"Dark Ages" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eleventh century. Being entirely new to us it was a most entertaining spectacular performance. With our American ideas of religious devotion, it seemed to us that the people, as well as the building, belonged to the Dark Ages. About fifty priests, in mantles, gowns, and capes, some black, some yellow,—with tinseled fringes and ornamentation,—with all manner of gestures, genuflections, salutations, kneelings, and burning of incense; with prayers, admonitions, and sacraments, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... In the dark ages of farming—to wit, in 1881, for this is a true story—a minister of the Gospel came into possession, by inheritance, of a fifteen-acre farm a short way from Philadelphia. He found the soil a reddish, somewhat gravelly ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... years between the fifth and the fifteenth century comprise the middle age, a period which only recently, through utterly inadequate conceptions of social growth, was wont to be called the dark ages. That long epoch of travail and growth, during which the old field of civilisation was broken up and sown afresh with new and various seed unknown to antiquity, receives now on all hands due recognition, as being one of the most rich, fertile, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... doors around it, leading into little dungeons. On one side of this horrible place was a rude stone altar with an iron crucifix. In the center was a block. It was probably a vault which in the old and dark ages had been used for a place of ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... from my oldest friend who was not a relative, Dr. Samuel Maitland of the "Dark Ages."[358] He found it among his books, and could not imagine how he came by it: I could have told him. He once collected interpretations of the Apocalypse: and auction lots of such {164} books often contain quadratures. The wonder is he never ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... perished likewise. Greek philosophy, the germs of physical science, and all that we owe to the ancients, would have perished; and we should have truly had an invasion of the barbarians, followed by truly dark ages, in which Europe would have had to begin all anew, without the help of the generations which had ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... looking at him fondly, "but I intend to believe Mr. Herrick, he is older and more experienced. Oh, we have such arguments sometimes," turning to Malcolm. "Cedric will have it that we are not sufficiently up-to-date. We are mediaeval or in the Dark Ages, according to him, but how is one to alter one's nature or to talk unknown languages? My sister and I are very conservative, and we cling to the beliefs ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... blood, sir. I opened a vein the very day they hanged him. I suspected it all along, and there it is. There is more arsenic there, sir, than they found in the entire carcass of that man. Arsenic! Why, it's a prime ingredient in the blood. This it is to live in the clouds. Talk of dark ages—when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... finds himself virtually alone with a sympathetic listener in the still starlight of the mountains; for all the rest are asleep by this time] It was just so with her, sir. Her intellect reached forward into the twentieth century: her social prejudices and family affections reached back into the dark ages. Ah, sir, how the words of Shakespear seem to fit every ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... generation rolling up its accumulation of knowledge the intellectual snowball is getting to be of ponderous size. History's remedy for this malady has always been to knock the whole structure to pieces every now and then and begin again. Perhaps we shall have to have another period of the Dark Ages and another Renaissance to ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... come. But now are the Dark Ages. The only thing that can possibly make Work anything but an unmitigated nuisance is the prospect of a 'Varsity scholarship, and the thought that, in the event of failure, a 'Varsity career will be ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... said Zee, with a lofty smile, "belong to the Pah-bodh of the dark ages, and now only serve for the amusement of infants. When we know the elements out of which our bodies are composed, elements in common to the humblest vegetable plants, can it signify whether the All-Wise combined those elements out of one form more than another, in order to create that in which He ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... without by wall and redoubt, Kiova within was a place of renown, With more advantages than in those dark ages Were commonly known to belong to a town. There were places and squares, and each year four fairs, And regular aldermen and regular lord-mayors; And streets, and alleys, and a bishop's palace; And a church with clocks for the orthodox— With clocks and with spires, as religion desires; ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sublimity is the result of geological conditions and the action of water, which together have produced many similar phenomena in the region of the causses, but in no other case, I believe, with such power in composing the picturesque. Imagine an open plain which in the truly Dark Ages whereof man has had no experience, but of whose convulsions he has learnt to read a little from the book whose leaves are the rocks, cracked along a part of its surface as a drying ball of clay might do, the fissure finishing abruptly and where it is deepest in front of a mass of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Approaching the parapet she gazed below into the Avenue de la Muette, where a long line of old cabs in the last stage of decay stretched beside the footpath. The hoods and wheels looked blanched, the rusty horses seemed to have been rotting there since the dark ages. Some cabmen sat motionless, freezing within their frozen cloaks. Over the snow other vehicles were crawling along, one after the other, with the utmost difficulty. The animals were losing their foothold, and stretching ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... tide whose waves daily continue the work of creation, and perfect the work of awaited happiness, which shall come when the times are accomplished. The flux and reflux of nations are but periods of the forward march: the great centuries of light, which dark ages at times replace, simply mark the phases of that march. Another step forward is ever taken, a little more of the earth is conquered, a little more life is brought into play. The law seems to lie in a double phenomenon; fruitfulness creating civilization, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... political ambition and social unrest, from recognized injustice and stinging inequalities. The historian with his theory of development might call this revolution the change from national youth to manhood, the emerging from the dark ages of Hebrew history to a period of national aggrandizement and growth in civilization,—one of the necessary changes which must take place if a nation would become strong, powerful, and cultivated. To the eye of the contemplative, conservative, and God-fearing Samuel this change of government seemed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... that the outline is that of a pyramid slightly rounded at the apex, and nearly as broad across the base as it is high. What is there of woman in such a figure? And this evening-dress; it suggests the enchantments in the stories of the Dark Ages, where knights encounter women who are women to the breasts and monsters below. From the head to as far as halfway down the waist, this figure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... The idea of conserving the game was a fourth-rate consideration, the first being the estoppel of the other man. The old-world owner of a game preserve delights in the annual killing of the surplus game, and we have even heard it whispered that in the Dark Ages there were kings who enjoyed the wholesale slaughter of deer, wild boar, pheasants and grouse. If we may accept as true the history of sport in Europe, there have been men who have loved slaughter with ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... in the great drama of human progress. It is impossible for him to speak lightly or contemptuously of the ideals which have sustained and comforted, guided and cheered countless hosts of his fellows through the long, dark ages of Christian Faith. But he knows that those ages are past and that present day adherence to the old ideals is atavistic and reactionary. But none-the-less his mental attitude toward the old ideals is one of reverent sympathy and, I had ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... of Milton's argument, leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately, that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.—Dr. Sumner's Notes on ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cruel things in the name of Christianity. In the dark ages it filled the minds of its disciples with fear, and their bodies with the pains of penance. It burned Michael Servetus, and it strangled the scientific opinions of Galileo. And in stalwart old Massachusetts it thought it was doing God's service in denying the Negro slave ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... to posterity,—as epitaphs, for example, written for their own monuments by monarchs, whereby we have lately become possessed of the names of several great conquerors and kings of kings, hitherto unheard of and still unpronounceable, but valuable to the student of the entirely dark ages. The letter which St. Peter sent to King Pepin in the year of grace 755 I would place in a class by itself, as also the letters of candidates, concerning which I shall dilate more fully in a note at the ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... be wise enough and sufficiently well organized and equipped to demolish and construct at the same time. As yet no such stage has been reached. During the intervals of chaos which separate two periods of forward movement (the dark ages of the world, as they are sometimes called) the masses agonize and suffer, groping blindly and crying out for guidance. Such is the period in which ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... transactions of the Churches of the Reformation recommend the duty. To what extent the practice may have been engaged in by the few in Europe who held the truth during the dark ages, we do not well know. That it was much attended to, we may rather infer, than use as an argument. But with the dawn of the Reformation came the practice of Covenanting. Step by step the Churches proceeded in opposition to Popery, by solemn engagements. By them the ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... ever have escaped without an interposition of Providence. Thus it has appeared to me in my calm and unbiassed judgment. Yet I confess I should want faith to make the trial. May it not be, that by such means in dark ages, and among blind nations, the purpose is effected of preserving conscience and the belief of our immortality, without which the life of our life would be extinct? And with regard to the conjurers ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... the road do not concern me. I give way to no one—certainly not to your companion, who appears to be disloyal. I had forgotten, for a moment, the character of this country. The dark ages still ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... eleventh century English cloth manufacturing had begun to revive. In the northern part of Italy certain Italians had flocks of sheep and obtained very fine wool, and the people of Flanders continued to develop skill in weaving during the Dark Ages. ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... be clear to everybody that there has been some evil influence at work to arrest the fair promise and development of the human race. The splendid march of intellectual progress from the dark ages to the brilliant dawn of the nineteenth century, with its glittering array of master minds and its titanic roll of genius, has been suddenly brought to a dead halt. Here and there, during the past generation, great figures have struggled up on to the world's stage and grappled ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... literature which the Fathers manifested so strongly, and which was inherited from them by the clergy of the "Dark," and to some extent the Middle Ages, clearly could not extend to the practice of the Apostles. If from the Dark Ages themselves we have not very many, it must be remembered that from them we have little literature at all: while from the close of that period and the beginning of the next we have one of the most ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... AGES.—The Dark Ages is a name often applied by historians to the Middle Ages, a term comprising about 1,000 years, from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the invention of printing in the fifteenth. The period is called "dark" because of the generally depraved ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... in all the arrangements, while to the younger folk it was "all very well," but quite of the old times. Little did they know of "old times" beyond the quarter century of their birth! Poor old Arnscombe might feebly represent them, but even that had struggled out of the modern "dark ages." Magdalen had decided on talking to Agatha and seeing how far she understood the situation, and she came to her room to put her in possession now that Mrs. Best had left the ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that this contemptible practice was first introduced into Europe by the Gipsies: but such persons are greatly mistaken. In the dark ages of superstition, in which this wandering people came to our part of the world, prognostication and fortune-telling were carried on to an infinite extent; and so enraged were the deceivers of those days against the Gipsies, that they proclaimed ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... idea, grander than any aspiration of Saracen or Egyptian, we find, when Europe, slowly shaking off the lethargy of the Dark Ages, was developing the idea of religion. It was material, however, as well as spiritual. God was glorified, not only by repentance or holiness of life, but also by the devotion of hand and heart and fortune ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... to the azure cope, Waits through dark ages for the morn, Defeated day by day, but ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... price that only men of rank or great wealth could afford to purchase them. The peasant, and the landholder who employed him, were alike ignorant; they could not obtain books, and therefore learning to read might well be considered in those dark ages a waste of time. This profound ignorance gave rise to all those superstitions which in the present enlightened age are regarded with ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the period of preparation virtually past, labor, conscious of itself and its desires, has begun a definite movement toward solidarity. It believes the time is not far distant when the historian will speak not only of the dark ages of feudalism, but of the dark ages of capitalism. And labor sincerely believes itself justified in this by the terrible indictment it brings against capitalistic society. In the face of its enormous wealth, capitalistic ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... has a remarkable history connected with its foundation. The tradition relates that in the dark ages some sacrilegious soldier had robbed a church in the neighborhood of its holy vessels of gold and silver. In the vessel in the Tabernacle there happened to be a consecrated wafer. The soldier journeyed on to Turin to dispose ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (crepiren) in finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead.—But this ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... into her eager ears the secrets of his honest soul, and Mrs. Warren had listened with a sweet and ready sympathy that had caused James quite to forget a certain stinging snubbing he had received from the selfsame lady, because once, back in the dark ages—before Nancy had opened her blue eyes on this naughty world—when he was a gawky, freckle-faced boy of sixteen, he had dared to walk home from church with Mildred, the eldest daughter ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... expect but a poor response, opposition not impossibly. Opposition would not daunt him. You must be prepared to do people good, if not with, then against their will. He was here to make them rebel against and shake off the remnants of the Dark Ages amid which they so extraordinarily appeared still to live. He had no conception so low a state of civilization could exist within little over a hundred miles of the metropolis!—It was a man's work, anyhow, and he must put his back into it. Must organize—word of power—organize ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... feudalism, and the South only repeats in behalf of slavery the tragic farce of Don Quixote in behalf of knight-errantry. Both alike would roll back the centuries of modern civilization, and, reversing the dreams of Plato and Sir Thomas More, would hope to find a Utopia in the dark ages of the past. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... age of India lasted nearly a thousand years, and was one of superb triumphs in civilization. It was an age of spiritual emancipation, of freedom from idol worship, of nobler humanity and of peace.[12] It was followed by the Puranic epoch and the dark ages. Then Buddhism was, as some say, "driven out" from the land of its birth, finding new expansion in Eastern and Northern Asia, and again, a still more surprising development in the ultima-Thule of the Asiatic continent, Japan. There is now no Buddhism in India proper, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... is fine—and I'll be obliged if you'll pour me some—but your philosophy is that of the dark ages, Mrs. Ruel. Thanks. Now tell me what traveler approaches on the ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... may, in some cases, become law, pleading no other reason than antiquity. But this is an age of investigation, which demands the most lucid and unequivocal proof of the point assumed. The dogmatism of the schoolmen will no longer satisfy. The dark ages of mental servility are passing away. The day light of science has long since dawned upon the world, and the noon day of truth, reason, and virtue, will ere long be established on a firm and immutable basis. The human mind, left free to investigate, will gradually advance onward in ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... your good works. So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised. This discrimination is a relic of the dark ages. The most ignorant and degraded man who walks to the polls feels himself superior to the most intelligent woman. We should demand the wiping out of all legislation ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... democracy was almost an incredible form of political association. Some of the mediaeval communes were not without traces of democracy; but modern nations do not derive from those turbulent little states. They derive from the larger political divisions into which Europe drifted during the Dark Ages; and they have grown with the gradually prospering attempt to bestow on the government of these European countries the qualities of efficiency ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... had to be combated, and the new ideas, born with the coming of the Savior, and propagated by him and his followers, were slowly and surely to take possession of the world. These fifteen centuries embrace those generally known in history as the "Dark Ages," during which progress was indeed slow. But when we remember the obstacles which, as we have seen, were to be met, the prejudice to be set aside, the great changes inaugurated, and the limited means at command, we marvel at the great results attained. Let us now briefly examine ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Commination Service which we have just heard read. They dislike to listen to it. They cannot say 'Amen' to its awful words. It seems to them to curse men; and their conscience forbids them to join in curses. To imprecate evil on any living being seems to them unchristian, barbarous, a relic of dark ages ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... because he is the mouthpiece of the people, whose earnest, mighty voice is making itself heard more and more irresistibly every day, to the utter discomfiture and overthrow of the hydra-headed avatars of the priestcraft and kingcraft and all the other mouldy and rank-smelling relics of the dark ages. The press is the arch apostle of civilization, progress, and truth—the Greatheart, whose mission it is to combat and destroy the giants Pope and Pagan, Maul and Despair, and all other misleaders and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... dark ages of the past, when ignorance, superstition, and bigotry held rule in the world, might made the law. But the undertone, the still small voice of Justice, Love, and Mercy, have ever been heard, pleading the cause of humanity, pleading for truth and right; and their low, soft tones of harmony ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the Love of Books in Dark Ages with Sketches of Bookworms, Bible Students, &c. from the Saxon Period to the Introduction ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... that there is more superstition—that is belief and dabbling in these inane practices—to-day in one of our large cities than the Dark Ages ever was afflicted with. If true, it is one sign of the world's spiritual unrest, the decay of unbelief; and irreligion thus assists at its own disintegration. The Church swept the pagan world clean of superstition once; ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Mohammed was rising rapidly and was about to inundate all Europe. But the war was carried into the enemy's country, and by the attack all Europe was saved. Again, we were freed from the ignorance of the dark ages (dark, as I may say, only because we have no light on them), by the introduction into Italy of some manuscripts, according to Mr. Ingersoll. But the truth is, all the learning of that period was centred in the church, and ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... very seriously by the ancients, but until recently modern scientists, rejecting the ideas of the dark ages, have scouted dreams. To-day, however, we study them scientifically, for we believe that whatever is, has a reason. Dr. Ross, I think, is acquainted with the new and remarkable theories of Dr. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... now, but men were safer because they could more easily read each other's minds, and thus they avoided many vices. The advance of civilization brings increase of corruption. Constantinople, where learning was preserved during the dark ages, was full of murder, debauchery, and crime. Contrast with its inhabitants those primitive nations which have been kept from the contagion of vain knowledge: the early Persians, the Germans described by Tacitus, the modern ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... time progressed, I began to realize that there was very little chance for any radical improvement of our race until the false doctrines which have come down to us from the dark ages were put away; and knowing that in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg we have a new revelation from the Lord, even the truths of his Second Coming in the clouds of heaven, which are destined to make all things new ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... throne—he was in matters of Church discipline its checkmate. This was the time that England trembled at the devilry of a king and rejoiced at the sun of a new learning that was slowly dispelling the fog of the Dark Ages. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... asserted itself against the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; and each by the stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recognition of its national integrity. This is but the accomplishment of an ideal toward which the western world has been tending since it emerged from the Dark Ages into the Renascence and since it began to suspect that the Holy Roman Empire was only the empty shadow of a disestablished realm. In the long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... quaint wooden figures representing Biblical characters, the coarse dresses, the tawdry colours, the strangely weird arrangement of the whole business, take us back into the monkish superstitions of the Dark Ages, with their mystery plays. It is best seen from one of the windows of the Spanish House, or from the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, on a sultry day, when the sky is heavy with black clouds, and thunder growls over the plain of Flanders, and hot raindrops ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... also threatening from another quarter. Creeping up from the darkness of the dark ages, a hideous monster is intently watching to seize the throat of liberty in our land. It thrusts itself up into the noonday of the ninteenth century, not that it may be benefited by its light and freedom, but that it may suppress and obscure them. The name ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... authority of these great men was converted into a bondage for posterity. The century in which they flourished (1020-1120) is unique in the history of their country as the age of philosophy. In Europe it was a part of the Dark Ages; and at that time the Western world was convulsed ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... a burning sun; at once lively and ferocious, strongly led away by the excitement of the moment, and ardent in their partialities and antipathies: in short, the same romance of character is perceptible among them, which, in the dark ages, peopled the country with troubadours. The mass of such a people, particularly when profoundly ignorant, may not be accessible to cool argument; and the manner and style of oratory which would disgust a reasoning Scotch peasant, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... development, was inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture. The epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... established not a few of these abominable institutions in our free England, where girls are incarcerated and strictly kept from communicating with their friends, and where foolish youths play the part of the monks of the dark ages. I am not afraid of your turning Romanists, my boys, but it is important to be guarded on all points. Just bring the monastic system to the test of Scripture, and then you will see how utterly at variance it is from ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... origin to ignorance, vanity, and superstition. In the dark ages of the World, when a man had rendered himself famous for wisdom or valour, his family and adherents availed themselves of his superior qualities, magnified his virtues, and represented his character and person as sacred and supernatural. The vulgar easily swallowed the bait, implored his protection, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... enlightened, and free women of Tiestan. What I do want to see is the women of this country, where there is so much boast of liberty and freedom, free themselves from the awful bondage of sex superstition, and all other bondages that have been heaped upon them by people of the Dark Ages because they are women. Even those who talk so much about woman's rights, are in bondage up to their necks. Look at Laura Stevenson in Orangeville; a fine bright young girl, who makes a hobby of woman's rights, and yet see the bondage ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... to the church, during the dark ages; of course, the great lights of Saxon England were prelates, except Alfred, and most of them wrote ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... must pause till agriculture overtakes. Steam-machinery applied to agriculture is the only thing that can correct this disproportion, and this is what we are going to make. The world is not to be much longer dependent for its cotton on the compulsory labor of the Dark Ages, nor for its flax and corn on blistered free hands or overworked cattle. The laborer, in either section of our country, will be transformed into an ingenious gentleman or lady, comfortably mounted on a migratory steam-cultivator to direct its gigantic energies,—or, at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... others very lengthy. These manuscripts and books were well known to John, who had read the majority of them, and was never weary of reading them again and again. Some were writings of the ancient fathers; others were the works of pagan writers and philosophers who had lived in the dark ages of the world's history, yet who had had thoughts and aspirations in advance of their day, and who had striven without the light of Christianity to construct a code of morals that should do the work for humanity which never could have been done till the Light came into ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... understand that language, why, you might just as well retire for an old fossil or petrifaction. You're obsolete, that's all; as much behind the times as RIP VAN WINKLE himself, after his memorable sleep. English is out of date here—a relic of the Dark Ages. Fashionable ladies return from Paris, bringing with them accomplished bonnes, and every one is prohibited from speaking a word of English to the children; but, in spite of every precaution, the vulgar little creatures ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... day. See how little does Shakespeare leave us to regret that he was born in his particular age! The great aera in modern times was what is called the Restoration of Letters;—the ages preceding it are called the dark ages; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark period was not universal, but partial and successive, or alternate; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not so; there is another ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... to all? What shall we say of the constitution that ordained slavery as the corner stone of a new confederacy, to teach mankind the folly of Christian civilization, and bring back the 'statelier Eden' of the dark ages? To which party in this terrible strife of brothers does 'liberty' look for protection to-day? Which of the two armies of brothers now arrayed against each other on the plains of Virginia and Georgia, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... its discoverers fell infinitely short of the actual reality. Large numbers of colonists left the Iberian peninsula for the newer and richer lands. Priests, monks and nuns went in every vessel, and the Roman Catholicism of the Dark Ages was soon firmly established as the only religion. The aborigines were compelled to bow before the crucifix and worship Mary until, in a peculiar sense, South America became the Pope's favorite parish. For the benefit of any, native or colonist, who thought that a purer religion should be, at any ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the old literature was packed with the old religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within our ten fingers the secret of the 'Dark Ages,' the real reason why the Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the point of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at any rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be voluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... are, therefore, devoted to a description of some of the precious spoils of mediaeval refinement. Where all is so splendidly beautiful, so deeply erudite, or so tenderly naif, choice is difficult; but at all events, here are a few of the priceless gems with which the Dark Ages have endowed ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... our own toddling America. Directly we scratch the surface and look for the beginning of applied arts, the lead takes us inevitably to the oldest civilisation. It would seem that in a study of fabrics which are made in modern Europe, it were enough to find their roots in the mediaeval shades of the dark ages; but no, back we must go to the beginning of history where man leaped from the ambling dinosaur, which then modestly became extinct, and looking upon the lands of the Nile and the Yangtsi-kiang found them good, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... a struggle between the antagonistic principles of royalty and aristocracy; a conflict which was going to last nearly five centuries, covering that dreary twilight known as the Dark Ages—a time when, had it not been for the Christian Church and for the torch of the Saracen in Spain, the light of civilization would really have been extinguished, and the slender thread of connection with a great ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... act of the New Haven colonists in adopting the laws of Moses as the statute-book of the colony, in the "Thirteen Historical Discourses of L. Bacon," pp. 29-32. "The greatest and boldest improvement which has been made in criminal jurisprudence by any one act since the dark ages was that which was made by our fathers when they determined 'that the judicial laws of God, as they were delivered by Moses, and as they are a fence to the moral law, being neither typical nor ceremonial nor having any reference to ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Indiscreetly and unsuspectingly she followed him. There clandestinely did he favor her graciously by adding a bar sinister to our knightly escutcheon and a strain of the blood royal to our family. This happened long, long ago in the dark ages or some other dark place—it may have been the Schwarzwald—and it was the curse of the stony field that ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... the Finance and Revenue Committee a bill entitled 'An Act for the Taxing of Personal Incomes, and for the Levying of a Withholding Tax.' Fellow citizens, words fail me to express my horror of this diabolic proposition, this proposed instrument of tyrannical extortion, borrowed from the Dark Ages of the Twentieth Century! Why, if this young nobleman had not taken his blade in hand, I'd have killed the ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... you really mean, 'What a great technology mankind has developed.' There's all the difference in the world. Technology is of the mind and hands. Civilization is of the spirit—and spiritually we are still in the Dark Ages. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... events, that wonderful false-start came to nothing. Rome succeeded to the world-leadership; and Rome, though energetic and capable, was never brilliant. With her, European free thought, investigation, science flickered out, and Asian religion took its place. Truly the slip-back from antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the atheists—the true and irredeemable atheists—who deny the reality of progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the terrestrial conditions ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... religion," and probe with questions and surmises. If they did, he knew, from what he had already seen of them, that they would try to do it delicately and kindly, but he felt that the most considerate efforts would be like the surgical instruments of the dark ages. He needed good, decisive, heroic treatment. But who would have the courage and skill to give it? Who cared enough for him to ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Why should we pay such extravagant deference to the opinions of men who lived in the dark ages, of the old Church Fathers, of Athanasius, of Arius, of Justin Martyr, of Origen, of Tertullian? Why, friends, just think for a moment. There was hardly a single point connected with this world that they knew anything about. How did ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... thought of much: the chief need of men who can do much or who amount to much is the intelligent sympathy of women who understand and care for them. Why, it was the inspiration of chivalry, even in the dark ages. Well, Marian Vosburgh, if you can't excel a kitchen-maid, it would be better that you had ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... ancient times before Science was born, and the superstitions of the Dark Ages, sedulously cultivated for theological purposes by monks and priests, have so colored our ideas of the influence that comets have had upon the human mind that many readers may be surprised to learn that it was the apparition of a wonderful comet, that of 1843, which led to the foundation of ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... Yet subsequently, on account of the inaccessible nature of the country, the inhabitants, separated from their more enlightened fellow-subjects, remained for a long period almost as ignorant as their ancestors in the dark ages; and, till of late years, retained many of the grosser superstitions and customs ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... Christian Science alone is new. At the beginning of Christianity it was taught and practised by Jesus and his disciples. The Master was the great healer. But the wave of materialism and bigotry that swept over the world for fifteen centuries, covering it with the blackness of the Dark Ages, nearly obliterated all vital belief in his teachings. The Bible was a sealed book. Recently a revived belief in what he taught is manifest, and Christian Science is one result. No new doctrine is proclaimed, but there is the fresh development of a Principle that ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... not yet adopted it in Cato's day, but by the time of Varro and Virgil it was well established in Italy. In Columella's day it was already a feature of the agriculture of Andalousia, and there the Moors, who loved plants, kept it alive, as it were a Vestal fire, while it died out of Italy during the Dark Ages: from Spain it spread again all over Southern Europe, and with America it was a fair exchange for tobacco. Alfalfa has always been the subject of high praise wherever it has been known. The Greek Amphilochus ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a 'thrilling tale', and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the Weekly Volcano. She had never read Sartor Resartus, but she had a womanly instinct ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... striking contrast, and personally I shall vote for the management of orphanages on home lines every time. This is not a concession to Dickens, whose pictures of Bumble I hope and believe apply only to the dark ages in which Dickens lived; but historically they are not yet far enough removed for me to advocate Government orphanages, though our Government schools are ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... guise.' The picture of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.' He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had arisen in his mind. Irving ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... correct details of the leading alchemists and scientific magicians of the dark ages, we should have been able to analyse their actions and their opinions, and trace them, probably, to the ordinary principles by which the human mind is in every age influenced and directed. But when a great man has ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... Dark Ages," Rynason said. "Maybe they didn't see that thousand-year setback coming...." He stopped, and stood up in the low passageway among the ancient circuitry. "So here we are, second-guessing the Outsiders. And outside, their proteges have disintegrators ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... practices should be abandoned. The observation and experience of mankind have justified this view. In the first ages of Christianity, it was believed that the Divine Being alone was to be sought in prayer for light and guidance by the human soul. Gradually, as the dark ages began to settle upon Christendom, the doctrine of the Devil as the head and ruler of a world of demons, and as able to hold communications with mortals, to interfere in their affairs, and to exercise more or less control over the laws and phenomena of nature, began to become prevalent. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... assure him beyond all doubt that his will can be made to endure for a single day beyond his death. At last, he sends for a minister of God—and what says the spiritual expert? Perhaps he represents that old, old organization, whose history stretches back for centuries through the dark ages to the borders of the brilliancy beyond; that old hierarchy that claims to hold all spiritual power to which man may appeal with reasonable hope. What says to the dying man this representative and heir of the accumulated spiritual research and culture of the past? He may with honesty ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... back, past the dark ages, past the stirring times of Greek and Roman antiquity, till we come to those blissful mythological ages when every tree and every stream was the home of ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... light of the nineteenth century, we must demand that our religion shall teach a higher idea in regard to woman. People seem to think we have reached the very end of theology; but let me say that the future is to be as much purer than the past as our immediate past has been better than the dark ages. We want to help roll off from the soul of woman the terrible superstitions that have so long repressed and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... render more profound the darkness by which they are surrounded. They are given with exquisite beauty; but they shine amidst the gloom like sunbeams struggling through the clouds. He inherited from the dark ages the austerity of the cloister; but he inherited with it the deep feelings and sublime conceptions which its seclusion had generated. His mind was a world within itself. He drew all his conceptions from that inexhaustible source; but he drew them forth so clear and lucid, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... tyranny and infant avarice exemplified in the social conditions of Great Britain.— Superstitions of the dark ages still in force amongst the trading community, furnishing valuable hints to certain American journalists, and highly suggestive of reflections ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... may be useful on certain points, as they happen now to be to you; who, I am sure, would not read them for general use and pleasure, and are a very different kind of author. I shall like, I dare to say, any thing you do write, but I am not overjoyed at your wading into the history of dark ages' unless you use it as a canvass to be embroidered with your opinions, and episodes, and comparisons with more recent times. That is a most entertaining kind of writing. In general, I have seldom wasted time on the origin of nations, unless for an opportunity of smiling at the gravity ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... carefully observed and numerically analyzed, one of the most important written contributions to practical medicine, to the treatment of internal disease, of this century, if not since the days of Sydenham. The lancet was the magician's wand of the dark ages of medicine. The old physicians not only believed in its general efficacy as a wonder-worker in disease, but they believed that each malady could be successfully attacked from some special part of the body,—the strategic point which commanded the seat of the morbid affection. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... course, you must make allowances for the appreciations of posterity, change of fashion and taste. From the middle of the sixteenth century down to nearly the middle of the nineteenth, the Middle Ages were always thought of as the Dark Ages. Scarcely any one could appreciate either the pictorial art or architecture of mediaevalism; those who did so always had to apologise for their predilection. The wonders of Gothic art were furtively relished by a ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... nine years, once referred to by Burke as the "Dark Ages," he had four occupations: book-browsing at Dodsley's, debating in the clubs, attending the theater on tickets probably supplied by Garrick, who had taken a great fancy to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... expressed opinion, I can merely add that I conceive the whole charge to be a base and odious calumny, unsupported by any credible testimony; a mere renewal of those disgusting persecutions which disgraced the annals of the dark ages, and one which would not for one moment be tolerated in the present day among a civilised and ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty orphan girl in our Christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of the dark ages, and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior. And yet here, beneath our very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many other places, unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous abuse ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth |
