"Shibboleth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spring of 1812 was not an unattractive one. A new party, controlled by a remarkable coterie of brilliant young men from the South, whose shibboleth was war with England, had sprung up in Congress, and, by sheer force of will and intellect, had dragged to the support of its policies the larger part of the Republican majority.[164] President Madison was thoroughly in sympathy with these members. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... their standard. There was not one of the men repudiating them who did not believe thoroughly in the principle of woman's full right to the ballot. The women simply were sacrificed to political expediency; set aside without a moment's hesitation in obedience to the party shibboleth. "This is the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Britain, well known to deal in such commodities, and to whom he was instructed to address himself in a particular phrase and with a certain sign, which, it seems, passed at that time current among the initiated Jacobites. The moment Mr. Pembroke had uttered the Shibboleth, with the appropriate gesture, the bibliopolist greeted him, notwithstanding every disclamation, by the title of Doctor, and conveying him into his back shop, after inspecting every possible and impossible place of concealment, he commenced: 'Eh, Doctor!—Well—all under the rose—snug—I ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the Bible for its own. Bigotry has made the Bible its battleground. Its phrases have become the shibboleth of pietistic sectarians. Its authority has been evoked in support of the foulest crimes committed by the vilest men; and its very existence has been made a pretext for theories which shut out God from His own world. In our day ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... have only begun to attack!" declared Westerling. He liked that sentence. It sounded like the shibboleth of a great leader in a crisis. "I shall assault ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... 'Tis Handbooks make the Pedagogue: O great, eternal verity! O fact of which our ancestors could ne'er obtain a glimpse! But we'll proclaim the truth abroad and noise it to posterity, Our watchword a curriculum—our shibboleth DE GUIMPS! ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... d'Herouville, polite to everybody, as a fine gentleman knows how to be, greeted the Comte de la Palferine with the particular nod which, while it does not imply either esteem or intimacy, conveys to all the world, "We are of the same race, the same blood—equals!"—And this greeting, the shibboleth of the aristocracy, was invented to be the despair of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... hundred marks, and they not a hundred pence," laughed Grimbeard. "It is not that I respect noble blood. I have scant cause. A wandering priest who came to say mass for us told us the story of Jephthah and the Gileadites; I will try the effect of a Shibboleth, too. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... consequently an important protective duty. It is a curious historical fact that this article, wool, seems to be the chief bone of contention ever since; in our tariffs nothing has been more bitter than the dispute on wool; the duty on wool is the shibboleth of the extreme protectionist.[1] Ohio, which is the home of the strong protection feeling, regards the duty on wool as the corner-stone to the whole fabric. It is argued that "a cheap coat makes a cheap man." In the East the feeling is that the duty on wool makes clothing ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... whether these things will be found of equal length, height, and breadth with the book of life, or whether, when thou art weighed in the balance, thou wilt yet be found wanting (Dan 5:27). How if, when thou comest to speak for thyself before God, thou shouldst say Sibboleth instead of Shibboleth: that is, though almost, yet not rightly and naturally the language of the Christians ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sixty years; LINCOLN for but a tenth of that time. Palmerston was a skilful guide of an established aristocracy; LINCOLN a leader, or rather a companion, of the people. Palmerston was exclusively an Englishman, and made his boast in the House of Commons that the interest of England was his Shibboleth; LINCOLN thought always of mankind, as well as his own country, and served human nature itself. Palmerston, from his narrowness as an Englishman, did not endear his country to any one court or to any one nation, but rather caused general uneasiness and dislike; ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... the "Autocrat" appears to me at least as certain as that two and two make four. It may, indeed, contain some recondite and malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's Prayer. But, understanding it simply as meaning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... comprehensively denominated that movement the renaissance of mediaeval feeling, but at the outset it acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... gravely as possible, "and no doubt the shallow-hearted, the stupid, the selfish are to be found everywhere, and belonging to either sex; but, nevertheless, solid virtue and true kindness are to be met with among the dames of Mayfair as among the matrons of the country-side. Their shibboleth is different, that's all. Perhaps—it is possible—that the speech of the town ladies is the more charitable, that they seek more persistently to do good to their fellow-creatures. I don't know. Comparisons are odious, but so," he added, with ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... whatever may be their other characteristics, are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as, we believe, our language can produce, and especially against everything in which he chooses (whether right or wrong) to recognise the shibboleth of Toryism. We shall endeavour, however, in the expression of our opinions, to remember the respect we owe to our readers and to Mr. Macaulay's general character and standing in the world of letters, rather than the provocations and examples of the volumes ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... His Shibboleth was, that the disgrace of the State must be wiped out by the repeal of the Yazoo Act; and repeal rang from every mouth, from Savannah to the mountains. Jackson resigned his seat in Congress, and was elected a member of the Legislature. Immediately upon ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... is to a nation, as a fan to the floor, which purges away the chaff and purifies the wheat. It is like the furnace to the metal, which takes away the dross and shews you a refined lump. It is a Shibboleth, to distinguish Ephraimites from Gileadites. And who knows not how great an advantage it is for the successful carrying on of any honourable design, to know friends from enemies, and the faithful from false brethren? Some ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... imperfectly upon any other topics but stots and kyloes, and Harry Wakefield could never bring his broad Yorkshire tongue to utter a single word of Gaelic. It was in vain Robin spent a whole morning, during a walk over Minch Moor, in attempting to teach his companion to utter, with true precision, the shibboleth LLHU, which is the Gaelic for a calf. From Traquair to Murder Cairn, the hill rung with the discordant attempts of the Saxon upon the unmanageable monosyllable, and the heartfelt laugh which followed every failure. They had, however, better modes of awakening the echoes; for Wakefield could sing ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... do see the various churches just beginning to rouse themselves—no longer wholly absorbed in making every one say "shibboleth" with an "h," still just as in politics the party machine becomes God, crushing truth and righteousness before it, so the church machine is only too often a Juggernaut's car, destroying all faith in God and man. The machine has usurped the pedestal ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... defective memory. She could not learn anything by heart, and if she were at all tired had to keep herself tremendously in hand to make no mistakes. But the three years of constant trying had enabled her to talk upon most subjects in a shibboleth of the world which imposed upon everyone. Her real talent which called for the greatest admiration was the way in which she manipulated what she knew, and skimmed a fresh subject. She would do so with such admirable skill and wording as to give ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... separation? An answer must be found or made,—and presently the answer appeared: If white and black men and women eat and drink together, play and work together,—then they will intermarry, and the white race will become mixed and degenerate. So that became the conviction, the creed, the shibboleth, of the Southern whites,—race purity, to be safeguarded by complete prohibition of all social intimacy, especially as symbolized by the common meal. And the prohibition was enforced among the whites by the penalty of sure ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the day's Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays Nocturnes of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith; O bearer of their order's shibboleth, Like some pale ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... words came back to me. The mountains seemed to echo them always. "Wake up, Davy! Do something; be somebody; get out of the valley." Here was my shibboleth. I must do something; I must be somebody; I must get out of the valley! And then I should go to Penelope Blight, and a hundred urbane, unctuous uncles could not defraud me ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... The suppression of competition by the establishment of state industries; equality of remuneration for labor; equality and legislative determination of the rate of interest; the choice of superintendents by the workmen. With many modern socialists, the shibboleth is not so much liberte as solidarite. Besides, Fichte's Naturrecht (1796), and his geschlossener Handelsstaat, are, without doubt, among the most remarkable works favoring an "organization of labor." They aim at the destruction of the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... American!" and—Wilton did not care for that tone. He had schooled himself to an English walk, and, so long as he did not raise it, an English voice. He did not gesticulate with his hands; he sat down on most of his enthusiasms, but he could not rid himself of The Shibboleth. He would ask for the Worcestershire sauce: even Howard, his immaculate butler, could not break him ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... repeat, are the happy by chance. You are the pickpocket of the happiness of which they are the proprietors. They are the legitimate possessors; you are the intruder. You live in concubinage with luck. What do you want that you have not already? Shibboleth help me! This fellow is a rascal. To multiply himself by Dea would be pleasant, all the same. Such happiness is like a swindle. Those above who possess happiness by privilege do not like folks below them to have so much enjoyment. If they ask you what ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of the spoken word over the written, a thing he could well afford to do, since he was a remarkably good writer. This for the same reason that the only man who can afford to go ragged is the man with a goodly bank-balance. The shibboleth of the modern schools of oratory is, "We grow through expression." And Plato was the man who first said it. Plato's teaching was all in the form of the "quiz," because he believed that truth was not a thing to be acquired ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... let a hair of my paint- brush touch the little broken mass of carmine which was all that he possessed. We believed, but I do not know whether this could be the fact, that carmine of this superlative quality was sold at a guinea a cake. 'Carmine', therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indulgence; it was a symbol of all that taste and art and wealth could combine to produce. I imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar's feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's proudest possession, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... him a most flattering attention. She was deeply impressed by him. He had just aided her pet mission in China—what he had given the heathen would have buttered my children's bread for many a day. Also, he was all but lyrical in his voicing of the shibboleth that Woman's Sphere is the Home, wherein she should be adored, enshrined, and protected. Woman and the Home! All the innate ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... quite as well educated, and of as high station in all but literary society, as Mr. Dickens, use the same pronunciation; but this eminent writer has thought fit of late to proscribe this practice as far as in him lies, by making it the Shibboleth of two of the meanest and vilest characters in his works. I should like to know whether the aspiration of this letter is due to Mr. D.'s London birth and residence, or whether it has become of late the general usage of good society. If the latter, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... in turn, donned the mendicant's knapsack. Pushing aside his golden goblet, each filled the beggars' bowl to the brim, and drained it to the beggars' health. Roars of laughter, and shouts of "Vivent les gueulx" shook the walls of the stately mansion, as they were doomed never to shake again. The shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies had provided them with a spell, which was to prove, in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace or hovel, forest or wave, as the deeds of the "wild ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the monophysites with an armoury of weapons. His teaching could not with justice be styled docetic or Apollinarian, but its mystic tone was so pronounced that it proved a propaedeutic for monophysitism. The shibboleth of orthodoxy, quoted above, "one incarnate nature of God the Word," passed rapidly into the watchword of heresy. Athanasius had used the word "nature" in a broad sense. The monophysites narrowed it down to its later technical meaning. Thus they ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... divided about Schoeffer. Some say he is no painter. Nothing seems to me so utterly without rule or compass as this world of art Divided into little cliques, each with his shibboleth, artists excommunicate each other as heartily as theologians, and a neophyte who should attempt to make up a judgment by their help would be obliged to shift ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... who, in many departments, ways, make the building up of the masses, by building up grand individuals, our shibboleth: and in brief that is the marrow ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... lived in, all things were estimated only by their value to commerce or to speculation; that there was neither space nor patience amongst men for what was, in their reckoning, useless; that the conqueror was now but a trader in disguise; that civilisation was but the shibboleth of traffic; that because trade follows the flag, therefore to carry the flag afar, thousands of young soldiers of every nationality are slaughtered annually in poisonous climes and obscure warfare, because such is the suprema lex and will of the ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... The Shibboleth, or trade cry, of the average modern vocal teacher is "The Old Italian School of Singing." How much of value there is in this may be surmised when we stop to consider that of the many who claim to teach the true Old ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... furnished some brutes lower than the beasts of the field, who have stirred the passions of the Anglo-Saxon as nothing in all of human history has before stirred them. The shibboleth of the Anglo-Saxon race is the courage of man and the virtue of woman: and when, by violence, a member of a despised race assails a defenseless woman; robs her of her virtue, her crown of glory; and sends her back to society broken and crushed in ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of brotherhood. There is no folly, no pardoning warmth ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The neglected gardens no longer check the advancing sands, which in some places were drifting over the ramparts. Through its abandoned gateway we almost staggered with weakness, and directed our course to the miserable bazaar. The only meat we could find was pork, that shibboleth between Mohammedanism and Confucianism. The Dungan restaurant-keeper would not cook it, and only after much persuasion consented to have it prepared outside and brought back to be eaten beneath his roof. With better water and more substantial food we began, from this time on, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... the grace of even the thinnest layer of varnish, and might well take lessons in the religion of appearances and that thing which we call "manner." Madame did know at least how to bear herself with the seeming of a lady, and could say her shibboleth as it ought to be said. Thus, she ate with delicacy and held her knife nicely poised and balanced, but Leam grasped hers like a whanger, and cut off pieces of meat anyhow, which as often as not she took from the point. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... possession of the souls of my friends. I would fight for their independence of thought and sincerity of life, and he would fight to lead them off into a far country in quest of what I considered a tradition, a shibboleth, "a potent agent for intoxication" of the reason by which man must progress. I also knew that I faced a foe versed in the warfare between religion and modern scientific decisions about it and that he would be one worthy ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... for them; they seemed to enter heartily into the other portions of the service—but the psalms in metre are a great Shibboleth. My beadle, who always sat where he could command the congregation, has often assured me that when a psalm was announced he could soon tell ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... out, "Such fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in, Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... if we sit tight on the safe side with a fire-insurance policy in the shape of a creed! Personally, I wonder when we all take to joining the sit-tight, safety-guarantee brigade, who is to stand on the outside guard? Or is there any modern Fighting Line? Or does the Fighting Line belong to the old Shibboleth legends of Canaanite and Jebusite and Perizzite and God knows what other "ite"? I hear these ancient gentry preached about and the heroes who smote them hip and thigh extolled. Personally, I am a great deal more interested in the modern tussle for a promised land than in those ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... great pains to instruct themselves as regarded American localities, and were not readily to be caught by a cross-examination as to the topographical features, public institutions, or prominent inhabitants of the places where they pretended to belong. The best shibboleth I ever hit upon lay in the pronunciation of the word "been," which the English invariably make to rhyme with "green," and we Northerners, at least (in accordance, I think, with the custom of Shakespeare's time), universally ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indescribable and without a function in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme good which was good for nobody would be without conceivable value. Respect for such an idol is a dialectical superstition; and if zeal for that shibboleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise of intelligent choice or the development of appreciation for natural pleasures, it would constitute a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persistently indulged ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Virtu Nightmare Devil Gospel Comfort Whist Mermaid Pearl Onion Enthusiasm Domino Book Fanatic Grotesque Cheat Auction Economy Illegible Quell Cheap Illegitimate Sheriff Excelsior Emasculate Danger Dunce Champion Shibboleth Calico Adieu Essay Pontiff Macadamize Wages Copy Stentorian Quarantine Puny Saturnine Buxom Caper Derrick Indifferent Boycott Mercurial Gaudy Countenance ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... had led the Legislature to appropriate ten thousand pounds sterling toward an expedition to effect the conquest of Canada. Acadia had just fallen into the hands of Gov. Francis Nicholson without firing a gun, and the news had carried the New Yorkers off their feet. "On to Canada!" was the shibboleth of the adventurous colonists; and the expedition started. Eight transports, with eight hundred and sixty men, perished amid the treacherous rocks and angry waters of the St. Lawrence. The troops that had gone overland returned in chagrin. The city was wrapped in gloom: the Legislature refused ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... at the age of seven, is not commendable—setting aside the question of whether (at any age) Theology is a web of words, ritual, dogma, tradition, invention, shibboleth; a web originally spun by interested men to obscure God from ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... coincide with the world's verdict. The world had said Garrison was crooked. If they had not agreed, they had not denied. If Garrison now had been reinstated, then the world said he was honest. They agreed now—loudly; adding the old shibboleth of the moral coward: "I told you so." But still they doubted that he had "come back." A has-been can never ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... for a principle; they do comprehend you when you talk of a name. The Emperor Napoleon is to them a name, and the prefects and officials who influence their votes are paid for incorporating all principles in the shibboleth of that single name. You have thus sought the well-spring of a political system in the deepest stratum of popular ignorance. To rid popular ignorance of its normal revolutionary bias, the rural peasants are indoctrinated with the conservatism ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... woman's sphere." This shibboleth is the logical result of the attitude mentioned. Doubtless, the home is woman's sphere; but the home includes all that pertains to it—city, politics and taxes, laws relating to the protection of minors, municipal ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... with a view to the speedy Christianization of the world, and either three-fourths would keep away or the whole time of the meeting be wasted in an acrimonious quarrel as to the meaning of Christianity or the wording of the Shibboleth whereby those who were should be distinguished from those who were not entitled ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Gallatin distinctly threw upon Congress, and by implication upon the Republican majority, the responsibility for the state of the Treasury, and the imperative necessity for a form of taxation which it detested as oppressive, and which it was a party shibboleth to declare in and out of season, to be unconstitutional. The choice of the administration was between the Bank which Jefferson detested and Gallatin favored, and the internal tax which Mr. Gallatin ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... close to her knee as he stood and talked at the foot of the mountain trail. And the voice of the tree in the eager spring airs said to her waiting heart—whispered it softly, shouted and tossed it abroad so that all might have heard it had they been awake and known the shibboleth, murmured it in tones of tenderness that penetrated her with bliss—that Creed was coming—coming—coming to her, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... Bartlett calls this the "shibboleth of Bostonians." However this may be, it is simply an archaism, not a vulgarism. Show, like blow, crow, grow, seems formerly to have had what is called a strong preterite. Shew is used by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... bishops, deans, rectors, and curates are discussed unreservedly; and the questions put and answered are not whether they are apostolic teachers, but whether they are high, low, broad, or no church; whether they wear scarlet or black, intone or read, say "shibboleth" or "sibboleth." ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... believe that is my predecessor's name—should he prove amiable, I may consent to go a little in your debt, and pay him for whatever log-chopping he has done. If otherwise, by the Lady of Guadalupe!—you remember our old Mexican shibboleth—he shall be cleared out of his clearing sans facon. Perhaps we have been wasting words upon an ideal existence! Perhaps there is no squatter after all; or that old Holt has long since 'gone under' ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them—rare and strange souls even in their time—would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Maitre d'Armes, and a passing reference to "The People's WILLIAM" and the carrying out of the People's will—which is quite another affair,—all, to quote Sir PETER, "vastly entertaining." The chapter on the Shibboleth "Education" is, thinks the Baron, about the best. Mr. LILLY is a Satirist who, as GEORGIUS MEREDITHIUS MAGNUS might express it, is, in his fervour, near a truth, grasps it, and is moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong, plain speech, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... between "the rocks of too much danger and pale fear" and reached the port of victory. Experience during the period since last it met may have had much to do with silence or brief mention of the heretofore darling shibboleth with which they were wont to inspire the faithful, rally the laggards, or capture converts. "Consistency, thou art a jewel" that dazzles, confuses, but doth not bewilder the ordinary politician, who can allow a former policy noiseless and ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... by a species of flattery to which the Welsh are most open. I had learnt, after no little application, a Welsh toast—a happy specimen of the language; it was but three words, but they were truly cabalistic. No sooner had I, after a "neat and appropriate" preface, uttered my triple Shibboleth, (it ended in rag, and signified "Wales, Welshmen, and Welshwomen,") than the whole party rose, and cheered at me till I felt positively modest. My pronunciation, I believe, was perfect, (a woman's lips and an angel's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the movement party, held truly orthodox opinions, and did their pastoral work as faithfully as ever Chalmers did after his great change of sentiment. It is curious to know that while party feeling ran high in the Scotch Church, it was a shibboleth of the Moderate party to use the Lord's Prayer in the Church service. The other party rejected that beautiful compendium of all supplication, on the ground that, it was not a Christian prayer, no mention being made in it of the doctrine of the atonement. It is recorded ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... accustomed to talking with people of our world—people who know England and its great houses well enough to have made her familiar with the knowledge of where certain pieces of famous furniture are.—The very phrasing of her sentences is the phrasing of our Shibboleth, and not the phrasing ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... meeting of the members of the two Houses and of the Divines of the Assembly in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, at which 220 of the Commons and all the Divines then present swore to the new pact, and signed it with their names.—This was but the beginning. The Covenant was thenceforth the Shibboleth of Parliamentarianism. In London first, and then gradually through England, in towns, parishes, and parish churches, wherever Parliament prevailed, all had to sign it or swear to it if they would be considered friends to the cause of Parliament ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... technic alone, is our shibboleth. How many teachers realize this? How many still commit the sin of transforming their pupils into machines, developing muscle at the expense of music! To be sure, some of the old teachers considered the second F minor ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... South must cultivate more cordial relations with the white men of the South. They must, by a wise policy, hasten the day when politics shall cease to be the shibboleth that creates perpetual warfare. The citizen of a State is far more sovereign than the citizen of the United States. The State is a real, tangible reality; a thing of life and power; while the United States is, purely, an ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... whether that be so or not equality is not consistent with military discipline. An army in which the idea of equality reigns is not an army but a mob, and is no more use for fighting purposes than so many armed peasants. The Shibboleth is always absurd and in a case like the present ruinous. The first duty of a soldier is obedience, absolute and implicit, and a complete surrender of the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... gentleman. The simplicity of his manners did not convince them. They seemed to hold by some complicated code of etiquette for ladies and gentlemen—Heaven knew how they had become possessed of it—of which he fell sadly short. He did not understand in the least their shibboleth of flirtation, their particular methods of banter, the precise shade of significance of their facial expressions and movements, the exact values of their phrases and catch-words; all of which was knowledge that, according to their notion, was the ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... called, is to-day the great panacea,—the political nostrum; as such it is confidently advocated by statesmen and professors and even by the presidents of our institutions of the advanced education. "Trust the People" is the shibboleth! "Let the People rule!" "The cure for too much Liberty is more Liberty!" To Democracy plain and simple—Composite Wisdom—I frankly confess I feel no call,—no call greater than, for instance, towards Autocracy or Aristocracy or Plutocracy. Taken simply, ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... iniquity."[238] "The Class War is inevitable under the present form of property-holding, and for it there can be neither truce, quarter, nor ending, save by the extinction of the class system itself. The identity of interests between capitalism and labour is a shibboleth that can only be given any sane meaning at all in the cynical sense that the interests of the wolf and the lamb are also 'identical' when the wolf has ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... shibboleth of shallow souls Around his ears in clamorous cadence rolls; He swells, he glows, he twinkles; The sapient Chairman wags his snowy pate, Whilst cynic triumph, cautious yet elate, Lurks laughing in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... these lost formulae to their rightful places, the explanation of the mere waifs and strays of folklore will be attended with some approach to scientific accuracy, and we shall then be in a position to get rid of that shibboleth so dear to the non-folklore critic, that all these things we deal with ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... only response was the bitter shibboleth—"Carajo!" showing that both were uneasy about the dog. Long before this time both had heard of the fame of Cibolo, though neither had a full knowledge of the perfect training to which that sagacious ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... intelligence were exchanged by the three gentlemen. I had stumbled upon their shibboleth, and proclaimed myself an Ephraimite, and not of Gilead. I have no doubt that up to that moment they had considered me as one of themselves—a member, and perhaps a priest, of their own ancient, grand, and imposing ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth, and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still the shibboleth in which the British believe, no less than our pioneers and Grant and Stonewall Jackson believed in it, and nothing throughout the Somme battle was so characteristically British as not only the stubbornness of their defense when small parties ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... longer "imputed" to him. In other words, he is outwardly accounted and declared righteous in the sight of God, though inwardly he remains a sinner. With the exception of "sola fides" there was probably no shibboleth in the sixteenth century so persistently dinned into the ears of Catholics and Protestants alike as "iustitia Christi extra nos." It is found in the Apologia written in defence of the Augsburg Confession(905) and ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... he as an artist to whom all doors were open, she as the elegant wife of a Conservative deputy, they were experts in that sport of brilliant French chatter, amiably satirical, banal, brilliant but futile, with a certain shibboleth which gives a particular and greatly envied reputation to those whose tongues have become supple in this ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Manchester, and visited in the week. The care and training of street arabs had been his passion when he was still a student at Manchester New College. Then had come his moment of utterance—a thirst for preaching, for religious influence; though he could not bring himself to accept any particular shibboleth or take any kind of orders. He found something congenial for a time to a deep though struggling faith in the leadership of the Christian Brethren. Now, however, something had broken in him; he could preach no more. But he could go back to his old school; he could teach his boys on Sundays ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... probably picked up intelligence for these scandalous chronicles. The writers, too, condescended to intersperse the cant dialect of the populace, with which the cobblers doubtless assisted these learned men, when busied in their buffoonery. Hence all their vulgar gibberish; the Shibboleth of the numerous class of their admirers—such as, "O, whose tat?" John Kankerbury, for Canterbury; Paltri-politans, for Metropolitans; See Villains, for Civilians; and Doctor of Devility, for Divinity! and more of this stamp. Who could imagine that the writers of these scurrilities were ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... oddity of the conception, sire, the secrecy of the performance, the hour, the mode, all the surrounding circumstances! I can imagine a man currying favour with the basest and most dangerous class by such means. I can imagine a conspiracy recruited by such means. I can imagine this shibboleth of the shutter grown to a watchword as deadly as the 'TUEZ!' of '72. I can imagine all that, but I cannot imagine a man acting thus ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... were very proud of the successes it had gained in the quasi-war with France just ended. They were tired also of a policy which was utterly at odds with their boast that all men were born free and equal, and the nation was roused with the shibboleth that there were "millions for defence, but not ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... who consider themselves Christian brethren; but the number taking up the name specifically, with a determination to stick to it denominationally, is small. In all large towns a few of this complexion may be found; and in Preston odd ones exist whose shibboleth is "Christian Brethren." We had a spell with them, rather unexpectedly, on a recent "first day"—"Christian Brethren" always call Sunday the first day. And it came about in this way: we were on the point of entering a Dissenting place of worship, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... which unite are the most important ones—that they shall bulk largest in our hearts and minds. And if they do, we shall know our brother in every man that is like-minded with us towards them, whatever shibboleth may separate us. I spoke a moment ago about the separate pools on the beach, and the tide rising. When the tide goes down, and the spiritual life ebbs, the pools are parted again. And so ages of feeble spiritual vitality have been ages of theological controversy about secondary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... innocent. Candidates have swallowed, and daily do swallow, many a worse one. As might be this doctrine of a great triangle, so is the doctrine of Home Rule. Why is a gentleman of property to be kept out in the cold by some O'Mullins because he will not mutter an unmeaning shibboleth? "Triangular? Yes,—or lozenge-shaped, if you please; but, gentlemen, I am the man for Tipperary." Phineas Finn, having seen, or thought that he had seen, all this, began, from the very first moment of his appointment, to consider painfully within himself whether the genuine services ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... begins with the words "I believe in God the Father Almighty." The last word, "Almighty," is an adjective which we owe to the metaphysical genius of Christian theologians; and the first words, "I believe," are the customary shibboleth of the priests of every religion. For the rest, this extract from the Creed is taken from the Lord's Prayer, which itself is a brief selection from common Jewish prayers before the days of Jesus. According to the evangelists—whoever they were—Jesus taught ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... but they could look at the Kremlin, stand in the street and watch the Czar and his wooden-faced wife sail by in their chariot of gold, and perhaps be cuffed out of the way by a court chamberlain. Surely that were felicity enough for fools! Our boasted Republican government, whose shibboleth has ever been the equality of all men— that the harvester of the lowly hoop-pole stands on a parity with a prince swinging a gilded scepter and robbing a poverty-stricken people—considered that its paid representatives ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... stricken houses. But the "Clarion" had its retort pat for the tribe of "I-told-you-so," admitting the prospect of some primary harm to save a great disaster later. More than one hundred lives, it pointed out, giving names and dates, had already been sacrificed to the shibboleth of secrecy; the whole city had been imperiled; the disease had set up its foci of infection in a score of places, and there were some three hundred cases, in all, known or suspected. One method only could cope with the situation: the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and was of too sociable a nature, to exclude any man who jumped with his humour, from the hospitality he was always ready to offer, be the agreeable acquaintance Whig, Tory, or Radical. But in the county of which he was lord-lieutenant, the old party distinction was still a shibboleth by which men were tested for their fitness for social intercourse, as well as on the hustings. If by any chance a Whig found himself at a Tory dinner-table—or vice-versa— the food was hard of digestion, and wine and ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... their teachers, they lost no time in bettering the instruction they received, using their models as mere stepping stones on the way to those unsurpassed and unsurpassable achievements which are all their own. The shibboleth of Art is [107] the human figure. The ancient Chaldaeans and Egyptians, like the modern Japanese, did wonders in the representation of birds and quadrupeds; they even attained to something more than respectability in human portraiture. But ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... presidents. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and the father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.' How little we know of all this, seated in comfort and affluence here at the North, descanting upon the rights of every man to cast one vote and have it fairly counted; that well-worn shibboleth invoked once more to dodge ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... were termed? Like the Democracy, it died a natural death, so far as the active enforcement of its principles was concerned, after those principles had no longer a foundation in the social developments of the age. Here and there, an old and incurable devotee to mere forms or party shibboleth, who could not comprehend the new order of thought, went over to the 'Democratic' conservatives. Of such were the old gentlemen who, in Philadelphia, voted for the white waistcoat and immaculate snowy neck-tie of James Buchanan. They fled to their ancient foes, that they might ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... This shibboleth, or slogan, came to them from across the sea and was first uttered in England before the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... shibboleth the hardest of all, the most shifting, the most inaudibly pronounced by themselves, if it be not a universal "No," and yet the most rigorously insisted upon? Is there not a "cant" of the vague and complacent denial, quite as bad as that of the too positive ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... called the undertaker, not a man, but a something, because in truth it need not be a man with flesh and blood. It may just as well be a scheme, a mere idea; if it does but appropriate the profits of production it admirably fulfils its duty as undertaker, for as such it is nothing more than the shibboleth of mastership. Let us not be misled by the fact that frequently—we will say, as a rule—the undertaker is at the same time the actual manager of the work of production; when he is, he unites two economic functions in one person, that of the—mental or physical—labour and that of ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... justly be accounted allies by each party. Difference of opinion on these points did not, for a moment, interrupt the pleasure of our intercourse; and I could not but wish, that those, of whatever party, who are accustomed to judge harshly of all who cannot pronounce their "shibboleth," might be instructed by the candid, charitable, and peace-loving deportment of Theodore ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... Fatimite creed—"Ali is the noblest of [God's] delegates, the wazir of the best of apostles"; "the Imam Maadd calls men to profess the unity of the Eternal"—in addition to the usual dogmas of the Mahometan faith. For two centuries the mosques and the mint proclaimed the shibboleth ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... The shibboleth that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"—there was a sombre shadow in her glance—"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... threatening to beat her little child for not rightly pronouncing the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." The child tried its best, but could get no nearer than "tepasses," and "trepasses." "Alas!" says Fuller, it is a shibboleth to a child's tongue wherein there is a confluence of hard consonants together; and then he continues, "What the child could not pronounce the parents do not practise. O how lispingly and imperfectly do we perform the close of this petition: As we forgive them that trespass against ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... who follow me to the close of his career will acknowledge that after his exile he lived for this principle, and that he died for it. "Respublica," the Republic, was the one word which to his ear contained a political charm. It was the shibboleth by which men were to be conjured into well-being. The word constitution is nearly as potent with us. But it is essential that the reader of Roman history and Roman biography should understand that the appellation had in it, for all Roman ears, a thoroughly conservative meaning. Among those who at ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... face and insulted. The translation of it is this: The man questioned, who is aware that as regards coat, hat, boots, and outward cleanliness he is below him by whom he is questioned, unconsciously feels himself called upon to assert his political equality. It is his shibboleth that he is politically equal to the best, that he is independent, and that his labor, though it earn him but a dollar a day by porterage, places him as a citizen on an equal rank with the most wealthy fellow-man that may employ or accost him. But, being so inferior in that coat, hat, and boots ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of entertainments reminds me that, a few evenings ago, I escorted her to a music-hall, wherein, although I had previously believed myself a past master in the shibboleth of London Cockneyisms and technical terminology, I heard and saw much which was au bout de mon Latin, and the head impossible to be ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... his early sympathy with the rebels. As Clarendon himself says, [Footnote: Life, i 425.] "They were all, or pretended to be, the most implacable enemies to the Marquis of Argyle; which was the 'Shibboleth' by which the affections of that whole nation were ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik |
