian heat still inflamed the air; the kine for shelter, rather than for sustenance, had wandered through some broken arches, and were lying in the shadow of the nave. This desecration of a spot, once sacred, still beautiful and solemn, jarred on the feelings of Egremont. He sighed and turning away, followed a path that after a few paces led him into the cloister garden. This was a considerable quadrangle; once surrounding the garden of the monks, but all that remained ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... been so deep, nor the effect so quick and great; but Mahomet, the camel-driver! Centuries of feud, hate, crimination, and wars—rapine, battles, sieges, massacres, humiliations, lopping of territory, treaties broken, desecration of churches, spoliation of altars, were ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... far as she could under the doorway, offended in her sovereign pride and disgusted as gentlewomen are at the sight of drunkenness. By her side, Gilbert drew himself up as if protesting against a sacrilege and against the desecration of his holiest thoughts. He knew that such men would often be as riotous again before they reached Jerusalem, and that it would be absurd to expect anything else. But meanwhile he realized what a little more of disgust would be enough to make him hate what was before him. For a moment he forgot ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... realization of the higher life, is taken as an end, and becomes the grave of idealism. With a reiteration that becomes almost wearisome, but which is the measure of the need for the warning, Philo protests against this desecration of life, of liberty, and of Judaism. His position is, that a free and cultured Jewry must pursue the mission of Israel alike by the example of the righteous life devoted to the service of God, and by the preaching of God's revealed word. This is his "burden of the word of the Lord" ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... peril and trial; that disease and heat, hunger and thirst, must be dared, as well as the sword of the infidel. But he spoke of the grand nature of the work, of the humiliation to Christians, of the desecration of the shrines, and of the glory which awaited those who joined the Crusade, whether they lived or whether they ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... reverse, for some critics, was also true, and Pope should not have used epic allusions and devices in The Dunciad. Edward Ward, for one, thought the poem an incongruous mixture "against all rule."[13] Pope's violation of "rule" seemed almost a desecration of epic to Thomas Cooke; of the mock-heroic games in Book II of The Dunciad, he complained that "to imitate Virgil is not to have Games, and those beastly and unnatural, because Virgil has noble and reasonable Games, but to preserve a Purity of ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... desecration that just now the father should come stumbling into the scene, filling the room with the fumes of liquor and muttering drunken curses. But Maggie was beyond the reach of human harm. This would ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And then, besides—ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... paralleled in savage history. One hour of such a catastrophe would destroy the creations of a quarter of a century, and expose the homes of nearly two hundred thousand souls to every conceivable form of desecration."[G] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... oratories; neither might laymen give the elements to themselves, nor approach the altar, nor teach. Offerings for the dead were authorized, and the mixed chalice made obligatory. Contrary to the occidental custom, fasting on Saturday was forbidden. The mutilation of the Scriptures and the desecration of sacred places were severely condemned; likewise the use of the lamb as the symbol for Christ (a favourite symbol in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... months; but the third reading was carried by one hundred and four against fifty-four. In the lords the second reading encountered no opposition, objections to it being reserved for the committee. In the committee the Bishop of Exeter moved, in order to avoid the desecration of the marriage contract when the ceremony was not performed in church, that the parties should make the following declaration:—"In the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, I, M., do take thee, N., to be my wedded wife, according to God's holy ordinance; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Ito; the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna in the "Gita," a book that is to Hindus what the "Imitation of Christ" is to emotional Christians—all these are pressed into the service of inflaming impressionable minds. The last instance is perhaps the worst. I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses of preaching ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... has almost charm. There is something slummy and unwashed-looking about the black blight. These insects are as foul as a stagnant pond. Though they have wings, they seem incapable of flight. They are microbes of a larger growth—a disease and a desecration. On the other hand, there is one good point about them: they are very stupid. Instead of spreading themselves out along the entire extent of the bean and so lessening their peril, they mass themselves in hordes in the ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... actually been built between the buttresses of the church, for their comparative diminutiveness, quaint style, and close incorporation with the pile, caused us to think them, at first, a part of the edifice itself. This desecration of the Gothic is of very frequent occurrence on the continent of Europe, taking its rise in the straitened limits of fortified towns, the cupidity of churchmen, and the general indifference to knowledge, and, consequently, to taste, which depressed ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... money; that they should have scoffed at all that was noble and generous, both in religion and in earthly things; all that was nothing to them. And now they would insult the great God Himself by believing that all He cared for was a little mass in a convent chapel. What desecration! What debasement! When I went to M. le Cure, he smiled at my vehemence. There was pain in his smile, and it might be indignation; but he was not ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... for him a kind of Sound-Temple as it were, protected from desecration by the hills and desolate spaces that surrounded it. From dawn to darkness its halls and corridors echoed with the singing violin, Skale's booming voice, Miriam's gentle tones, and his own plaintive yet excited note, while outside the old grey walls ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... compelled to come into the fold than from the misinterpretation of any other text in the sacred scriptures. If any civilized power in the world to-day should send an expeditionary force into a heathen country, which should signalize its arrival therein by the desecration of its temples and the destruction of its idols, the commander would be recalled at once. We have learned other methods, methods of persuasion, of reason, of love. The age of Cortes knew nothing of these methods, and he was only following out the common practice when he ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... first to be disarmed, and then to be made the victim of an invasion characterized by such barbarous atrocities as shame the civilization of the age. The wrongs she suffered, the brave efforts of her unarmed people to defend their hearthstones and their liberties against the desecration and destruction of both, form a melancholy chapter in the history of the United States, which all who would cherish their fair fame must wish ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... horrible carnage of the Moslem ensued, in which Godfrey, although unable to check, refused to share. His first act was to retire from his comrades, and with three attendants to repair, unarmed and barefooted, to the Church of the Sepulchre. His vow was accomplished, and the desecration of one holy site atoned for by the preservation of another yet holier. This act of devotion, so worthy of the true Crusader, recalled from carnage those who had forgotten their vows in the thirst for vengeance, and the whole army, led by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... another, and I became almost oblivious to all thought of dressing until the gong rang for breakfast. I felt rebellious, and, on that morning at least, the meal seemed a desecration, the sacrifice of an opportunity. Once before, I had a similar early morning experience; that was at Laggan, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, when, on awakening, I beheld directly opposite my window lovely Lake Louise and the beautiful ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... It seems a desecration of these rapids thus to subdue and triumph over them. They are as if placed there by Nature as a sportive check to man's further intrusion; and as the waters come hurrying down, led, as it were, by some Undine jealous for her realm, their murmurings ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... back, seeing that the desecration of the article had been completed, plucked up heart of courage and put in her little request; "I think I might have a needle-case out of it," said she, "just as a suvneer of the poor general"—and a long fragment cut rapidly out of the waistband ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... visitor who is a stranger must be prepared for a regrettable amount of waste paper and broken bottles left about to mar what would otherwise be one of the finest scenes in the Downs. Refreshment stalls and tea gardens help to vulgarize the surroundings, though the added desecration of aerial railway across the Dyke ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... that God sometimes shaves nations: "In the same day shall the Lord shave with the razor that is hired." With one sharp sweep He went across Judea and down went its pride and its power. In 1861 God shaved our nation. We had allowed to grow Sabbath desecration, and oppression, and blasphemy, and fraud, and impurity, and all sorts of turpitude. The South had its sins, and the North its sins, and the East its sins, and the West its sins. We had been warned again and again, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... month, later, Mrs. Graham refers to the gay and fashionable circles to which they were introduced in Quebec, and mentions her visiting the beautiful falls of Montmorency; but mourns over the low state of religion, and the prevailing desecration of the Sabbath. ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... salons.' He admitted this, and asked if I supposed that the number of serious readers was affected by this arrangement. As I hesitated to answer, he told me that at first a considerable party in Freeland saw in this combination of reading with recreative intercourse a desecration of science. But all opposition was given up when it was seen that the possibility of alternating study with cheerful conversation very largely increased the number of readers. Of course the Association for Providing Refreshments—for this, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... from him. My husband must be a Christ-like man. I have very strong convictions, you see, on the subject of the sanctity and responsibilities of marriage. There are certain conditions which I hold to be essential on both sides. I hold also that human beings are sacred and capable of deep desecration, and that marriage, their closest bond, is sacred too, the holiest relationship in life, and one which should only be entered upon with the greatest care, and in the most reverent spirit. I see no reason why marriage should be a lottery. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... superior article, and well worth the price charged for it, but he was "humbugging" the public by this queer way of arresting attention. It turned out just as he anticipated, that English travelers in that part of Egypt were indignant at this desecration, and they wrote back to the London Times (every Englishman writes or threatens to "write to the Times," if anything goes wrong,) denouncing the "Goth" who had thus disfigured these ancient pyramids by writing on them in monstrous letters: "Buy Warren's Blacking, 30 Strand, London." The Times ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... alternate excitement, curiosity, and a vivid sense of desecration and sacrilege. For the life of him he could not make the thing seem right or legal in his eyes, and yet he had neither the wish nor the power to stay his hand or interfere with what Kitchell ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... of it makes it almost desecration to touch it. It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the week, and a list of virtues, with spaces against each for marks. this, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... circumstances that make these occupations a desecration of the Lord's day, and as such evidently they cannot be tolerated. They must not be boisterous to the extent of disturbing the neighbor's rest and quiet, or detracting from the reverence due the Sabbath; ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... as possible, and thus leave the ship only a very brief length of time to prepare for defence when our intention to attack her became no longer possible of concealment. I remonstrated with him upon this desecration of the colours that he had once fought and hoped to win fame under; but of course my remonstrance was quite useless, the rascal only ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... nothing less than a holy feeling; and without doubt the person whose rule of modesty has been transgressed feels the same sort of wound that he would feel if something made holy to him by his religion had suffered a desecration. I say "rule of modesty" because there are about a million rules in the world, and this makes a million standards to be looked out for. Major Sleeman mentions the case of some high-caste veiled ladies who ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who care for appearance more than sympathy. But you are not such a man! It is not as if we had been friends; it is not as if we had ever spoken. It is wicked to call such a foolish fancy by the name of love; it is desecration." ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... made up for when the drumming, smashing, and brass-blurting of the overture to "Zampa" was noised forth: this was encored with ecstacies, and so were some of the quadrilles. Happy musical taste! Beethoven's septour, arranged as a set of quadrilles, is a desecration unworthy of Musard. For this piece of bad taste he ought to be condemned to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... great religious teachers—some of them very great indeed—have thought and taught contemptuously of our animal nature. "He spake of the temple of His body." That is sublime! That is the whole secret. And that is why vice is horrible: because it is the desecration, not of a hovel or a shop, of a marketplace or a place of business: ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... drop of blood in your veins? Has your manhood rotted into cowardice? Wake up and take your place in the class struggle. For the desecration of the flag your leader is in jail. What flag? The flag of the capitalist class—the flag that floats over the bull pens of Colorado. The wholesome truths he stamped upon its stripes are your shame and your masters' crime. Rally ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... stand in that chaos of destruction, that ribald havoc, that desecration of all we think of as sacred, and see, stretched from one broken tombstone to another, the telephone wires that connect the trenches at the foot of the street with ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Jackson, Jr., Esq., the Grand Seignior. Patrick Dooley, Secretary, was in his place on the right of the Grand Seignior. The meeting was large, and a more desperate looking collection of men have rarely assembled in a convention in our city. Such desecration of the evening of the Sabbath has never before been witnessed here. After the opening of the meeting, one of the members took early occasion to remark substantially, that it must have been noticed by all present, as well as himself, that the city was full of ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, "Oh, don't hurt it, Bill Murray! Oh, be careful! Don't let it ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... difficulties only to lie down here silently, uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove even one ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... as high priest one Phannias—a country priest, ignorant, boorish, and wholly unable to discharge the function of the office. Hitherto, the people had submitted to the oppression of the Zealots, but this desecration of the holy office filled them with rage and indignation; and Ananus—the oldest of the chief priests, a man of piety and wisdom—was the head of the movement and, calling the people together, exhorted them to resist ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... and from the same source, so nettled me, that I greatly fear, all my respect for the foreign office and those who live thereby, would not have saved them from something most unlike a blessing, had not Monsieur Schnetz saved diplomacy from such desecration by saying, that if I could content myself with a plain suit, such as civilians wore, he would do his endeavour to ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Gower watched the successful progress of the play with an anxiety almost as keen as that of the author. To Helen it seemed as though the giving of these lines to the public—these lines which he had so often read to her, and altered to her liking—was a desecration. It seemed as though she were losing him indeed—as though he now belonged to these strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted scene before ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Mrs. Borrachsohn belonged to the school of mothers who believed in winter underwear until the first of June, and Isaac felt nothing. But Eva Gonorowsky saw and shuddered, hiding her eyes from the symbol and the desecration. Patrick glowered at her, filled his brush again, bent quickly down, and branded the bare and mottled legs of his enemy ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... he knew its history, and she became keenly interested. She had at times a strong feeling of the past life still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated life had intruded. She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty secret was a desecration or only a continuance of something ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... remains of my husband disturbed." The sergeant pushed her roughly aside, and with the end of his pike prised up the lid of the coffin, while Mrs. Martin and the other three mourners screamed lustily and wrung their hands in the greatest grief at this desecration ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... apartment, with the odour of fried onions below, and the four children and the phonograph overhead. And Anna would have to go on pinch-hitting for cook, and waitress, and chambermaid, and bottle-washer—she would have to go on with the desecration of her beautiful hands in dish-water, and the ruin of her complexion over the kitchen-stove. The clothes that he had planned to buy for her, the jewels, the splendid car—the cohort of servants he had planned for her—the social prestige! And instead of that, he was nothing ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... a mite surprised!" replied Cornelia, with a depth of meaning which her hearers failed to fathom. They imagined that she was humbly appreciative of her own good fortune in visiting a neighbourhood as yet preserved from the desecration of the American tourists, whereas she was mentally reviewing the sleepy shops where the assistants took a solid five minutes to procure twopence change, the broken-down flies which crawled to and from the station; the tortoise-like round of ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... most gracious smiles and her most captivating manners to society, is false to her husband and her home. The prettiest gown and the brightest jewels should grace her own dinner table. To bring them out only to attend a reception, or a tea party, is a desecration. Many women expend their moral and spiritual strength upon the "club," and bring the withering remnants as a sacrifice to the blighted home fireside. We have no right to help build a church, or ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Mercurius Rusticus, which has given vogue to the common story is wholly untrue." He further adds: "Some fanatic soldier may, indeed, according to the story, have broken off the head of Queen Elizabeth, mistaking her for our Lady. But no general mutilation or desecration took place at this time. And at Exeter, one form of mutilation, which specially affected the west front, was not the work of enemies but of devotees. For ages the country folk who came into the city ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... volleyed beautifully, and darted across the court with a fleetness and a surety both delightful to observe. So interested were they in the battle that they forgot all about the mason, till the butler came out, and announced that the desecration had begun. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... (XXXVIII.-XL.) and calls Vishnu the servant of Siva: a Puranic legal work called the Vriddha-Harita-Samhita is said to contain a polemic against Siva. Occasionally we hear of collisions between the followers of Vishnu and Siva or the desecration of temples by hostile fanatics. But such conflicts take place most often not between widely different sects but between subdivisions of the same sect, e.g., Tengalais and Vadagalais. It would seem too that at present most Hindus of the higher castes avoid ostentatious membership of the modern ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... day we visited another hospital; that known as the Hospital de Jesus—hallowed ground; for here the mortal remains of Cortes were deposited. And, though rescued from desecration by a distinguished individual, during a popular tumult, so that they no longer repose in the sanctuary of the chapel, there still exists, enshrined here, that over which time and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca |
