"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... le cure will tell you that a fortnight ago I was chained to my arm-chair, swearing under my breath like a pagan, and cursing the follies of my youth!—Forgive me, my father; I mean that I had the gout, and I forgot that I am not the only sufferer, and that it racks the old age of the philosopher quite as much as ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... by the Wild Woman's story of the hardships she had suffered, and the godless company she had been driven to keep—Egyptians, jugglers, outlaws and even sorcerers, who are masters of the pagan lore of the East, and still practice their dark rites among the simple folk of the hills. Yet she would not have him think wholly ill of this vagrant people, from whom she had often received food and comfort; and her worst danger, as he ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... scold from Termagantes, a cruel Pagan, formerly represented in diners shows and entertainments, where being dressed a la Turque, in long clothes, he was mistaken for ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... in him had gone further than I had feared. He was now utterly contemptuous of criticism and would listen to no counsel. He was gross, too, the rich food and wine seemed to ooze out of him and his manner was defiant, hard. He was like some great pagan determined to live his own life to the very fullest, careless of what others might say or think or do. Even the stories which he wrote about this time show the worst side of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the same—always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled," said Stangrave,—he was given to half-mystic utterances, and hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret Fuller Ossoli,—"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... solitude,—just where the line of water conservation, creeping northward from the Lachlan, here and there touched the line creeping southward from the Darling,— I was standing in the veranda of the barracks, on Goolumbulla station, when the narangies' pagan henchman announced, "Brekfit leddy, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... cathedral," he said to the verger; "I shouldn't like to leave Winchester without having seen it; that is to say without having seen it again. I was here forty years ago, when I was a boy; but I have been in India five-and-thirty years, and have seen nothing but Pagan temples." ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... our impending doom: That Emperour, Charles of France the Douce, Into this land is come, us to confuse. I have no host in battle him to prove, Nor have I strength his forces to undo. Counsel me then, ye that are wise and true; Can ye ward off this present death and dule?" What word to say no pagan of them knew, Save Blancandrin, of th' Castle ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... hibernates under the chilling influence of rationalism, and that it would start into active life if that influence were ever seriously relaxed. The truth seems to be that to this day the peasant remains a pagan and savage at heart; his civilization is merely a thin veneer which the hard knocks of life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition under the crust of civilized ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... had helped to prepare the way for romantic realism by his choice of living themes. Louis XVI, though decked in epic dignity, was something that touched and interested the age; and Bonaparte, even in pagan apotheosis, was so positive a subject that the improvvisatore acquired a sort of truth and sincerity in celebrating him. Bonaparte might not be the Sun he was hailed to be, but even in Monti's verse he was a soldier, ambitious, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... of Manila, I am told, is writing to your Majesty, petitioning you to command that his stipend be increased. Having considered the reasons that he gives—and that, even if there were no other than his residing here in the gaze of so many pagan nations and those of different sects, as the representative of the greatest ecclesiastical dignity—his desire for the means to discharge so many obligations as he has seems as just, for this reason and for the others regarding the archbishopric, as would be unjust my neglect to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... better the churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle. There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most disgusting ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... affinities of Germany are rather with Japan than with Judaea. For in Japan, too, beneath all the romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater scale of the mediaeval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... time, instead of ornamenting construction, they constructed ornament; and as the Reformation came to the Church in the sixteenth century so to architecture came degradation. And then the Renaissance of pagan types, from which the Gothic had derived its being by a rational development, was by the revivalists of those days hotch-potched into a more or less homogeneous mass, which even the genius of Wren could ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... the youth ponder. It was revealed to him that he had been a barbarian, a beast. He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion. Regarding it, he saw that it was fine, wild, and, in some ways, easy. He had been a tremendous figure, no doubt. By this struggle he had overcome obstacles which he had admitted to be mountains. They had fallen like paper ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... release from the Old Tower, his youngest child succumbed to the ravages of a malignant fever. He and his wife were distracted, as, in spite of their pagan instincts and habits, their devotion to their offspring was a passion. They remembered Mr. Turnbull appealing to them to flee from the wrath to come by amending their ways, lest something terrible befell themselves ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... kindly and in a private capacity, of the danger of his situation, a danger so much the greater in that he and his people would meet with the less consideration, seeing that they kept up the religion of their pagan forefathers. Morvan gave attentive ear to this sermon, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his foot tapping it from time to time. Ditcar thought he had succeeded; but an incident supervened. It was the hour when Morvan's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... Star of Bethlehem, and these also have been works of imagination. We have been told, for instance, that it was the morning star of a new day for humanity. But this is a falsehood, which the clergy palmed off on ignorant congregations. The world was happier under the government of the great Pagan emperors than it has ever been under the dominion of Christianity. For a thousand years the triumph of the Cross was the annihilation of everything that makes life pleasant and dignified. The Star of Bethlehem shone in a sky of utter blackness. All the constellations of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Arabs, and have trusted them less. Though perhaps he would not have thrown me down the precipice, even had I given him nothing, yet it was wicked of him to play with me in a place of such danger. If an Arab had done so, I should have been pleased at his play, and should have held him to be a good pagan; but I believe no good of that Christian.' When he rejoined his party, the patron told him that the Eastern Christians were least to be trusted ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... old English Epic.... There is not one word about our England in the poem.... The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English to its very root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... in regard to human love, and happiness flowing from it, as her father had taught her to be respecting God and the joy of believing. Though seemingly a fair young girl, her father had made her worse than a pagan. She believed in nothing save art and her father's wisdom. He seemed to embody the culture and worldly philosophy that now became, in her judgment, the only things worth living for. To gain his confidence became her great desire. But this had received a severe shock. Mr. Ludolph ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... she knows more of our way of speaking, then we must teach her; it is a sad thing for Christian children to live with an untaught pagan," said Louis, who, being rather bigoted in his creed, felt a sort of uneasiness in his own mind at the poor girl's total want of the rites of his church; but Hector and Catharine regarded her ignorance with feelings ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... That which causes most inquiry to this commerce and communication, is the diversion of the commerce between the Yndias and Espana to other kingdoms, not belonging to his Majesty, but heathen and pagan; such is now the case between Nueva Espana, Peru, and the Filipinas, which receive annually two million pesos of silver; all of this wealth passes into the possession of the Chinese, and is not brought to Espana, to the consequent loss of the royal duties, and injury to the inhabitants ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... Roman empire, in which the Pax Romana had provided a mould of widespread civilisation for the Church's growth, was at length broken up in the western half of it, by Teuton invaders occupying its provinces. These were all, at the time of their settlement, either pagan or Arian. There followed, in a certain lapse of time, the creation of a body of States whose centre of union and belief was the See of Peter. That is the creation of Christendom proper. The wonder seen is that the northern ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... of the valley. Now I saw in my dream, that at the end of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; and while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, POPE and PAGAN, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, and ashes, &c., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learnt since, that PAGAN has been dead many ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... never looked up in his face like that. He could not himself have told why; but Charlotte had never for one moment lost sight of the individual, and the respect due him, in her lover. Rose, in the heart of New England, bred after the precepts of orthodoxy, was a pagan, and she worshipped Love himself. Barney was simply the statue that represented the divinity; another might have done as well had the sculpture ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... homage paid, And made their death-day holy, as we see Still in the Calendar, and still to be! And long the Shoemaker has felt the claim, And proved him joyful at such lofty fame; For theirs it was by more than blood allied, Alike they worshipp'd, and alike they died! Nor minded how the Pagan nipp'd their youth— They are not dead who suffer for the Truth! The skies receive them, and the earth's warm heart In grateful duty ever plays its part, Embalms their memory to all future time, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... that I thought them Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where their beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what they talked of in their divine language, and with that ineffable tonic accent which no foreigner perfectly acquires, and let us for once translate the profanities Pagan and Christian, which ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... me, and had not read a dozen pages, when I was convinced that I ought to be ashamed of myself to think how greatly I have admired less noble and less natural beauties in Pagan authors; while I have known nothing of this all-exciting collection of beauties, the Bible! By my faith, Lovelace, I shall for the future have a better opinion of the good sense and taste of half a score of parsons, whom I have fallen in with in my time, and despised for magnifying, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... With struggle and sorrow and vengeful act 'Gainst Puritan, pagan, and priest. Where wolf and panther and serpent ceased, Man added the horrors your dark ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... These pagan meditations were interrupted by a footfall slowly approaching. I did not turn to ascertain who it might be, but trusted it was no one of importance, as the poddy and I presented rather a grotesque appearance. It was one of ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... thus of a passage by Mr. Wesley: "In the doctrinal Tracts, p. 172, is an address to Satan, which we have no hesitation in saying is fraught with the most concentrated blasphemy ever proceeding from the tongue or pen of mortal, whether Jew, Pagan, or Infidel, and all imputed to the Calvinists. One cannot help wondering how such transcendent impieties ever found their way into the mind of man; I am not willing to transfer the language to these pages; but the work is doubtless accessible to most ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... interval of a solar year. Why he should choose to express that interval by fifty, rather than by fifty-two, weeks, may be surmised in two ways: first, because the latter phrase would be unpoetical and unmanageable; and, secondly, because he might fancy that the week of the Pagan Theseus would be more appropriately represented by a lunar quarter than by a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... of soil for their roots. Poor happy children! You are all dead a long while ago now, and have long been hushed in the great humming sleep and silence of Time; the modern world has no time nor room for people like you, with so much kindness and so little ambition . . . . Yet their free pagan souls were given a chance to be penned within the Christian fold; the priest accompanied the gunner and the bloodhound, the missionary walked beside the slave-driver; and upon the bewildered sun-bright surface of their minds the shadow of the cross was for a moment thrown. Verily to them the professors ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... morality in idolatrous systems. The notion that the service of a god implies any duties in common life beyond ceremonial ones is wholly foreign to paganism in all its forms. The establishment of the opposite idea is wholly the consequence of revelation. So we need not wonder if the pagan conception of service was here in the minds of the vowing assembly. If we look at their vow, as recorded in verses 16-18, we see nothing in it which necessarily implies a loftier idea. Jehovah is their national God, who has fought and conquered for them, therefore they will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... call it their "prayer in stone," which suggests to recollection the story of the cathedral of Amiens, whose architectural construction and arrangement of statuary and paintings made it to be called the Bible of that city. The Frankish church was reared upon the spot where, in pagan times, one bitter winter day, a Roman soldier parted his mantle with his sword and gave half of the garment to a naked beggar; and so was memorialized in art and stone what was called the divine spirit ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... a sanction to all morality, but is forced to construct a mythology which outrages all moral considerations. Taken as a serious statement of fact, the anthropomorphism of the vulgar belief was open to the objections which Socrates brought against the Pagan mythology. The supreme ruler was virtually represented ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... course of centuries, ever growing, never wavering, looking eagerly to the South and to an unfulfilled destiny, and possessing both the energy of barbarism in its subjects and the subtlety of civilization in its rulers. The two former of these five empires were Pagan, the two next Mahometan, the last Christian, but schismatic; all have been persecutors of the Church, or, at least, instruments of evil against her children. The Russians I shall dismiss; the Turks, who form my proper subject, I shall postpone. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... pagan mysteries into lower and more literal forms, the Ivy preserved two meanings. It was already the vine of life, and the early Christians laid it in the coffins of their departed, as the emblem of a new life in Christ.[4] It had hung upon the limbs of naked nymphs, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fresh flowers or those metal wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated, mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Most pagan religions belong to this category and pharisaic Judaism as well. This is also the tendency of certain Catholics of the old school for whom the great thing is to appease God or to buy the protection of the Virgin and the saints by means ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... children of Cromwell's Puritan soldiers were beginning to grow rich by importing slaves for Roman Catholic Spaniards, the Maroons still held their own wild empire in the mountains, and, being sturdy heathens every one, practised Obeah rites in approved pagan fashion. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... engaged in so holy an avocation would have been a great protection from any Christian soldiery; but the monks entirely misconceived the nature of the impulses by which human nature is governed, in supposing that it would have any restraining influence upon the pagan Danes. The first thing the ferocious marauders did, on breaking into the sacred precincts of the chapel, was to cut down the venerable abbot at the altar, in his sacerdotal robes, and then to push forward the work of slaying every other inmate of the abbey, ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... encouraged by religion, as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews—as in Abraham, David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic laws—the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has religion modified this tendency, sanctified ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... it does not make one hold one's breath like some of the dramatic episodes: "Whatever religious instinct had been in the family had spent itself at least two generations before her time. She was a pagan—a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful pagan.... But she was none the less a Puritan. Certain of her ways of thought and habits of life, had survived the beliefs which had given them birth, as an effect will often outlive its cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Antoine had always cut the choicest buds of his roses and set them in a delf pot in front of it, every other morning all the summer long. Bebee, whose religion was the sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly equal in strength and in ignorance,—Bebee filled the delf pot anew carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers who ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... almost completely done its work, and the old Finnish element could be detected merely in certain peculiarities of physiognomy and accent." This amalgamation extends to their religions—prayers wholly pagan devoutly uttered under the shadow of a strange cross, next the Finnish god Yumak sharing honors equally with the Virgin, finally a Christianity pure in doctrine and outward forms except for the survival of old pagan ceremonies in ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... similarly honoured at Embrun. When the Protestants took that town in 1585, they found, among the relics of the principal church, the Phallus of St. Foutin. The devotees of that town, in imitation of pagan ones, made libations to this obscene idol. They poured wine over the extremity of the Phallus, which was dyed red by it. This wine being afterwards collected and allowed to turn sour, was called the holy vinegar, and, according to the author from whom ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, living out all their days on remote hilltops, seeing the white dawn and the purple even, and the world ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... world as far as possible the remains of the declining Roman and Greek culture. It became hostile to Greek and Latin literature and art and sought to repress them. In the rise of new languages and literature in new nationalities every attempt was made by the church to destroy the effects of the pagan life. The poems and sagas treating of the religion and mythologies of these young, rising nationalities were destroyed. The monuments of the first beginnings of literature, the products of a period so hard to compass by the historian, were served in the same way ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... by Sir Thomas Dale, might be far from the Christian work intended." One Nanamack, a lad brought over by Lord Delaware, lived some years in houses where "he heard not much of religion but sins, had many times examples of drinking, swearing and like evils, ran as he was a mere Pagan," till he fell in with a devout family and changed his life, but died before he was baptized. Accompanying Pocahontas was a councilor of Powhatan, one Tomocomo, the husband of one of her sisters, of whom Purchas says in his "Pilgrimes": "With this savage I have often conversed with my good friend ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... others of his party, but these were but the criticisms levelled in all ages against those who are in advance of their time, nor do they require serious refutation. The English Humanists had nothing in common with the neo-pagan writers of the Italian Renaissance as regards religion, and they gave no indication of hostility to Rome. Whatever other influences may have contributed to bring about the religious revolution in England, it was certainly not due to the Renaissance, for to a man its disciples ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... of Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the O'Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Grasshopper, or the Marine, or the Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... between Mahometans and idolaters. But, if our Government does take a part, there cannot be a doubt that Mahometanism is entitled to the preference. Lord Ellenborough is of a different opinion. He takes away the gates from a Mahometan mosque, and solemnly offers them as a gift to a Pagan temple. Morally, this is a crime. Politically, it is a blunder. Nobody who knows anything of the Mahometans of India can doubt that this affront to their faith will excite their fiercest indignation. Their susceptibility on such points is extreme. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sobriety unto others), together with all publicke dice-play in the Hall (a most pernicious, infamous game; condemned in all ages, all places, not onely by councels, fathers, divines, civilians, canonists, politicians, and other Christian writers; by divers Pagan authors of all sorts, and by Mahomet himselfe; but likewise by sundry heathen, yea, Christian ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call upon the Muse ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... he do, I'll die a sturdy martyr. And to the last preach to thee, pagan Percy, Till I have made a convert. Answer me, Is not this idol of thy heathen worship That sent thee hither a despairing pilgrim; Thy goddess, Geraldine, is she ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... welcome brave allies. That our gallant Tracy was the beautiful Begum's favourite soon became notorious to all; and not less so, that the Begum herself was precisely in the same interesting situation as Mrs. James Stuart. The two ladies, Pagan and Christian, were, technically speaking, running a race together. Well, just as times drew nigh, poor Lieutenant Stuart was unfortunately killed in an insurrection headed by some fanatics, who disapproved of foreign friends, and perhaps of their princess's situation. His death ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... were full as curious as was I concerning Madame de Contrecoeur—perhaps more so, because not one of them but believed her the Sorceress which unhappy circumstances had obliged her to pretend to be. Pagan or Christian, no Indian is ever ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... tobacco must be regarded as the most astonishing of the productions of nature, since, although unsightly, offensive, and, perhaps, in every way pernicious, it has, in the short period of about three centuries, subdued not one particular nation, but the whole world, Christian and Pagan, into a bondage more abject and irremediable than was ever known to tyranny or superstition. Kings have forbidden it; popes have anathematized it; and physicians have warned against it. Even ministers ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Matthew, the reference is to the Jews even at the time when it was yet lawful to keep the legal observances, in so far as he whom they converted to Judaism "from paganism, was merely misled; but when he saw the wickedness of his teachers, he returned to his vomit, and becoming a pagan deserved greater punishment for his treachery." Hence it is manifest that it is not blameworthy to draw others to the service of God or to the religious life, but only when one gives a bad example to the person ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... degree that is remarkable, and has produced singular and favorable results on the national character, which it is hoped may be imparted to the land to which they are flocking in such multitudes. For with all their peculiarities of pagan philosophy and their oriental eccentricities of custom and practical life, they are everywhere renowned for their uniform and elegant courtesy—a most commendable virtue, and one arising from habitual deference to the aged more than from ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... attention on what might else have been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten; while the ominous words of Dandie - heard, not heeded, and still remembered - had lent to her thoughts, or rather to her mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea of Fate - a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure, lawless, and august - moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian men. Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare and seems so simple and violent, like a disruption of life's tissue, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... divided into fifteen books, and there is a short introductory narrative called "The Finding of the Tain," and a short closing narrative called "The Writing of the Tain"; these form a sort of Early Christian frame to the great Pagan tale. ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... comfort in this stoical thought of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance, and does it satisfy religious souls? The upstart, the rogue, the tyrant, the rake, and all those haughty sinners who make an ill use of life, and whose steps are dogged by Death, will be surely punished; but can the reflection ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... explained away from downright fighting. A good double thrashing was the inevitable penalty, but all without avail; fighting went on without the slightest abatement, like natural storms; for no punishment less than death could quench the ancient inherited belligerence burning in our pagan blood. Nor could we be made to believe it was fair that father and teacher should thrash us so industriously for our good, while begrudging us the pleasure of thrashing each other for our good. All these various thrashings, however, were admirably influential in ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people of ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... takes the view that the account of the miracles of Apollonius is derived from the narrative of Christ's miracles, and has been concocted by people anxious to degrade the character of the Saviour. The attempt to make him appear as a pagan Christ has ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... God Whom Carpophorus adored? Why, from this what inference follows? Only this, if it be so, That Daria He defends, But the poor Carpophorus, no. And as I am much more likely His sad fate to undergo, Than to be like her protected, I to change my faith am loth. So part pagan and part christian I 'll remain—a bit of ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... party. She was a devout Roman Catholic, and it is a creed which forms an excellent prop in hours of danger. To her, to the Anglican Colonel, to the Nonconformist minister, to the Presbyterian American, even to the two Pagan black riflemen, religion in its various forms was fulfilling the same beneficent office,—whispering always that the worst which the world can do is a small thing, and that, however harsh the ways of Providence may seem, it is, on the whole, the ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... to Hermes, and lay at the root of the physical philosophy of Pythagoras. The quotation in the text is from the "Golden Verses," given in Passow's lexicon under the word tetraktys: nai ma ton hametera psycha paradonta tetraktyn, pagan aenaou physeos. "The most sacred of all things," said this famous teacher, "is Number; and next to it, that which gives Names;" a truth that the lapse of three thousand years is just ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... portion. Fond and too persuading eyes Fixed on her, a traitor lover, Whom, not knowing, I don't name, Though mine own worth hath informed me What was his: for being his image, I sometimes regret that fortune Made me not a pagan born, That I might, in my wild folly, Think he must have been some god, Such as he was, who in golden Shower wooed Danae, or as swan Leda loved, as bull, Europa. When I thought to lengthen out, Citing these perfidious stories, My discourse, ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... pagan village dwelt a man who had refused most positively to become a Christian. When urged to accept of Christianity he had most emphatically repeated the expression most common among them: "As my fathers lived and ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... of Lamb, says: "Lamb used to boast that he supplied one line to his friend in the fourth scene [Act IV., Scene i] of that tragedy, where the description of the Pagan deities occurs. In speaking of Saturn, he is figured as 'an old man melancholy.' 'That was my line,' Lamb would say, exultingly." The line did not reach print ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... at Lincoln, in the tower of St. Mary-le-Wigford Church. Into this tower, which is of early date, a Roman pagan monument (Diis Manibus, &c.) is walled, and, on the triangular gable of the stone, a Saxon inscription has been carved. It is imperfect, but the general sense is clear. It must be read from the lowest and longest line upwards to the apex. It says: "Eirtig ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... enraptured. He would gladly have encouraged these pagan deliverances on the part of the converted Prince, but the Colonel was scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of hearts not ill-satisfied at the evidence of the skin-deep Christianity of a man delivered over to the corrupt teaching of the Jesuits, found in this ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... has been since the beginning of time, and may in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... absolute lord and lawgiver; they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion for it, for me: it was remarkable too, I had but three subjects, and they were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father a Pagan and a cannibal; and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions: but this by ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... is pagan; but wait till you feel it,— That jar of the earth, that dull shock, When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of that Pagan sculpture with what you call the later Christian art of Painting?—I should be glad to see it done—that is to say, I should be glad to see the galleries of painting and sculpture collaterally placed, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... population of 65,000,000 was expected and only 62,500,000 was returned. Moreover, there is ample evidence in history that, wherever the Christian ideal of a family has been abandoned, a race is neither able to return to the family life of healthy pagan civilisations nor to escape decay. During the past fifty years in England family life has been definitely weakened by increased facilities for divorce amongst the rich, by the discouragement of parental authority amongst the poor, and ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... these is the period of the Christian Fathers, culminating in the authoritative writings of Augustine, who died in 430. By this time a great part of the critical Greek books had disappeared in western Europe. As for pagan writers, one has difficulty in thinking of a single name (except that of Lucian) later than Juvenal, who had died nearly three hundred years before Augustine. Worldly knowledge was reduced to pitiful compendiums on which the mediaeval ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... bitter, seemed to be doubly inveterate and intense toward her. They published pamphlets, in which they called her a daughter of Heth, a Canaanite, and an idolatress, and expressed hopes that from such a worse than pagan stock no progeny ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... many of the multitudinous sides of human nature dark and depraved, that we are apt to think there is no bright side at all. Nor shall we let slip the opportunity of saying, at the risk of being considered very simple, that of all the gifts of felicity bestowed, as the Pagan Homer tells, upon mankind by the gods, no one is so perfect and beautiful as the love that exists between a good mother and a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... Man, from the French of Emile Souvestre. This interesting narrative, well deserving the attention both of masters and working men, forms Part XLVIII. of Longman's Traveller's Library.—Remains of Pagan Saxondom, principally from Tumuli in England, drawn from the Originals: described and illustrated by J. Y. Akerman, Part VI. containing coloured engravings of the size of the originals of Fibulae ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... now. He is doing a bust of some Pagan nymph or other, and prevailed on Nanina to let him copy from her head and face. According to her own account the little fool was frightened at first, and gave him all the trouble in the world before ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... Three forms of religion have existed, and each in turn has ruled the mind,—Fetichism, Polytheism, and Monotheism. The first can be distinctly traced in the mythical stories of Genesis, the second in pagan nations, and the third in these later times. Now, it is a very small matter in which one of these forms man has worshiped or may still worship. If he worship at all, he adores the true God, "the only God, whether he call on Brahma, Jehovah, Pan, or ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... transpire happiness, pleasure healthy, healthful hear, listen heathen, pagan honorable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the outlines of his person obscured; on the contrary, his figure (such as it was, I don't boast of it) was well set off by a civilized coat and a silken vest quite pretty to behold. The defiant and pagan bonnet-grec had vanished: bare-headed, he came upon us, carrying a Christian hat in his gloved hand. The little man looked well, very well; there was a clearness of amity in his blue eye, and a glow ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... not, they must in every way regard the master with respect—bowing to his authority, working his will, subserving his interests so far as might be consistent with Christian character.[D] And this, to prevent blasphemy—to prevent the pagan master from heaping profane reproaches upon the name of God and the doctrines of the gospel. They should beware of rousing his passions, which, as his helpless victims, they might be ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Methodism. They wanted preachers who would openly assail the doctrine of the divine or special inspiration of the Bible, and the supernatural origin of Christianity, and try to bring people down or up to the pagan or infidel level of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... praises of so great and good a king: Shall Churchill reign, and shall not Gotham sing? As on a day, a high and holy day, Let every instrument of music play, Ancient and modern; those which drew their birth (Punctilios laid aside) from Pagan earth, 120 As well as those by Christian made and Jew; Those known to many, and those known to few; Those which in whim and frolic lightly float, And those which swell the slow and solemn note; Those which (whilst Reason stands in wonder by) Make some complexions ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... I answer, 'lots of people,' and especially those who worship the pagan divinities of literature. The same thing happens—but their fury is more excusable, because they have less natural intelligence—with the lovers of music. Instead of being sorry for the poor folks who have 'no ear,' and whom 'a little music in the evening' bores to extremity, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... they caught and maimed; But I, my sons, and little daughter fled From bonds or death, and dwelt among the woods By the great river in a boatman's hut. Dull days were those, till our good Arthur broke The Pagan yet ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... Still, with the spirit's vision clear, I saw Hell's empire, vast and grim, Spread on each Indian river's shore, Each realm of Asia covering o'er. There, the weak, trampled by the strong, Live but to suffer—hopeless die; There pagan-priests, whose creed is Wrong, Extortion, Lust, and Cruelty, Crush our lost race—and brimming fill The bitter cup of human ill; And I—who have the healing creed, The faith benign of Mary's Son, Shall I behold my brother's need, And, selfishly, to aid him shun? I—who upon my mother's knees, ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... peoples, was the Spirit of the Corn. In Russia especially children of the rural class sing songs of a very distant age, mother handing down to child themes unexposed to foreign influence. It is true the Church has altered the application of many by dressing up afresh pagan observances in Christian costumes. There are several, but one of the songs of the Russian serf to his prattling offspring illustrates this statement. Before reading it, it should be borne in mind that Ovsen is the Teutonic Sun God who possessed a boar, and that the antiquity of the song belongs ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... into a hole like dogs, after having spent our money among them like princes. Prejudice however is not banished from Leghorn, though convenience keeps all in good-humour with each other. The Italians fail not to class the subjects of Great Britain among the Pagan inhabitants of the town, and to distinguish themselves, say, "Noi altri Christiani[Footnote: We that are Christians.]:" their aversion to a Protestant, conceal it as they may, is ever implacable; and the last day only will convince them ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... discovered and published by the librarian of the National Assembly—so M. Villemain announced at a recent meeting of the Academie des Belles Lettres at Paris. The work traces the heresies of the third century to the writings of the Pagan Philosophers, and throws new light upon ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... of such resilient temperament, one who gamboled through life like a faun, argument was difficult. Bob Wharton was pagan in his joyous inconsequence; his romping spirits could not be damped; he bubbled with the optimism of a Robin Goodfellow. Ahead of him he saw nothing but dancing sunshine, heard nothing but the Pandean pipes. The girl ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Ferdinand," observes Fray Antonio Agapida, "was humbling himself before the cross and devoutly praying for the destruction of his enemies, that fierce pagan, El Zagal, depending merely on arm of flesh and sword of steel, pursued his diabolical outrages upon the Christians." No sooner was the invading army disbanded than he sallied forth from his stronghold, and carried fire and sword into all those parts which had submitted to the Spanish ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... was an idea too lofty for human thought to grasp at once. The light of God's ineffable purity was too bright and dazzling to burst at once on human eyes. Therefore it was gradually displayed. The election of a chosen seed in Abraham's race to a nearer approach to God than the rest of pagan humanity; the announcement of the Decalogue at Sinai amidst awe-inspiring wonders; the separation of a single tribe to the priestly office, who were dedicated to, and purified in an especial manner for the service of the tabernacle; the sanctification of the High-priest ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... illustrations of several articles found in a Mid[-e] sack which had been delivered to the Catholic priest at Red Lake over seventy years ago, when the owner professed Christianity and forever renounced (at least verbally) his pagan profession. The information given below was obtained from Mid[-e] priests at the above locality. They are possessed of like articles, being members of the same society to which the late owners of the relics belonged. The first is a birch-bark roll, the ends of which were slit into short strips, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... to have been devoted to good Mother Hubbard, in her fit of lumbago, and returned without having set eyes on that afflicted Christian, to amaze his worthy sister with poetic babblings about wood-nymphs and such pagan impieties,' ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... the law, devising Provisional Governments, and Privy Councillors wallowing in imaginative treason. As for the Bishops, they will talk daggers as luridly as the rest, but they will not even threaten to use any. And so does the pagan rage, and the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... into the air. Unnoticed passed the eruption before the gaze of Saint-Prosper, whose mind in a torpor swept dully back to youth's roseate season, recalling the homage of the younger for the elder brother, a worship as natural as pagan adoration of the sun. From the sanguine fore-time to the dead present lay a bridge of darkness. With honor within grasp, deliberately he had sought dishonor, little recking of shame and murder, and childishly husbanding green, red ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... different religions, expelled demons, and the Christians fully recognized the power possessed by the Jewish and gentile exorcists; the followers of Christ, however, claimed to be in many respects the superior of all others. The fathers maintained the reality of all pagan miracles as fully as their own, except that doubt was sometimes cast on some forms of healing and prophecy. Demons which had resisted all the enchantments of the pagans might be cast out, oracles could be silenced, and unclean ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Chapter XII. Immortality And The Resurrection. 1. Orthodox Doctrine. 2. The Doctrine of Immortality as taught by Reason, the Instinctive Consciousness, and Scripture. 3. The Three Principal Views of Death—the Pagan, Jewish, and Christian. 4. Eternal Life, as taught in the New Testament, not endless Future Existence, but present Spiritual Life. 5. Resurrection, and its real Meaning, as a Rising up, and not a Rising again. 6. Resurrection of the Body, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm. And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in the Marquesas, in the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... however, Christianity appropriated bodily for its public rites the basilica-type and the general substance of Roman architecture. Shafts and capitals, architraves and rich linings of veined marble, even the pagan Bacchic symbolism of the vine, it adapted to new uses in its own service. Constantine led the way in architecture, endowing Bethlehem and Jerusalem with splendid churches, and his new capital on the Bosphorus with the first of the three historic basilicas dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so: ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this, sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's grocery store he would ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... preferment, and he was made conseiller du roi, contrleur-gnral de l'extraordinaire des guerres, and secretary-general of the fleet of the Levant. His long epic Clovis (1657) is noteworthy because Desmarets rejected the traditional pagan background, and maintained that Christian imagery should supplant it. With this standpoint he contributed several works in defence of the moderns in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns. In his later years Desmarets devoted himself chiefly to producing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... popular—he was hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When he converted the king or chief, and he always directed his sacred ammunition at the upper classes, he took advantage of every inch of spiritual and governmental club put in his hand, and smote the pagan hip and thigh. His sole effort was to make the South Seas safe for theocracy, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... So then Simon by such inventions got what interpretation he pleased, not only out of the writings of Moses, but also out of those of the (pagan) poets, by falsifying them. For he gives an allegorical interpretation of the wooden horse, and Helen with the torch, and a number of other things, which he metamorphoses and weaves into fictions concerning ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... one speak to your master?' 'He is not there,' answers one. 'He is there,' answers the other, 'but he is busy making counterfeit money, forged contracts, daggers and poisons, to undo those who have but accomplished his purposes.' The atheist resembles the first of these porters, the pagan the other. It is clear, therefore, that the pagan offends the Deity more gravely ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... the stick! Can it be that the Italian peasants, who still believe cattle kneel in their stalls at midnight on the anniversary of Jesus' birth, decorate the mangers on Christmas eve with holly, among other plants, because of a survival of this old pagan notion about its subduing effect ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... know that the runes or Runic letters were long employed in this way. For instance, Mr. Turner thus informs us ('History of the Anglo-Saxons,' vol. i, p. 169): 'It was the invariable policy of the Roman ecclesiastics to discourage the use of the Runic characters, because they were of pagan origin, and had been much connected with idolatrous superstitions.' And if any one be incredulous, let him read this from Sir Thomas Brown: 'Some have delivered the polity of spirits, that they stand in awe of charms, spells, and conjurations; letters, characters, notes, and dashes.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to have exhibited charms of the most imposing character; whilst the chasteness of its arrangement was only equalled by its almost magic beauty. Nor was this luxuriance, and this attention to the hair, confined to the gentler sex, for among the pagan Orientals the hair and beards of the males were not less sedulously attended to. Among the males of Judah and Israel, long flowing ringlets appear to have been regarded as highly desirable and attractive. The reputed beauty and the prodigious length and weight ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... and Seyd el-Bedawee is as certainly one form of Osiris. His festivals, held twice a year at Tanta, still display the symbol of the Creator of all things. All is thus here—the women wail the dead, as on the old sculptures, all the ceremonies are pagan, and would shock an Indian Mussulman as much as his objection to eat with a Christian shocks an Arab. This country is a palimpsest, in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that. In the towns the Koran is most visible, in the country Herodotus. I fancy it is ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Tatars, in their original ancestors from Asia. Most of them are baptized into the Russian faith, and their villages have Russian churches. Nevertheless, along with their native tongue they are believed to retain many of their ancient pagan customs and superstitions, although baptism is in no sense compulsory. The priest in our friends' village, who had lived among them, had told us that such is the case. But he had also declared that they possess many estimable traits ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... defying wave and fate, Have ploughed the placid face of Father Thames, Startling the loud cry of hawk and bittern As his royal prows grated on thy strand, Or skimmed over the marshes of thy infancy. Yet, amid all the wrecks of human ambition Where Pagan, Jew, Buddhist, Turk and Christian Struggled for the mastery of gold and power, You still march forward, giant-like and brave, Facing the morning of progress and liberty, Carrying thy cross and crown to all lands— And with thy grand flotilla, chartered ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... town of Amesbury. It is needless that I should enter here into any part of the dispute about which our learned antiquaries have so puzzled themselves that several books (and one of them in folio) have been published about it; some alleging it to be a heathen or pagan temple and altar, or place of sacrifice, as Mr. Jones; others a monument or trophy of victory; others a monument for the dead, as Mr. Aubrey, and the like. Again, some will have it be British, some Danish, some Saxon, some Roman, and ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... hostile powers of Nature. A Norse prophet or prophetess standing beside Elijah at Horeb would have bowed down before the earthquake or the fire; the oriental waited for the "still small voice." And we are heirs to a Latin theology grafted on to the Thor-worship of our pagan ancestors. The idea of a Nature producing beneficently and kindly at the word of a loving God is foreign to all our inherited modes of thought. And our views of the heart of Nature are about as correct as those of our ancestors were of God. A little more of oriental tendencies of thought would ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... priest beheld the bridal group before the altar stand, And sigh'd as he drew forth his book with slow reluctant hand: He saw the bride's flow'r-wreathed hair, and mark'd her streaming eyes, And deem'd it less a Christian rite than a Pagan sacrifice; And when he call'd on Abraham's God to bless the wedded pair, It seem'd a very mockery to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... Constantinople came here once and saw Gian Bellini at work in the Great Hall. He had never seen a good picture before and was amazed. He wanted the Senate to sell Gian to him, thinking he was a slave. They humored the Pagan by hiring Gentile Bellini to go instead, loaning him out for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... ears, the rhythm of swaying girls still in our blood. As we pass out into the bleak street, the first faint flush of dawn is in the east. The waesserer are washing off the cabs; a helmeted hauptmann salutes lazily as we pass, and we drive home full of the intoxications of that pagan gaiety which the Viennese, more than any other people, have preserved in all its innocence, its sensuous splendour, its ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... aspects of the Pagan-Christian conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... the Prince, carelessly, "all religions are tolerated. Here we have temples for the worship of the Roman and the Greek gods and mosques for the Moslems. Here Christian, or Jew, Sun- worshipper or Pagan implore their several gods unmolested, and thus is Baalbek prosperous. I confess a liking for this Temple of Life, and come here often. I should, however, warn you that it is the general belief of those who frequent this place that he who steps ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... public affairs are the principal subjects of history." And the following cannot fail to recall a similar thought in Tacitus, "History undertakes to record the transactions of the past for the instruction of future ages."[106] Two references to religion under the Pagan empire are always worth repeating. "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world," he wrote, "were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful." "The fashion of incredulity ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... circumstances it would hardly have occurred to any one to try to derive the monotheistic narrative of Gen. i. from either of these pagan myths, crowded as they are with uncouth and barbarous details. But it happened that Mr. George Smith, who brought to light the Assyrian Creation tablets, brought also to light a Babylonian account of the Flood, which had a large number of features in common with the narrative of Gen. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... leather out abroad; let out a heathen soul or two; fed this good sword with the black blood of pagan Christians; converted a few individuals with ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... were, from very early times, blended with festivities accordant to the national habits of the new converts, with even some alloy of pagan usages, is understood to have been a policy adopted by the founders of the faith among semi-barbarous nations—a concession to the weakness of their neophytes. Our own village wakes and fairs, with their green boughs and flags, cakes ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Eternal. I understood these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; for "thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... of Staines the overlordship of Wessex extended across the river and reached within twenty miles of the Ouse at Bedford. These districts were the remnants of the united state of the first King of the English—Egbert, whose realm embraced not only the midland and semi-pagan Mercia, but who claimed the fealty of East Anglia and Northumbria and for a few years made the Firth of Forth the north coast of England. To the south-west the country that Alfred was called upon ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... bit of the pagan in every natural boy, and to give him too much to reverence taxes his powers until they are worn and impotent by the time he reaches manhood. Under Miss Hester's tutelage too many things became sacred to Fred Brent. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... on the emerald which is said to have reached Tiberius must have seen the Founder of our religion—or, at least, must have known some one who had seen Him. "None hath seen Him smile; but many have seen Him weep." It is so like what we should have expected! The days of the joyous pagan gods were passing away, the shadows of tedium and of life-weariness were drooping over a world that was once filled with thoughtless merriment—and then came One who preached the Gospel of Sorrow. He preached that gospel, and a faithless world ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... was worth while to be abroad among the heather and the fir-trees at dawn, for the virgin world, the pagan, freed from cerements and found in the twilight to be a god, was all my own, mine to enjoy. I think I know why primitive man, when he lived in lands where Nature was wild and the nights were long, was a resolute ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... pagan, a pagan, and belong to all the fiends in hell." With these pious words he went away. The bank-bill, crushed into a ball, flew out of the room after him, then the door ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... Pringle, it may be needful in me to state, for the satisfaction of my people, that although by stress of law we were obligated to conform to the practice of the Episcopalians, by taking out a bishop's license, and going to their church, and vowing, in a pagan fashion, before their altars, which are an abomination to the Lord; yet, when the young folk came home, I made them stand up, and be married again before me, according to all regular marriages in our national Church. ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... it is in vain for us to reflect on the absurdity, incongruity and frivolousness, as we apprehend it, of the pagan worship, inasmuch as we find, whatever we may think of its demerits, that the most heroic people that ever existed on earth, in the hour of their direst calamity, regarded a zealous and fervent adherence to that religion as the most sacred of all ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... council, and while the dignity was hereditary in a family supposedly descended from the gods, an immediate heir was not unlikely to be passed over in favor of a relative who was remoter but abler.[3] In both pagan and Christian times the royal office was invested with a pronouncedly sacred character. As early as 690 Ine was king "by God's grace." But the actual authority of the king was such as arose principally from ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the crowded theatre—Philip was too young to remember the old Chambers' Street box, where the serious Burton led his hilarious and pagan crew—in the intervals of the screaming comedy, when the orchestra scraped and grunted and tooted its dissolute tunes, the world seemed full of opportunities to Philip, and his heart exulted with a conscious ability to take any of its prizes ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... Ichabod—standing by the door; don't you know him?—Egerton—but they call him Ichabod at the Garrick. Now, what could our hostess expect to get out of Ichabod? He has nothing left to him but biting his nails like the senile Pope or Pagan in the ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... poison a tallow-chandler and his family. Beastly creature, I know not what to do with him. Travel, quotha; ay, travel, travel, get thee gone, get thee but far enough, to the Saracens, or the Tartars, or the Turks—for thou art not fit to live in a Christian commonwealth, thou beastly pagan. ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve |
