"Ritual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beginning that the exigences of bodily life gave consciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or reproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness is a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the chief episodes in the body's fortunes. The organs, by their structure, select the impressions possible to them from the divers influences abroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... continued the Chinaman, "or hara-kira, still rules, as you know, in the great families of Japan. There is a sacred ritual, and the samurai who dedicates himself to this honourable end, must follow strictly the ritual. As a physician, the exact nature of the ceremony might possibly interest you, Dr. Petrie, but a technical account of the two incisions which the sacrificant employs in his ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it—the coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and visible expression of literary enthusiasm, and naturally its form was variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... would, as a matter of course, have taken a ritual character, and been associated especially with particular seasons. It is therefore more than an accident, that many of these harmless observations seem especially connected with Halloween. The Day of All Saints, of which name our English title is a translation, precedes ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... mother's cousin, Tommy Nixon. He was the most popular young man of the neighborhood. The rudiments of a classical education gained at a reputable academy in Sackville had not detracted from his qualities as a healthy, rollicking young farmer. The lodge had an imposing ritual of which I well remember one feature. At stated intervals a password which admitted a member of any one lodge to a meeting of any other was received from the central authority—in Maine, I believe. It was never to be pronounced except to secure admission, and ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... differ from yours, which belong to the Roman ritual. At the same time, the Vespers are almost similar, except sometimes the lessons, and then what may put you out is that ours are often preceded by the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. As a general rule we have a psalm less in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... indeed, a strange farrago, this romantic drama with which the vast audience had replaced the Sabbath pieties, the home-keeping ritual of the Ghetto, in their swift transformation to American life. Confined entirely to Jewish characters, it had borrowed much from the heroes and heroines of the Western world, remaining psychologically true only in its minor characters, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... song, the "Keeper of the Deer Medicine," who is master priest of the occasion, leads off in the recitation of a long metrical ritual, in which he is followed by the two warrior priests with shorter recitations, and by a prayer from another priest (of uncertain rank). During these recitations, responses like those of the litany in the Church of England may be ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... time that relegated till to-morrow everything that could possibly be neglected to-day. Near her one of the older men, more rigid in his observances than the generality of Ahmed Ben Hassan's followers, was placidly absorbed in his devotions, prostrating himself and fulfilling his ritual with the sublime lack of self-consciousness of ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... strongly." Constantine made special study of the situation. There were three different branches of the church amongst these people, the Roman and Greek Catholic and the Orthodox Russian or Uniate Church, which was in creed and ritual a sort of half-way between the other two. The Russian church people had put up a church building near Star, but having no pastor of their own, they divided on which of the two others, the Roman Catholic or the Greek Catholic priest, should conduct ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... and his worshippers were falling away. On the other hand, Carthage had another sanctuary which was very fashionable, a Serapeum as at Alexandria, where were manifested the pomps of the Egyptian ritual, celebrated by Apuleius. Neighbouring the holy places, came the places of amusement: the theatre, the Odeum, circus, stadium, and amphitheatre—this last, of equal dimensions with the Colosseum at Rome, its gallery rising upon gallery, and its realistic sculptures of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practised imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches—the apparelled and arrayed approaches and ritual of literature—and so to go further and to be admitted among ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... the laboratory in which the mind of Orange Ulster is prepared to face the tasks of the twentieth century. Barbaric music, the ordinary allowance of drum to fife being three to one, ritual dances, King William on his white horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts called up in wild speeches by clergymen and politicians—such is Orangeism in its full heat of action. Can we, with ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... alloyed in percolating through a rotting civilization; though pagan gods were taken into her pantheon, and pagan forms into her ritual, and pagan ideas into her creed; yet her essential idea of the equality of men was never wholly destroyed. And two things happened of the utmost moment to incipient civilization—the establishment of the papacy and the celibacy of the clergy. The first prevented the spiritual ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... destroyed; elegant structures for Christian worship were raised, and those already erected, enlarged and beautified; the episcopacy was increased and honored with great favors and enriched with vast endowments; the ritual received many additions; the habiliments of the clergy were pompous, and the whole of the Christian service at once exhibited a scene of worldly grandeur and external parade. What a mighty change! But a short ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... attributes still clung to him. To the last he was the ruler of the lil-mes, "the ghosts" and "demons" who dwelt in the air and the waste places of the earth, as well as in the abode of death and darkness that lay beneath it. His priests preserved their old Shamanistic character; the ritual they celebrated was one of spells and incantations, of magical rites and ceremonies. Nippur was the source and centre of one of the two great streams of religious thought and ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... thousand years ago Egypt made use of the dance in its religious ritual. At a very early period the Hebrews gave dancing a high place in their ceremony of worship. Moses bade the children of Israel dance after the crossing of the Red Sea. David danced before the Ark of the Covenant. The Bible is replete with instances showing the place of the dance in the lives of ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... Accordingly, in the spring and summer of 1838, a large scheme to give armed support to the republicans of Canada was secretly organized all along the northern boundary of the United States. It was a secret society of 'Hunters' Lodges,' with ritual, passwords, degrees. Each 'Lodge,' was an independent local body, but a band of organizers kept control of the whole series from New York to Detroit. The 'Hunters' are uniformly called 'brigands' and 'banditti' by the British regular officers who fought ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... consequence, of Health? Should she, by reason of their ignoble interferences and persecutions, yield her own allegiance to the Higher Light? Not she! Rather would she fling herself, heart and soul, into the freshening tide of her own visible church. Out of its ritual only, could she gain new fervour to bear and endure and then, if need be, fight for her spiritual freedom. It was only what the martyrs of old had done; only the work which fell upon the upholders of ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... amalgamations took place. Most of the organizations now took the form of secret societies whose initiations were marked with naive formalism and whose routines were directed by a group of officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. The societies adopted fantastic names such as "The Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun," "The Knights of St. Crispin," and "The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," of which ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... the wishes of the family as to the form of service, the hymns or music, and remarks. The funeral service should be brief, and preferably a ritual service with no sermon or eulogy. The last are usually harrowing to the feelings of the mourners, and there should be every reasonable effort made to relieve the tension of the occasion, for the sake of ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and her husband's tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under the denomination of 'barbarous,' to say of the invoking supplications of the service, that they were—she had been heard to state it more or less publicly and repeatedly—suitable to abject ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in Parliament. Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink into dust, with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always find believers."[50] That is the view of a strong and rather unscrupulous ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... secret order or fraternity, with a ritual similar to other fraternal orders, its membership is open to any one of good character, and the local granges frequently hold "open" meetings to which all the people of the community are invited. The strength of ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... Sunday" was Ascension Day, when we also went to church, but, it being a week-day, we wore our school caps in the place of high hats. Ascension Day thus falling, if I may so express myself, within the Octave of "Cock-hat Sunday," I decreed that the customary ritual must be observed with the school caps, and my little flock obeyed me implicitly. So eager were some of the boys to do honour to this religious festival, that their caps were worn at such an impossible angle that they kept tumbling ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... beside him, and tried to entertain him with conversation, but Febrer did not take his eyes off Almond Blossom, who, faithful to the ritual of such occasions, was seated in a chair in the center of the room, receiving the admiration of her suitors with the demeanor of a ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... solemn ritual began. Breaking off a bit of the putty, Mrs. Pawket welded it on the jar near the other protuberances; while the putty was soft she fixed in it the screw, arranging that implement by a method best calculated to display ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... which would occur to one already initiated in the science of the subject. Our attention may be devoted to getting skill in technical manipulation without reference to the connection of laboratory exercises with a problem belonging to subject matter. There is sometimes a ritual of laboratory instruction as well as of heathen religion. 1 It has been mentioned, incidentally, that scientific statements, or logical form, implies the use of signs or symbols. The statement applies, of course, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... loosestrife or Lysimachia vulgaris, in which it is a very variable specific character, the whorls varying from two to four leaves. In the cultivated state it is met with in the myrtle or Myrtus communis, where it has come to be of some importance in Israelitic ritual. Crisped leaves are known in a mallow, Malva crispa, and as a variety in cabbages, parsley, lettuce and others. The orbicular fruits of Heeger's shepherd's purse (Capsella heegeri) recall similar fruits of other cruciferous genera, as for instance, Camelina. ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... you read in their novels. It requires the greatest curiosity, or the greatest habitude, to discover the smallest connexion between the sexes here. No familiarity, but under the veil of friendship, is permitted, and Love's dictionary is as much prohibited, as at first sight one should think his ritual was. All you hear, and that pronounced with nonchalance, is, that Monsieur un tel has had ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... aspiration, and life in general. The second basic tenet of Christianity is that of human responsibility to God, to whom man is related as the created to a creator, as a subject to a ruler, and as one saved to his redeemer. The institutions of sacrifice and ritual are outward signs of human subjection to God himself and to his laws, according to which the universe is conceived to operate. Finally, Christianity teaches that just as God in his single and triune form ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of it. But there is one matter arising from that which I do think important. Even the High Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these are the things the Puritans attacked. If it is not the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have been a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster arsenal, full of arms against ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the Indians staged their "rain dance." The missionaries had long opposed this form of expression by the Indians, and their objections led to a government ban which was finally modified to permit some sort of ritual. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... up the orrery and watching the balls go round; he would know that the heavens must be studied for themselves, if one was ever to understand them accurately: and no one who wishes to be more than moderately religious can remain satisfied with the meagre assistance obtained by ritual ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... women pour forth and hasten to the Maronite church. In the loft of the dingy old warehouse wax candles burn before an altar of brass. The priest, in a white robe with a huge gold cross worked on the back, chants the ritual. The people respond. The women kneel in the aisles, shrouding their heads in their shawls; a surpliced acolyte swings his censer; the heavy perfume of burning incense fills ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... understood, Then writes upon Simplicity so well That none agree on what he wants to tell, And future ages will declare his pen Inspired by gods with messages to men. To found an ancient order those devote Their time—with ritual, regalia, goat, Blankets for tossing, chairs of little ease And all the modern inconveniences; These, saner, frown upon unmeaning rites And go to church for rational delights. So all are suited, shallow and profound, The prophets prosper and the world goes ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... have to first go through an ordeal which may try you terribly! Do not ask me anything! You must not ask, because I may not answer, and it would be pain to me to deny you anything. Marriage with such an one as I am has its own ritual, which may not be foregone. It may . . . " I broke passionately into ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... men took off their hats and stood with bared and bent heads, as if sharing in a solemn ritual. They stood with millions upon millions of their kin in the old mother lands, and scattered wide upon the seas, stood with many millions more of peoples and nations, pledging to this same cause of right, life ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... prominent our observance of the best of the old-time habits. I might preach a pleasant little sermon just here, taking as my text the "survival of the fittest," and illustrating the truth from our own domestic ritual; but the season preaches its own sermon, and I should only follow the example of some ministers and get between the text and my congregation if I made the attempt. For weeks we have all been looking forward to this eventful evening, and the still more eventful morrow. There have been hurried and ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... as our public ritual has it," says Cyril. "In the text-book which I studied—'The Perfect Butler'—there was very little about being humble, however. But my cousin, who conducts an employment agency, assured me that could only be acquired by practice. So he secured ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... without a conclusion. Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered. I have notes of some half-dozen cases of the kind of which "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" and that which I am now about to recount are the two which present ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the impression that grows on the visitor to America that Business has developed insensibly into a Religion, in more than the light, metaphorical sense of the words. It has its ritual and theology, its high places and its jargon, as well as its priests and martyrs. One of its more mystical manifestations is in advertisement. America has a childlike faith in advertising. They advertise here, everywhere, and in all ways. They shout your most private ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... ceremonies in their great temple are magnificent, and to one of these we are now invited. At the sound of the gong they make their entrance before the idols with a stately ritual; twenty or thirty priests officiate in gala costumes, with genuflections, clapping of hands and movements to and fro, which look like the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... horse, rode back, and was off saddle again, and had the rite administered swiftly; but having laid holy hands upon him, he laid also a disciplinary one, for he boxed the old fellow's ears pretty smartly, which spanking some would have us to believe was a technical act of ritual, a sort of accolade in fact. The same has been suggested about the flogging of forester Godfrey; for the mere resonance of these blows it seems, is too much for the tender nerves of our generation. Another bumpkin with his son once ran after the bishop's horse. The holy man descended, ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... the abbey of the Trinity had its own peculiar rites; and, till the period of the revolution, the community were in the habit of printing their liturgy annually in latin. A very beautiful quarto volume, containing the ritual, was published at Caen, in 1622, by the order of Laurence de Budos, then abbess. It was probably from pride at a privilege of this nature, and from a confidence in their strength, that the nuns persisted in celebrating the ridiculous, or, it might almost be called, blasphemous Fete des Fous, ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... ritual had one sacrifice which carried this truth in it. It is the first prescribed in the Book of Leviticus, the ceremonial book—namely, the burnt offering. Its especial meaning was this, that the whole man is to be laid ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the book which was answered by my brother, John Davidson.' While Bancroft was stunned and silenced by the impetuosity of the attack, Melville went on to charge him with the chief responsibility for the Romish ritual that had been introduced into the English Church, and for the silencing of the Puritan ministers; and then taking him by the white sleeves of his rochet, he shook them 'in his maner frielie and roundlie, and called them Romish rags and the mark of the Beast.' The Primate was the reputed author of ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... the manner of their lives. Obstinacy and selfishness have murdered more human beings than any other form of plague. The blasphemy of sham religion has insulted the majesty of the Creator more than any other form of sin, and He has answered it by His Supreme Silence. The man who attends a ritual of prayer which he does not honestly believe in, merely for the sake of social custom and observance, is openly deriding his Maker and the priests who gain their living out of such ritual are trading on the Divine. Let the people of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... a single farthing, not a single tear, nor a drop of blood. From the summit of our mountain he hath promulgated his laws, traced in evident characters on the tables of nature. From the East to the West they will be understood without the aid of interpreters, comments, or miracles. Every other ritual will be torn in pieces at the appearance of that of reason. Reason dethrones both the Kings of the earth, and the Kings of heaven.—No monarch above, if we wish to preserve our ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... sense in which churches and creeds, forms and ceremonies, play little part. Ours is the search of the heart for something greater than itself which is still itself; it is the religion of brotherhood, whose creed is love, whose ritual ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wickedness See Jeremiah 48:11-13, and many the like prophecies against them. Nothing could therefore justify this practice but a particular commission from God by his prophet, as in the present case, which was ever a sufficient warrant for breaking any such ritual or ceremonial ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... twice to the English Cathedral, and was interested to see there a lady in a nun's habit, with a number of brown girls, who was pointed out to me as Sister Bertha, who has been working here usefully for many years. The ritual is high. I am told that it is above the desires and the comprehension of most of the island episcopalians, but the zeal and disinterestedness of Bishop Willis will, in time, I doubt not, win upon those who prize such qualities. He called in the afternoon, and took me to his pretty, unpretending ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of ritual and doctrine—offences to which, fortunately, we can afford to be more indifferent than our ancestors were, no reasonable man now thinking twice about them—Pocklington was deprived of all his livings and dignities and preferments, and incapacitated from holding any for the future, ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... fashions of his country, or with the natural bias of his own education. Bred up a Jew, under a religion extremely technical, in an age and amongst a people more tenacious of the ceremonies than of any other part of that religion, he delivered an institution containing less of ritual, and that more simple, than is to be found in any religion which ever prevailed amongst mankind. We have known, I do allow, examples of an enthusiasm which has swept away all external ordinances before it. But this spirit certainly did not dictate our Saviour's conduct, ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... of General Sherman, his family, who had been bred in the Catholic faith, called in a Catholic priest to administer extreme unction according to the ritual of that church. The New York "Times," of the date of February 13, made a very uncharitable allusion to this and intimated that it was done surreptitiously, without my knowledge. This was not true but the statement deeply wounded the feelings of his ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Andrew, pastor of Crete, on the works of the most beatific father, John the Damascene. He is religious—unusually so! I used to lead him on, and he would sing to me with tears in his eyes: 'Come ye brethren, and we will give the last kiss to him who has gone to his rest...' From the ritual of the burial of laymen. No, just think: it is only in the Russian soul alone that such contradictions may ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... complete list of these fraternities is quite impossible. Commonly, thirty-two are reckoned, but many have vanished or have been suppressed, and there are sub-orders innumerable. Each has a "rule" dating back to its founder, and a ritual which the members perform when they meet together in their convent (kh[a]nq[a]h, z[a]wiya, takya). This may consist simply in the repetition of sacred phrases, or it may be an elaborate performance, such ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... though he was so single-minded a follower of Christ and His teachings, he was no Pharisee of the New Dispensation; the sacerdotalism of the Christian Churches was as hateful to him as the sacerdotalism of the Jews was to Christ. He was concerned with the living spirit, not with ritual, or formularies, or doctrinal shibboleths. His mind was open to all that was true, good, and generous. He asked for free and full development of the soul of man. "The cry of Ajax was for light," was one of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Mrs. Sykes was busy washing the veranda. This was a ritual, rigorously observed twice every day; in the morning with a pail and broom, in the evening with the hose. Par be it from us to malign the excellent Mrs. Sykes or to suggest that her opportune presence on the front steps was due to anything save the virtue of cleanliness. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... for Miss Langdon?" Even now she could see the courteous, grave young face soften as he turned quickly toward her, baring his dark head with that swift foreign grace that turns our perfunctory habits into something like a ritual. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of a religious, ceremonial, or healing ritual. Ointment or oil. Something that serves to soothe; a balm. Affected or exaggerated earnestness, especially in choice ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... life: games, marriages, feasts and battles, painted in the crude colors of early art. Between were paneled pictures of the gods, monstrous and deformed deities, half men, half beasts; and the dado, done in black, pictured the funeral rites of the Egyptians, with explanatory passages from the ritual of the dead. Rudely-sculptured bas-reliefs and intaglios, torn from ancient mastabas, were set over windows and doors, and stone colossi of kings and gods leered and threatened from dusky corners. Sarcophagi of black basalt, ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... previously done over those of the other Christian slain. It mattered not; that all seeing eye which reads the heart, could not fail to discriminate between the living and the dead, and the gentle soul of the unfortunate girl was already far removed beyond the errors, or deceptions, of any human ritual. These simple rites, however, were not wholly wanting in suitable accompaniments. The tears of Judith and Hist were shed freely, and Deerslayer gazed upon the limpid water, that now flowed over one whose spirit was even purer than its own mountain springs, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... A knowledge of the ritual, though, stood Rodney in good stead this morning. He liked Martin well enough—had really a traditional and vicarious affection for him. But he was about the last man he wanted to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... o'clock Sunday service at a certain noted metropolitan church. At breakfast, and during the walk to church, Fenwick said not a word to his friend about Bullhampton. He talked of church services, of ritual, of the quietness of a Sunday in London, and of the Sunday occupations of three millions of people not a fourth of whom attend divine service. He chose any subject other than that of which Gilmore was thinking. But as soon as they were out of church he made ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... of light in the ritual of the church it is not surprising that the extinction of lights is a part of the ceremony of excommunication. Such a ceremony is described in an early writing thus: "Twelve priests should stand about the bishop, holding in their hands lighted ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... picked up that precious phrase? She was growing all too worldly-wise for his simple old mind. His abashed eyes turned away from her and began to blink at the twinkling candles on the tea-table; it stood there like an altar raised for the celebration of some strange, fearsome ritual—an incident in the dubious life toward which a heartless and ambitious daughter-in-law was pushing his poor little Preciosa. He almost felt like grasping her by the arm and bolting with her ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... sent to the bottom by a big typhoon, and the wives and the sweethearts were being towed out to sea to pay a last tribute to them, by strewing the fatal spot with flowers and paper prayers. White-robed priests stood up in the front of the boats and chanted some mournful ritual, keeping time to the dull thumping of a drum. The air was heavy with incense. A dreamy melancholy filled the air and I thought how hallowed and beautiful a thing is memory. From out that silent watching crowd came a voice that sent my thoughts ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... humbug. He knew that if he didn't now get rid of her Roscarna would become nothing more than a warren in which her innumerable relatives might swarm. He purged Roscarna of Joyces, Biddy included. He buried Jocelyn decently according to the ritual of the Church of Ireland, and proceeded to put his wife's estate in order as soon as her father's ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... stranger as it were in a foreign land. In 1246, however, the Pope having threatened excommunication, the King gave way, and Richard at once began to reform his diocese, to discipline his priests, and to restore the ritual of his cathedral, and indeed of all the churches in his diocese. He lived a life of severe asceticism, and gave so much in alms that he was always a beggar. Usurers were punished by excommunication, and Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues. It was he, too, who first established ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... Christ. From some marginal notes he has made on Froude's essay on Newman's "Grammar of Assent," I take these quotations: "After all, what matter what our dogmas if we really follow the example of great teachers like Christ, who had nothing to do with creeds or ritual?" "Every man should be his own priest." The Sermon on the Mount was his religion. One of his favourite Scriptural texts was the familiar one from the Epistle of St. James (i, 27): "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... on Herman, holding up his glass, and going on with the formula they had, half unconsciously, fallen into the habit of using, although they made no pretense of having a ritual. ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... jewel, and found surcease of the pangs of exile, easement for the restraints upon liberty, and blissful consolation. Tendance upon the garden under the strait shadow of wall was to him, not a duty, not a pastime, but a ritual. The captive was happy, for here was the end ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of a forged bond, a stockade. This latter condition had been the result of allowing the church to interfere unwarrantedly in what was not its affair. Religion had calmly usurped this, the most potent of the motives of humanity; or, rather, it had fastened to it the ludicrous train of ritual. That laughable idea that God had a separate scrutinizing eye, like the eye of a ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... north porch, and a chapel attached to the north transept. Alterations of an extensive nature seem to have been begun in the fourteenth century; for to this date belong the rood screen, placed farther to the east than the old division between the ritual choir of the canons and the western part of the nave, which was probably given up to the lay dwellers in the parish,—and the splendid reredos. The Lady Chapel also was completed certainly before 1406, probably eleven years earlier. The fifteenth century saw the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... passed, Fergus said to his sister, 'My dear Flora, before I return to the barbarous ritual of our forefathers, I must tell you that Captain Waverley is a worshipper of the Celtic muse, not the less so perhaps that he does not understand a word of her language. I have told him you are eminent as a translator of Highland poetry, and that Mac-Murrough ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... give other graves in other lands to these who had given their lives. Velasquez was laid beside the Americans. Teresa, a shivering, sobbing little figure in the garb of an insurgent soldier, was supported by big Graydon Bansemer. There was no service except the short army ritual; there was no priest or pastor; there was but one real mourner—a pretty, heart-broken girl who lay for hours beside the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... chiefs. Where, we may ask, is not at this moment the effect of that movement perfectly appreciable within our body? Look at the new-built and restored churches of the land; look at the multiplication of schools; the greater exactness of ritual observance; the higher standard of clerical life, service, and devotion; the more frequent celebrations; the cathedrals open; the loving sisterhoods labouring, under episcopal sanction, with the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... expression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of the whole body of existing poetry; how many fascinating trains of reflexion, what colour and substance would therewith have been deducted from it, filled as it is, apart from the more aweful associations of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad's cup, with all the various symbolism of the fruit of the vine. That supposed loss is but an imperfect measure of all that the name of Dionysus recalled to the Greek mind, under a single imaginable form, an outward body of flesh presented to the senses, and comprehending, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... were an established ritual. Had she been using her son's sick-room, Phyllis wondered, as a regular weeping-place? She could feel in Mrs. Harrington, even in this mortal sickness, the tremendous driving influence which is often part of a passionately ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... la casa ... panes negros. "The following are the chief points in the funeral rite as prescribed in the Roman Ritual. The corpse is borne in procession with lights to the church. The parish priest assists in surplice and black stole; the clerks carry the holy water and cross; the coffin is first sprinkled with holy water and the psalm De Profundis recited; then the corpse is carried ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... had touched the coffin, taking a last farewell. The blind men had made a circle round the grave, hiding the last act of ritual from the multitude. The needful leaves, the graceful pebbles, had been deposited, the myrtle blooms and flowers had been thrown, and rice, dates, bread, meat, and silver pieces were scattered among the people. Some poor men came near to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is valued primarily for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... suffice, Till night with grateful shade involved the skies, And shed ambrosial dews. Fast by the deep, Along the tented shore, in balmy sleep, Our cares were lost. When o'er the eastern lawn, In saffron robes, the daughter of the dawn Advanced her rosy steps, before the bay Due ritual honours to the gods I pay; Then seek the place the sea-born nymph assign'd, With three associates of undaunted mind. Arrived, to form along the appointed strand For each a bed, she scoops the hilly sand; Then, from ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... more liberal than the operation strictly needed was cleared for me on the polished deal table; a penny ink-bottle and a pen with a rusty but still useful nib set upon it, and from a special drawer, with a solemnity that of the character of sacred ritual, Mrs. Watt, as Bill's grandmother informed me she was called, drew forth a single sheet of notepaper. Its dimensions had been heavily curtailed by the deepest border of mourning black that I ever had seen on English writing-paper. Other nations surpass us in this evidence of respect, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... near Brantford also boasts of its place of worship; but, although it has its ritual from the Church of England, the clergyman comes from the United States and is paid by the society, called the New England Society. He has lived many years among his flock, and is said to be an excellent man. The Indians are to a man as loyal as ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... differences in the proportions of the several parts. It remains only to add that in almost every case the principal front was toward the east or nearly so. When Greek temples were converted into Christian churches, as often happened, it was necessary, in order to conform to the Christian ritual, to reverse this arrangement and to place the principal entrance at the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... ask whether I endeavour to raise the islanders to my own level? It is the last thing that I would attempt. Culture they do not need: their dainty hieratic precisions of ritual are a sufficient culture in themselves. As I said once before, "it is an absurdity to speak of married people being one." Here we are an indefinite number; and no jealousy, no ambitious exclusiveness, mars the happiness of all. This is the Higher Life about which ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... fast— And praying—one could most pathetic pray; But love our enemies! Dear Lord, Is there not unto thee some easier way— Some way through churchly service, song, or psalm, Or ritual grand, to reach thy ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... Messiahship, and showed her that as God is a Spirit, so they that worship Him must do so, not in any specific locality, such as Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim, and not by any prescribed form or any outward ritual, but in spirit and in truth. No wonder that her heart was immediately and completely captivated by so grand and glorious a revelation, and that, at once, she left her waterpot and went her way to become a preacher of righteousness ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... women, being in number eighteen, as well seculars as regulars, and without a single exception, appeared to him to have obtained the gift of tongues, inasmuch as they accurately replied to the matters in Latin, which were addressed to them by their exorcists, and which were not borrowed from the ritual, still less arranged by any preconcert; they frequently explained themselves in Latin—sometimes in entire periods, sometimes in broken sentences;" "that all or almost all of them were proved to have introvision (cognizance de l'interieur) and knowledge of whatever thought ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... once taken place, the whole Anglo-Saxon name attached itself to the Roman ritual. Among the motives for this change those which corresponded to the naive materialistic superstition of the time may have been the most influential, yet there were other motives also which touched the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... God not more by His Righteousness and His Power than by His Grace, manifest as all three have been throughout His dealings with Israel. The worship of other gods is forbidden and so is every attempt to represent Himself in a material form. His ritual is purged of foolish, unclean and cruel elements. Witchcraft and necromancy are ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... islands and keys which they frequented, and where much treasure, whose lawless owners perished without reclaiming it, is still supposed to be concealed. The most cruel of mankind are often the most superstitious; and those pirates are said to have had recourse to a horrid ritual, in order to secure an unearthly guardian to their treasures. They killed a negro or Spaniard, and buried him with the treasure, believing that his spirit would haunt the spot, and terrify away all intruders." ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... saying unto me. Write. From henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.'" And then the voice faltered and broke. "She was the light of my life and the joy of my heart," it was no longer the ritual of the church; "and yet had I to walk beside her and tell her naught. And now is she taken from me, for the Lord hath received her to His bosom to live in the light ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... church music; he loved to join in singing the familiar psalms and paraphrases and hymns, and he appreciated as few in the congregation could the majestic anthems rendered by the choir. He never wantonly absented himself from the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the Presbyterian ritual of which, in close keeping with the form of the original Holy Meal, naturally appealed to him. Intellectual and mystical, historical and sacramental elements entered into ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... only trace it back to the oldest chant music, when it was doubtless sung by both the Eastern and Western Churches. In the rude liturgies of the 4th and 5th centuries it must have begun to assume ritual form; but it remained for the more modern school of composers hundreds of years later to illustrate the "Magnificat" with the melody of art and genius. Superseding the primitive unisonous plain-song, the old parallel concords, and the simple faburden (faux ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... his family. He recoiled from what he figured to himself (but too often falsely figured) as the haughty and disdainful English nobility—-all so rich, all so polished in manner, all so punctiliously correct in the ritual of biensance. Lord Carbery might face them gayly and boldly: for he was rich, and, although possessing Irish estates and an Irish mansion, was a thorough Englishman by education and early association. "But I," said Lord Massey, "had ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... therefore it became the wedding finger. The priesthood kept up this idea by still retaining it as the wedding finger, but the custom is really associated with the doctrine of the Trinity; for, in the ancient ritual of English marriages, the ring was placed by the husband on the top of the thumb of the left hand, with the words, 'In the name of the father;' he then removed it to the forefinger, saying, 'In the name of the Son;' then to the middle finger, adding, 'And of the Holy Ghost;' finally, he left it ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... more to do in Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language of the church, than has preaching. Savages are nearly all great dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. The character of people is often learned from their dances, and Moliere says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... banner of my Cid, and my Cid was the first Christian Alcayde of Toledo. Of the terms granted unto the Moors, and how they were set aside for the honour of the Catholic faith, and of the cunning of the Jews who dwelt in the city, and how the Romish ritual was introduced therein, this is not the place to speak; all these things are written in the Chronicles ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... the eternal duties of morality, is the pure and simple religion of the Evangel, the true theism. The other, established in one country only, gives that country its own gods, its own tutelary patrons; it has its own dogmas and ritual, and all foreigners are deemed to be infidels. Such were all the religions ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... sections recited and addresses on morality, the domestic virtues and other ethical subjects were given. In some, an orator of morality was appointed. Births, marriages and deaths were announced and—an essential detail—collections were made in aid of suffering Humanity. A Decadi Ritual[175] was printed with a selection of hymns and prayers to be used in the Temples of Reason. The services were crowded, famous preachers often evoked tears, tracts were published and saints of Liberty were in course of evolution. But less than eight years after Robespierre's ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... breeze, caught in the maze of tufted pinnacles, filtered its chastened way, a pensive organist, learned to draw grave litanies from the boughs and reverently voice the air of sanctity. The fresh familiar scent hung for a smokeless incense, breathing high ritual and redolent of pious mystery. No circumstance of worship was unobserved. With one consent birds, beasts and insects made not a sound. The precious pall of silence lay like a phantom cloud, unruffled. Nature was on ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates |
