"Paganism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hang the masterpieces of the leading painters. There is the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" by Raphael, pure and candid, like an angel whose soul is a bud not yet in bloom; his "St. John," nude, a fine youthful form of fourteen, healthy and vigorous, in which the purest paganism lives over again; and especially a superb head of a crowned female, radiant as a summer noonday, with fixt and earnest gaze, her complexion of that powerful southern carnation which the emotions do not ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... be a sense of superiority in knowing oneself a century or two in front of one's fellow-creatures that counterbalances the sense of solitude. Queen Mab had no such consolation. She was an anachronism hundreds of years on the wrong side; in fact, a relic of Paganism. ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... Nymphs. The underlying paganism of the Bishop produces a strangely incongruous mixture on his tomb—the Savior, St. Praxed, Moses, Pan, and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Female friendship Paganism unfavorable to friendship Character of Jewish women Great Pagan women Paula, her early life Her conversion to Christianity Her asceticism Asceticism the result of circumstances Virtues of Paula Her ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... conundrum, to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He protested vehemently against the idolatrous worship of images, the legacy of Paganism to the Church, a practice directly opposed to that of the Mosaic law which Jesus came, not to destroy, but to fulfill. It was idle to reply that these images were the Scriptures of the illiterate, that they were not the object of, but the stimulus to, worship. Experience showed that the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... epistle, "To the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus." The people addressed were in Ephesus, and they were likewise in Christ. What did it mean to be in Ephesus? Ephesus was one of the great centers of paganism. It was adorned with costly and magnificent temples. It was rich and voluptuous. Both private and public life were utterly corrupt. Even the religious practises of the Ephesians were unspeakably vile. This city was a moral bog, a sink of pollution, filled with all corruption, ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... grotesque medley is the multitude of men, women and children, breast deep in the sanctifying Ganges. Thousands have come on foot from far-away villages of this boundless land of paganism; and from all goes up a continuous murmur of prayer and adoration, like a moaning wind emerging from a distant forest. Eye and ear alike are flooded with an indescribable rush of sensations, and the heart is oppressed ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... "Truly, beloved child and lord you will be in heaven and on earth most high and holy, and your good deeds, fame, and sanctity will fill all (the four quarters of) Ireland and you will convert your own nation and the Decies from paganism to Christianity. On that account I bind myself to you by the tie of brotherhood and I ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and there was none in paganism. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... fly from wicked Parents to Christ: But to fly from pious Parents to a Monkery, that is (as it too often proves) to fly from ought to stark naught. What Pity is that I pray? Although in old Time, he that was converted from Paganism to Christianity, paid yet as great a Reverence to his idolatrous Parents, as it was possible to do without prejudice to ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... scatter blessings as curses? Because some dyspeptic Greek dreamed of three pitiless old weavers, blind to human tears, deaf to human petitions, why should we wise and enlightened people of the nineteenth century scare ourselves with the skeleton of Paganism? I have as inalienable a right to brocades, crown-jewels, and a string of titles, as any reigning queen, provided I can only get my hands upon them; and, since life seems to be a sort of snatch-and-hold game, quick keen eyes and nimble fingers decide the question. I ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and prayed God would deliver them from this imminent danger. In ancient days Helgoland was ten times larger than it its now, and on this old rocky island, which had been the last aslyum of the gods of northern paganism, lived a warlike people, who knew no other laws than those, of their own will, no other toil than piracy, and who submitted to no other master than the chieftain chosen from among their most colossal fellows. The pirates of Helgoland were desperate men, who had selected for themselves as ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... spring is, because, as the story goes (and they say he himself said so), that was the place where he first saw her. And he has also left other directions which the clergy of the village say should not and must not be obeyed because they savour of paganism. To all which his great friend Ambrosio the student, he who, like him, also went dressed as a shepherd, replies that everything must be done without any omission according to the directions left by Chrysostom, and about this the village ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Per omnia secula seculorum, Kyrie eleyson, Christe eleyson, came under the category of enchantments (ensalmos) known by the terms bolong and mantala of the primitive mangkukulam, manghihikup, mananangisama, etc. etc., of Philippine paganism. All of these Latin phrases acquired so great a prestige that they were looked upon as a form of irresistible invocation for conquering the divine will, and a certain ridiculous sect came to be known as the Colorum, which term originated from the wrong pronunciation of ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... old philosophies and religions, he is at his best as a scorner, but he has "the scorn of scorn" and some of "the love of love" which, Tennyson declares, is the poet's dower. His lament for the Greek paganism runs: ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... almost unconquerable, in directing their armies, in strengthening their determination. We remember La Vendee, we remember our Puritans, and we have had recent experience in the Soudan. We know what Christianity has done again and again; what Judaism, what Mahommedanism, what many kinds of paganism, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... Colonaeus which glorified the sun-set of his illustrious predecessor: but yet, Protestant as I am, I cannot discover that it is in the least obscure. Faith, Hope, Charity, the Five Senses, Heresy, Judaism, Paganism, Atheism, and the like, which in inferior hands must have been mere lay figures, are there instinct with a dramatic life and energy such as beforehand I could hardly have supposed possible. Moreover, in spite of Dr. Lorinzer's odd encomiums, each allegory ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... we try to rebuild Celtic paganism and to guess at its inner spirit, though we are working in the twilight on a heap of fragments. No Celt has left us a record of his faith and practice, and the unwritten poems of the Druids died with them. Yet from these fragments we see the Celt as the seeker ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... branch of civilization, and which has most strenuously been extolled by the zealous and pious fathers of the Roman Church, is the introduction of the Christian faith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire horror, to behold these savages tumbling among the dark mountains of paganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance of religion. It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded; they were sober, frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; but though they acted right habitually, it was all in vain, unless they acted so from precept. The new ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... of trackless, vast, silent, uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of Africa, where ignorance ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... there had been in some sense a dispensation carried on in favour of the Gentiles. He who had taken the seed of Jacob for His elect people, had not therefore cast the rest of mankind out of His sight. In the fulness of time both Judaism and Paganism had come to nought; the outward framework, which concealed yet suggested the living truth, had never been intended to last, and it was dissolving under the beams of the sun of justice behind it and through it. The process of change had been slow; it had been done not rashly, but by ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... above all others, being wholly unsuited to the timid and irresolute. By this art we obtain a knowledge of different countries, regions, and realms. By it we attract and bring to our own land all kinds of riches; by it the idolatry of paganism is overthrown and Christianity proclaimed throughout all the regions of the earth. This is the art which won my love in my early years, and induced me to expose myself almost all my life to the impetuous waves of the ocean, and led me to explore ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... with the earth and air as by what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas. Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole man—intellect, habits, and affections—from the life of the world to a new mystical life, in answer to a moral ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to worship their god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... be only made by the birch-bark canoe: in no other way could the Gospel he carried to these people. After we became accustomed to the canoe and dog-train, we rejoiced that we were counted worthy to be the Messengers of Good Tidings'to these neglected ones, who, having lost faith in their old paganism, were ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Cherifian Arabs, newcomers from Arabia, to whom the lax Berber paganism was abhorrent. They preached a return to the creed of Mahomet, and proclaimed the Holy War against the hated Portuguese, who had set up fortified posts all along the west ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... said the reason was because there was in it more genuine faith than in any book; and we branched off into florid eloquence touching paganism, Christianity, and art. ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... good and evil. His Aholibah is a poem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another. As Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority." It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... ancient of Greek writers, and the most celebrated theologian of Paganism, relates several apparitions both of gods and heroes, and also of the dead. In the Odyssey,[77] he represents Ulysses going to consult the sorcerer Tiresias; and this diviner having prepared a grave or trench full of blood to evoke the manes, Ulysses draws his sword to prevent ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... whose character was as jagged as his name. This pagan proposed to the Polish nobles that he should marry Hedwige, and thus unite the grand duchy of Lithuania with the kingdom of Poland; promising in that event to renounce paganism, and embrace Christianity. The beautiful and accomplished Hedwige was horror-struck at the proposal, and declared that never would she marry ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... revived even amidst the light of the nineteenth century, and prevail to an extent that may seem to justify the apprehension, frequently expressed on the Continent of late years, of the restoration of a sort of Semi-Paganism in Modern Europe; and it is still necessary, therefore, for the defence of a pure Theism, to reexamine those ancient forms of error which have reaeppeared on the scene after it might have been supposed that they had vanished for ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... civil war, in which his enemies were completely overpowered, the barbarian forced a number of the vanquished to embark in their canoes and put to sea; and during the revolution that issued in the subversion of paganism in Otaheite, the rebel chiefs threatened to treat the English missionaries and their families in a similar way. In short, the atrocious practice is, agreeably to the Scotch law phrase, "use and wont," in the South Sea Islands." — John Dunmore ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... either of you," she observed, "that we know nothing of this great land of ours? That we sing of loving 'thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills'—although the word 'templed' savors of paganism and does not belong in a national hymn? And that it ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... professors of Christianity seem to have been animated by a quite contrary spirit. Whilst they were thinly scattered over the world, tolerated in some places, but established nowhere, their zeal often consumed their charity. Paganism, at that time the religion by law established, was insulted by many of them; the ceremonies were disturbed, the altars thrown down. As soon as, by the favour of Constantine, their numbers were increased, and ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... had infected every department of art and literature, we find the throne of the Virgin adorned with classical ornaments and bas-reliefs from the antique remains; as, for instance, the hunt of Theseus and Hippolyta. We must then suppose her throned on the ruins of paganism, an idea suggested by the old legends, which represent the temples and statues of the heathen gods as falling into ruin on the approach of the Virgin and her Child; and a more picturesque application of this idea afterwards became common in other subjects. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... beginning to be a 'bore,' and that Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all; while the middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a pretty toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think, apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is merely used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to mention that, if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand down to posterity likenesses of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... state normally constituted. The nearest approach made to the realization of the proper relations of church and state, prior to the birth of the American Republic, was in the Roman Empire under the Christian emperors; but the state had been perverted by paganism, and the emperors, inheriting the old pontifical power, could never be made to understand their own incompetency in spirituals, and persisted to the last in treating the church as a civil institution under their supervision and control, as does the Emperor of the French in France, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... experience she must have known how profligate was the world in which she lived. About her she saw vice shamelessly displayed or cloaked in sacerdotal robes; she was conscious of the ambition and avarice which hesitated at no crime; she beheld a religion more pagan than paganism itself, and a church service in which the sacred actors,—with whose conduct behind the scenes she was perfectly familiar,—were the priests, the cardinals, her brother Caesar, and her own father. All this Lucretia beheld, but they are wrong who believe that she or others like her ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... motive is religion. Polyeuctes is an historic or traditional saint of the Roman-Catholic church. His conversion from paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of presenting eggs at Easter is too well known to need description; but perhaps few are aware that, like many other customs of the early Church, it had its origin in paganism. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... course, the preacher's main task is to interpret man's moral experience, which drives him out to search for the eternal in the terms of the "other" and redeeming God. We have spoken of the depersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike have brought upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way in which we have confounded the social expressions of religion with its individual source. We are so concerned with the effect of our religion ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... yearning heart, not to theatres and balls, but to the "dear remembrance" of the splendors 'of tattoo and amocos; or that some unlucky wretch who has not mastered the hideous passions of his old paganism has almost battered out the brains of a fellow disciple in a sudden paroxysm of anger; or that some timid soul is haunted with half-subdued suspicions that some great goggle-eyed idol, with whose worship his whole existence has ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... content themselves with the little that is left them, their conquerors will cherish them as friends and brothers.' Others, especially the more thoughtful churchmen are much concerned to explain why an empire which had flourished under paganism should be thus beset under Christianity. Others desert the Empire altogether and (like St Augustine) put their hope in a city not made with hands—though Ambrose, it is true, let fall the pregnant observation that it was not the will of God that his people should be saved by logic-chopping. 'It ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... and that, had the time been ripe, had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of hereditary—"elective as in the days of paganism," as one Thevet says in holy horror.[81] And yet, because the time was not ripe, I find no hint of such an idea in his collected works. Now, the regiment of women was another matter that he should have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... employed in founding churches in the East. 'By their fruits ye shall know them;' and we have only to reflect on the lives of the popes, many of them monsters of atrocity, and the fearful acts of persecution which they encouraged and authorised, to be convinced that paganism, the invention of Satan, had usurped the name of Christianity, and that the Romish Church, as it is called, instead of being the mother of all Churches, is truly the Babylon of the Apocalypse; yet this is the system which ministers of the ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... very strange and even startling to Oowikapun. He had lived all his life in a land dark with superstition and paganism. The Gospel had as yet never been proclaimed there. The name of Jesus had never been heard in that wild north-land, and so as none of the blessedness of religion had entered into the hearts of the people, so none of its sweet, losing, elevating influences had begun to ennoble and bless ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... of testimony as to Greek myths must be sought in the writings of the heathen apologists or learned Pagan defenders of Paganism in the first centuries during Christianity, and in the works of their opponents, the fathers of the Church. Though the fathers certainly do not understate the abominations of Paganism, and though the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Antioch to relieve the famine which raged there. In A.D. 47 he went from Antioch in company with Barnabas on his first missionary tour, visiting Cyprus and part of Asia Minor. On his return, A.D. 49, he attended the Council at Jerusalem (Acts xv.; Gal. ii.), at which he insisted that converts from paganism should not be required to submit to circumcision and the other ceremonial rules of the Jewish Church. Only once again has any Council of the Church had to discuss such a burning and weighty question, and that once was at the Council of Nicaea in 325, when it was determined to describe ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... extensive. It was to say, as in a familiar conversation, I might express myself as follows: Brother, if we disprove the religion of Jesus Christ, that is, if we give up our present belief, there is no other religion, that we have heard of, that can have the least claim to our belief. Judaism, Paganism, Mahomedanism, could neither of them have any claims; nor in fact could what people call Deism, or the belief in one God. If you say there is certainly demonstrated in the very nature of things an eternal unchangeable principle or ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... Paradise dawn; its sense of the dignity of man as man; the religious reverence with which it speaks of all human ties, human strength and beauty—ay, even of merely animal human appetites, as God-given and Godlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire, when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller's Gods of Greece; for on this subject he was more eloquent than on any. He had gradually, in fact, as we have seen, dropped all faith in anything but Nature; the slightest fact about a bone or a weed was more important to him than all ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... combination of men should crush it, it must have perished at the outset; but it only grew stronger in the midst of its fierce and powerful enemies. It went through ten bloody persecutions, "conquering and to conquer," until it overthrew paganism, and became the established religion of the Roman empire. Then it was not strengthened by its alliance with the state, but only corrupted and shorn of its true power. And so it has been ever since. The gospel has always shown itself mightiest to subdue men to Christ, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... He had signed to the waiter that he wished to pay, and this transaction took some moments, during which he thoroughly felt, while he put down money and pretended—it was quite hollow—to estimate change, that Chad's higher spirit, his youth, his practice, his paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence, whatever it might be, had consciously scored a success. Well, that was all right so far as it went; his sense of the thing in question covered our friend for a minute like a veil through which—as if he had been muffled—he heard ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... of the Dutch character. When, after driving out the awful, vindictive, bloodthirsty Spaniards, the Dutch came into power, it was but natural to think of retaliation: banish the Papists, or persecute the Anabaptists, suppress their paganism, or crush their fanaticism, would have been most natural. Against any such ideas the nation as a whole set its face like a wall of adamant. Very soon the sober convictions of the people were triumphant. And after the most atrociously cruel war, in which these men had suffered untold agonies, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... as a political establishment, when all its professors shall laugh at its absurdity. Destroy its monastic orders, and marry the priests, and the rest is a pretty puppet-show, with the idols, and the incense, and the polytheism, and the pomp of paganism. God ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Greenwich, Eton and Oxford. Although as a scholarly poet he had a considerable reputation, his literary fame rests chiefly on his fine historical works, of which fifteen volumes appeared, including the "History of the Jews," the "History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire," and the "History of Latin Christianity to the Pontificate of Nicholas V." The appearance of the "History of the Jews" in 1830 caused no small consternation among the orthodox, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... seldom carried until a certain number of those who are labouring for the reform have experienced in their own persons the hardships of fine and imprisonment. Christianity itself would never have triumphed over the Paganism of ancient Rome had the early Christians not been enabled to testify from the dungeon and the arena as to the sincerity and serenity of soul with which they could confront their persecutors, and from that time down to the successful struggles of our people for the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... early youth, contains the two most fearless, I was going to say the most ingenuous, paeans, perhaps, that have been written since the Renaissance: "At the Water's Edge" (Au Bord de l'Eau) and the "Rustic Venus" (La Venus Rustique). But here is a paganism whose ardor, by a contrast which brings up the ever present duality of his nature, ends in an inexpressible ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... however, flourished magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth, the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later, when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the Christian Art par excellence. Later still, at the Renascence, it was certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to Rome that ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... their gods by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony, declined with Paganism; but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends. At present it is only practiced as a mark of obedience from the subject to the sovereign, and by lovers, who are solicitous to preserve this ancient ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... and that the Government should have left education to the care of the missionaries during the proselytizing period was undoubtedly the most natural course to take. It was desirable that conversion from paganism should precede any kind of secular tuition. But the friars, to the last, held tenaciously to their old monopoly; hence the University, the High Schools, and the Colleges (except the Jesuit Schools) were in their hands, and they remained as stumbling-blocks ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... chief cities were colonies where the laws were administered by magistrates in the Roman fashion, and the houses, dress, and amusements were the same as those of Italy. The greater part of the towns had been converted to Christianity, though some paganism still lurked in the more remote ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Remains of paganism are to be found in some of the sayings. A curse still existing says, "May Perun (i. e., the lightning) strike thee." The god Perun, the Thunderer, resembles Thor, and like him carries a hammer. He has been transformed into Elijah, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... that vain repetition of certain phrases and thoughts, which mars the work of sacred poets generally, and which has led to an unjustly strong censure being laid on them by critics, so different from each other as Dr. Johnson and Mr. Matthew Arnold. As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacred poems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerity is equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument (notoriously false to history and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... that all religions in their later stages exhibit a much lower conception of the Divinity than in their earlier form. It is only the hopelessly prejudiced who can say, as does John Fiske, that "to regard classic paganism as one of the degraded remnants of a primeval monotheism, is to sin against the canons of a sound inductive philosophy." Sinning against the consonant testimony of universal history is a venial offense, it ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... consultation, agreed to conform to his good pleasure, humiliating as it was to them. Accordingly, one and all publicly offered up eleven prayers, which were considered a sufficient testimony of their having renounced Paganism, and embraced the ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... surprising it with a death-blow. We beheld him poring over his Bible for texts that should be sovereign medicines for us, deadly for the devil within us. Consequently, we were on the defensive: bits of Cicero, bits of Seneca, soundly and nobly moral, did service on behalf of Paganism; we remembered them certainly almost as if an imp had brought them from afar. Nor had we any desire to be in opposition to the cause he supported. What we were opposed to was the dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man, who had his one specific for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... formed the most immoral nuisance attendant on the sports of the time, and whose hardy license and peculiar sisterhood might tempt the antiquary to search for their origin amongst the relics of ancient Paganism. And now, to increase the girl's distress, some half-score of dissolute apprentices and journeymen suddenly broke into the ring of the Maenads, and were accosting her with yet more alarming insults, when Marmaduke, pushing them aside, strode to her ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... words of Lord Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life——" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is well mirrored in his novels—for he was a man who felt at home in mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the accidents that must always ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... lucky thing for the Christian world. We Westerners—we of America and Europe—would go all to pieces otherwise. You see we Occidentals have not eons of fatalistic paganism to fall back on as have the sons of the East. They endure without our religion. But we—what would happen to us if Christianity did not ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... century Christianity had conquered Paganism, and Paganism had infected Christianity. The Church was now victorious and corrupt. The rites of the Pantheon had passed into her worship, the subtilties of the Academy into her creed. In an evil day, though with great pomp and solemnity,—we quote the language ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... strange that the words should come to her just then. She could not think why they came. But, repeating them to herself, she felt how very far off she was from Paganism. Yet she had within her warm love surely and living hope. Could such things, as they were within her, ever do violence to the Kingdom of Heaven? She looked between her horse's perpetually moving ears at the hollow ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... meet? Paris does not seem amusing to me. Ah! into what sort of a world are we going to enter! Paganism, Christianity, idiotism, there are the three great evolutions of humanity! It is sad to find ourselves at ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... as a kind of Christian fossils out of which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive Church. She was a simple maiden enough and vastly more attractive than the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, so smothered under the old clothes of Paganism which she has been appropriating for the last fifteen centuries that Jesus of Nazareth would not know ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... in not accepting from Europe what is known as the "revival of learning;" at least, as carried almost to the excess of modern paganism by its first promoters. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... world of thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age. The old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose from the dead, and the followers of ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... their private life; their self denial; their exposure to danger; their fearlessness in denouncing sin; their being proof against corruption; their zeal; their sympathy; their benevolence—and they present a startling contrast with the priests of Paganism, or the ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... organisation, but it was weakened by the assimilation of the native Church to that of Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries, which introduced a secular element among the clergy; and the frequent Danish invasions, which may be described as the organised power of Paganism against Scottish Christianity, grievously undermined its native force. The Celtic churches and monasteries were repeatedly laid waste or destroyed, and the native clergy were compelled either to fly ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... fact, the vast majority of the priests who came over from Europe brought with them no such ideas. The church was ruler, not missionary. And so far as it dares it sticks stubbornly to that notion even to this day. So it has had to make practical compromise with the paganism and superstition it found here. Many of its religious observances are the aboriginal pagan practices disguised in Christian dress and given Christian names. The church has sold its birthright for the privilege of exploiting ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches. It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still worshipped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the goddess of Philo. So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued so ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... encouraged by his education, which, like that of all well-born Romans, even in the sixth century after Christ, had savoured much more of paganism than of Christianity. Like his ancestors, before the age of Constantine, he had been taught grammar and rhetoric; grammar which was supposed to include all sciences, meaning practically a comment on a few classical texts, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... extinguished that royal line, aided his master to become "Dominus totius orbis"—as he is called in an inscription[342] describing his triumphant campaigns "ex oceano Britannico." And after "the victory of the Galilaean" (363) had ended Julian's brief and futile attempt to restore the Higher Paganism (to which several British inscriptions testify),[343] it was again to an Emperor from Britain that there fell the Lordship of the World—Valentinian, son of Gratian, whose dynasty lasted out the remaining century ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... and Christian Paganism there is small choice—all State religions are very much alike. Caesar was Pope: and no State religion since his time has been an improvement on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... in a work by E. Bosc and L. Bonnemere in 1882, [Footnote: Hist. des Gaulois sous Vercingetorix. Paris, 1882.] reproduced by M. Louis Bousrez in 1894, [Footnote: Les monu- ments Megalithiques de la Touraine. Tours, 1894.] which, if true, would show that a lingering paganism is to be found among these people. It is to this effect: "What is unknown to most is that at the present day there exist adepts of the worship (of the Celts) as practised before the Roman invasion, with the sole exception ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... everywhere in the midst of idolatrous superstitions, of a religion comparatively pure and often stamped with a lofty morality. Paganism is not a simple fact; it offers to view in the same bed two currents (like the Arve and the Arveiron)—the one pure, the other impure. What is the relation between these two currents? ... Did humanity ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... believers nearly constituted the whole of the population of the kingdoms of antiquity. Even those who professed to have shaken off the prejudices of their education, and to rise above the absurdities of paganism, had still some of the old leaven adhering to them. One of the last acts of the life of Socrates, was to order the sacrifice of a cock to ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... staircase in the principal temple of Baalbec. The remains of the capitals of columns betray a very corrupt taste, being badly sculptured, and without any elegance either in design or execution; and the temple seems to have been built in the latest times of paganism, and was perhaps subsequently repaired, and converted into a church. The stone with which it has been built is more decayed than that in the ruins at Baalbec, being here more exposed to the inclemency of the weather. No ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... palladium which lay buried then, as now, under the great column which Constantine had built. The rough energy of the Westerns had disregarded the talismans of the Greek Church as completely as those of paganism. In vain had the believers in these charms destroyed during the siege the statues which were believed to be of ill omen or unlucky. The invaders had a superstition as deep as their own, but with the difference that they could not believe that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... it will not be a matter of surprise that the leaders of our English Reformation should, in their turn, have attributed the miracles of the Roman Catholic saints to the same infernal source as the early Christians supposed to have been the origin of the prodigies and oracles of paganism. The impulse given by the secession from the Church of Rome to the study of the Bible by all classes added impetus to this tendency. In Holy Writ the Reformers found full authority for believing in the existence of evil spirits, possession by devils, witchcraft, and ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... an idea of the works of Edgar Saltus. One finds therein the same unicorns, the same fabulous monsters, the same virgins on the rocks, the same exotic and undreamed of flora and fauna, the same mystic paganism, the same exquisitely jewelled workmanship. One can find further analogies in the Aubrey Beardsley of "Under the Hill," in the elaborate stylized irony of Max Beerbohm. Surely not provincials these, but just ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... few and far between: a quotation here and there from the Fathers; two or three legends; Venus reappearing; the persecutions of Apollo in Styria; Proserpina going, in Chaucer, to reign over the fairies; a few obscure religious persecutions in the Middle Ages on the score of Paganism; some strange rites practiced till lately in the depths of a Breton forest near Lannion.... As to Tannhaeuser, he was a real knight, and a sorry one, and a real Minnesinger not of the best. Your Excellency will find some of his poems in Von der Hagen's four immense volumes, but I recommend you to ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... residing there less than six months. During this period, notwithstanding the various important matters in which he was engaged, the purifying of the court, the depression of the Christians, the restoration and revivification of Paganism, he found time to form plans and make preparations for his intended eastern expedition, in which he was anxious to engage as soon as possible. Having designated for the war such troops as could be spared from the West, he committed them and their officers to the charge of two generals, carefully ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... Pluto, and Neptune, and I know not who, upon the stage, yet he believes none of those fables, but considers himself as a Christian, a Catholick, &c. All this does appear very absurdly superfluous to us; but as I observed, they live nearer the original feats of paganism; many old customs are yet retained, and the names not lost among them, or laid up merely for literary purposes as in England. They swear per Bacco perpetually in common discourse; and once I saw a gentleman in the heat of conversation blush at the recollection that he ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... scientific conclusions and godless theories of the evolution of mankind. Mankind can not create God. God creates mankind. All the man-made gods are fashioned after the similitude of Caliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism was but an installment of Caliban's theory. God was a bigger man or woman, with aggravated human characteristics, as witness Jove and Venus and Hercules and Mars. Greek mythology is a commentary on Caliban's monologue. For man to evolve a god who shall be non-human, actually divine in character ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... science, for unending progress; and that the mission of the Bible is not yet complete. The Bible is not responsible for the partial miscarriage of Christianity, due to the compromises made by its organizers, who, in their too great zeal to conquer and convert Paganism, were themselves converted by it. But everything in Christianity which comes in a direct line from Judaism lives, and will live; and it is Judaism which through Christianity has cast into the old polytheistic world, to ferment there until the end of time, the sentiment of unity, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and men of burden, the Ish Sabal, and to the craftsmen, corresponding with the first and second degrees of more modern Masonry, but little secret knowledge was confided. Like the aspirants in the lesser Mysteries of paganism, their instructions were simply to purify and prepare them for a more solemn ordeal, and for the knowledge of the sublimest truths. These were to be found only in the Master's degree, which it was intended should be in imitation of the ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's "blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual achievement—at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph—that makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man. The Wordsworths and ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Church, just delivered from paganism. Like lambs in the midst of wolves, they stood amongst bitter enemies, their teacher had left them alone, and their raw convictions needed to be consolidated and matured in the face of much opposition. No wonder then that over and over again, in both letters, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... course modelled his group in the nude first, and Harding, who had been with him the night before last, had liked it much better than anything he had done, Harding had said that he must not cover it with draperies, that he must keep it for himself, a naked girl playing with a baby, a piece of paganism. The girl's head was not modelled when Harding had seen it. It was the conventional Virgin's head, but Harding had said that he must send for his model and put his model's head upon it. He had taken Harding's advice and had sent for Lucy, and had put her pretty, quaint ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... paganism to the early ages of Christianity, we can but rarely quote instances of fire lighted up for other purposes, in a public form, than for the ceremonies of religion; illuminations were made at the baptism ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... reconciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"—it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy had given of the origin of the world with the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... scandal, a dishonour to the church, and an assenting unto their heresies, might he not have much more thought that conformity with the customs of pagans was forbidden as a greater scandal and dishonour to the church, and as an assenting to the paganism and idolatry ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... impressed with the spirit of the scene around me, which grew more spectral and melancholy as the dusk of evening began to fill up the broken arches, my eye was assailed by the shrines ranged around the space, doubtless to remove the pollution of paganism. In the middle stands also a cross, with an inscription, granting an absolution of forty days to all who kiss it. Now, although a simple cross in the centre might be very appropriate, both as a token of the heroic devotion of the martyr ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... all his people, and driven him into the sea, and made spoil of all the treasures which he had brought with him; ... King Bucar calling these things to mind, had gone himself and stirred up the whole Paganism of Barbary, even as far as Montes Claros, to cross the sea again, and avenge himself if he could; and he had assembled so great a power that no man could devise their numbers. When the Cid heard these tidings he was troubled ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... to find the Fathers of the Church sympathetic towards the spectacle of the naked human body, for their position was based on a revolt against paganism, and paganism had cultivated the body. Nakedness had been more especially associated with the public bath, the gymnasium, and the theatre; in profoundly disapproving of these pagan institutions Christianity discouraged nakedness. The fact that familiarity ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... pavements inlaid with turquoise and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had been pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism; but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted the inevitable night. The historical moral was the same whether these marble outlines were merely "the isles" seen afar off like sunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... filled by the breeze, it carried us away from the dreary spot where we had sorrowfully left all that was good and faithful. It was a happy end—most merciful, as he had been taken from a land of iniquity in all the purity of a child converted from Paganism to Christianity. He had lived and died in our service a good Christian. Our voyage was nearly over, and we looked forward to home and friends; but we had still fatigues before us: poor Saat had ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... Tennyson's famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald's dolce far niente paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the manuscript of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... successfully assailed those antiquated forms of error,—overcoming "by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony." "They loved not their lives unto the death," but freely gave themselves for Christ, till, in time, the current of popular favor ceased to flow in the direction of paganism. The accession of Constantine to the throne, put an end to the dragonic period of Rome; the Pagan service gave place to the worship of Jehovah. The rites of heathenism were no longer the religion of the state, and its ministers were displaced ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... and its high arches, tho the undeniably noble effect of the whole is somewhat marred to English eyes by the unusual appearance of the unadorned brick walls and vaulting. The pulpit, by Delvaux (1745), partly in oak, partly in marble, represents Truth revealing the Christian Faith to astonished Paganism, figured as an old and outworn man. It is a model of all that should be avoided in plastic or religious art. The screen which separates the choir from the transepts is equally unfortunate. The apsidal end of the Choir, however, with its fine modern stained glass, forms a very pleasing ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... positive sciences have studied the "external world" in its analytical details, and if they could have made a "sympathetic," religion that religion might be the pagan creed. Indeed, so far science has brought a very perceptive breath of paganism among us. But when it shall have succeeded in penetrating the inner man, and there making manifest the laws of life and the realities of existence, a great Christian light will surely shine upon men; and maybe children, like the angels over Bethlehem, will sing the hymn invoking ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... correct; few light-beams shining white, pure of admixture: but of all creeds and religions now or ever before known, was not that of thoughtless thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox? We will exchange it even with Paganism, with Fetishism; and, on the whole, must ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... possibilities. In His view, it may be that greater deeds may be attempted and accomplished by the Church of to-day than ever in that past age, when she grappled with and vanquished the whole force of Paganism. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... fortunately cannot control thought!"—I said—"Not even the thoughts of its own children! And some of the beliefs of the Church of Rome are more blasphemous and barbarous than all the paganism of the ancient world! Tell me, what are my ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... fathers and schoolmen were labouring to deduce a science of meteorology from our sacred books, there oozed up in European society a mass of traditions and observances which had been lurking since the days of paganism; and, although here and there appeared a churchman to oppose them, the theologians and ecclesiastics ere long began to adopt them and to clothe them with ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles; and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate they meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into the pleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his own revisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legends are "The Three Marvels of Hy," which tells of the inner life of Columba and his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd," which utilizes folk-lore as old or ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... and syllogisms; and the persons they thus proselyted were downright honest, well meaning people, such as understood plain sense better than any artificial pomp of reasoning: whereas if our divines should now set about the gaining converts from paganism by their metaphysical subtleties, they would find that most of the persons they applied themselves to were either so ignorant as not at all to apprehend them, or so impudent as to scoff and deride them; or finally, so well skilled at the same weapons, that they would ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... to the lowest. The peasants flock from every quarter, shops are shut, churches are opened; and the Divine Tragedy enacted in Syria eighteen hundred years ago, is now celebrated in land then undiscovered, and by the descendants of nations sunk in Paganism for centuries after that period. But amongst the lower classes, the worship is emphatically the worship of Her who Herself predicted, "From henceforth all nations shall call me blessed." Before her shrines, and at all hours, thousands are kneeling. With faces expressive of the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... altar."—These are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar-shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and it is not doubted that they both connect themselves through links of ancient tradition with the gloomy realities of Paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... gory spectacles; but they are also gorgeous and solemn ceremonies. Its ferias are tremendously worldly; but they are none the less stupendous religious fetes. Its picturesque Easter processions, when colossal images of the Virgin are carried among bareheaded and kneeling crowds, smack of paganism; but we cannot question the genuineness of the religious fervor thus displayed. Its Cathedral touches the arena; and its Archbishop washes the feet of its old men. Its religion is still the living force which unites ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... readily. The conservatism of the Jew prevented his changing the roll form of his scriptures. The Pagan adhered to the rolls with their associations of classic culture. The final passing out of the roll and victory of the book are contemporary with the victory of Christianity over Paganism and its adoption as ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... of superstition is as apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual disease is the sad fact that confronts every lover of his fellow-men. This paganism is more ancient and universal than any one of the religions founded on writing or teachers of name and fame. Even the applied science and the wonderful inventions imported from the West, so far from eradicating it, only serve as the iron-clad man-of-war in warm salt water ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... sometimes as unseasonably resented as it was exerted. Trapp is angry that he calls the sacrificer in the Georgicks "the holy butcher:" the translation is, indeed, ridiculous; but Trapp's anger arises from his zeal, not for the author, but the priest; as if any reproach of the follies of paganism could be extended ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Koyuwo, King of India, a religions high priest from Siaka (the author of that Eastern paganism about a thousand years before the Christian era), coming to China, to teach the way of happiness, lived a most austere life, passing his days in continual mortification, and retiring by night to solitudes, in which he fed only upon the leaves of trees and ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... same—sensual and vivid, impassioned and prone to excess, essentially and eternally Pagan, above all adoring woman, Venus or Mary, and the bambino, that mystic Cupid whom the poets called the first love. Catholicism and Paganism, theories and mysteries; if there be two religions, they are that of the south and that ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... is quite different when common action is confined to merely social work. But "social service," stripped of all its Christian principles and reduced to pure philanthropy, is not Christianity; it is mere naturalism or neo-paganism. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... since 1405, speculative thought and ideal studies were in full swing. There was no re-birth in Venice, whose tradition was unbroken and where "men were too genuinely pagan to care about the echo of a paganism in the remote past." St. Mark was the deity of Venice, and "the other twelve Apostles" were only obscurely connected with her religious life, which was strong and orthodox, but untroubled by metaphysical enthusiasms and inconvenient heresies. Padua, on the other hand, was absorbed ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... seems paganism, or rather barbarism, with a moral veneer. It seems barbarism, because it brings us back to the good old days when mere might was right. Bernhardi, speaking of the right of conquest of new territory inherent in a growing people, tells us that in such cases 'might is at ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... on hell. In these the guide stays the men of his party to prove the character of the places to them from the frescos and statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so indulged had not better taken the guide's word for the fact. There can be no doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered which poisons Christian life, and which, while the social conditions remain the same from age to ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... sublimity of thought, beauty of sentiment, aptness of expression, unction of form. In these matters the Breviary hymns are not inferior to the classic poetry of paganism, nor to the much-belauded beauties of the Gallican Breviary hymns (vide Bacquez, Le Saint Office, notes vi. and viii. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... Wanderers, Pilgrims, wandering Arabs, whose religion, Al-Islam, so styled by its Christain opponents. And yet the new creed was at once accepted by whole regions of Christians, and Mauritania, which had rejected Roman paganism and Gothic Christianity. This was e.g. Syria and the so-called "Holy Land," not because, as is fondly asserted by Christians, al-Islam was forced upon them by the sword, but on account of its fulfilling a need, its supplying a higher belief, unity as opposed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... that God is a Paternal Being, and has an interest in his creatures, such as is expressed in the title Father; an interest unknown to all the systems of Paganism, untaught in all the theories of philosophy; an interest not only in the glorious beings of other spheres, the Sons of Light, the dwellers in Heavenly worlds, but in us, poor, ignorant, and unworthy; that He has pity for the erring, pardon for the guilty, love for the pure, knowledge for the humble, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... in it! The conversion of England! The retrogression of England! Do you think such a thing is likely to happen because a few misguided clerics choose to appeal to the silly sentimentality of hysterical women with such church tricks and rags of paganism as incense and candles! Bah! Do not judge the English inward heart by its small outward follies, Monsignor! There are more honest, brave, and sensible folk in the British Islands than you think. And though ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... asylum, but a haunt of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... learning that is the outcome of comparatively recent investigation into the interpretation of the text, have declared that the three sisters who play such an important part in that drama are not witches at all, but are, or are intimately allied to, the Norns or Fates of Scandinavian paganism. It will be the object of the following pages to illustrate the contemporary belief concerning witches and their powers, by showing that nearly every characteristic point attributed to the sisters has its counterpart in contemporary witch-lore; that some of the allusions, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... by Paganism, of which Krishna "burnishing the head of the serpent" is a striking example, may be easily accounted for, and their source pointed out. As a corruption of the earliest revelation, Paganism contains, as might be expected, a portion of truth blended with much ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... religious epics, these same sentiments and ideals softened and ennobled by the sweet spirit of the Christian religion. We see the conversion of England in the very process of its accomplishment. We see the beauties of Paganism and those of Christianity blending with each other, much as the Medieval and the Renaissance are blended in Spenser. In the one aspect Andrew is the valiant hero, like Beowulf, crossing the sea to accomplish a mighty deed of deliverance; in the other he is ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... been as old as Paganism, wherein, whilst all voluntary acts are attributed to the individual, all involuntary ones are ascribed to the Deity. Even sneezing was so considered: hence the phrase common in the lower circles in England, "Bless us," and in a higher grade ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... Teutonic God, ambitious, cruel and vengeful. The Germans were comparatively recent Christians. Their Christianity was not more than six centuries old. When the Crusades were drawing to a close, the Prussians were still living in paganism. Pride of race, impelling them to war, had revived these dead divinities. The God of the Gospel was now adorned by the Germans with lance and shield like the old Teutonic god ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follows the defence of poetry, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... been known a religion without such a belief. There is not a savage in the islands of the South Pacific who does not believe that his priest can shield him from the consequences of sin. There was not a people in antiquity who had not dispensers of Divine favour. That same belief passed from Paganism into Romanism. It was exposed at the period of the Reformation. A mighty reaction was felt against it throughout Europe. Apparently the whole idea of human priesthood was proved, once and for ever, to be baseless; human ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... poem which I have mentioned as out of harmony with the book; and I must protest that the vilely sensual faces in Mr. Beardsley's frontispiece to these Plays are hopelessly out of keeping with the sunny paganism of Scaramouch in Naxos. There is nothing Greek about Mr. Beardsley's figures: their only relationship with the Olympians is derived through ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... gods, Thor and Woden, had become the divinities of the land, and the Saxons, in whom Christianity had but recently supplanted the superstitions of paganism, were fast returning to the worship of the pagan gods. Edmund and his companions were shocked at the change. On reaching home they found that the ravages of the Danes had here been particularly severe, doubtless in revenge for the heavy loss which had been sustained by them in ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... pass over the people, at one time carrying them back to paganism, at another inclining them to Christianity—the first sign of the latter tendency being discernible in an increase of attendance at the mission schools. The women are more backward than the men, because they have been kept in subjection, and their intelligence has remained only half developed. ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce |
