"Martyrdom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nero about the time of the martyrdom of Paul, continued with greater or less fury for centuries. Christians were falsely accused of the most dreadful crimes, and declared to be the cause of great calamities—famine, pestilence, and earthquake. As they became the objects of ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... upon his zeal and piety. At this time he narrowly escaped assassination from an Arabian youth whom he had taken into his service. Raymond had prayed to God, in some of his accesses of fanaticism, that he might suffer martyrdom in his holy cause. His servant had overheard him: and, being as great a fanatic as his master, he resolved to gratify his wish, and punish him, at the same time, for the curses which he incessantly launched against Mahomet and all who believed in him, by stabbing him to the heart. He ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... able to turn to the Sun whence all goodness and all shining comes. God's children may be very naughty, but they must be able to turn towards him. The Father of Lights is the Father of every weakest little baby of a good thought in us, as well as of the highest devotion of martyrdom. If you turn your face to the Sun, my boy, your soul will, when you come to die, feel like an autumn, with the golden fruits of the earth hanging in rich clusters ready to be gathered—not like a winter. You ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... that of the young men in every study, though Greek, to which I was persuaded by my minister, led me through a cruel martyrdom of jokes from my companions. Repeating at school what their mothers said at home, they even then satirized me with proposals to get up petitions to open the doors of our State University to girls "who wanted to be men" I felt these jokes ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... been the first practical application of the Wealth of Nations. Neither party, perhaps, could claim a special connection with good or bad political economy; and certainly neither was prepared to incur political martyrdom in zeal for scientific truth. A question was beginning to come to the front which would make party lines dependent upon economic theories, and Huskisson's view ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... never troubled him; for, in the first place, they never troubled any one who did not make conspiracy and rebellion an integral doctrine of his religious creed; and next, they seldom troubled even them, unless, fired with the glory of martyrdom, they bullied the long-suffering of Elizabeth and her council into giving them their deserts, and, like poor Father Southwell in after years, insisted on being hanged, whether Burleigh liked or not. Moreover, in such a ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of woman's life that she gave at the birth and crucifixion? Her faith, her hope, her sufferin', her glow of divine pity and joyful martyrdom. These, mingled with the divine, the pure heavenly, have they not for nineteen hundred years been blessin' the world? The God in Christ would awe us too much; we would shield our eyes from the too ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... of Yorkshire; and Mary Dyar. An account of the cruelties inflicted upon them is given in Sewell's History of the Quakers, edit. 1725, pp. 219-227.; also in a pamphlet entitled A Declaration of the sad and great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New England, for the Worshipping of God: London, printed for Robert Wilson, in Martin's-le-Grand, 1661. It will be found among the King's Pamphlets in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... least reason to believe that he was dishonest. Indeed he would have found more difficulty in deceiving others had he not begun by deceiving himself. His faith to his own schemes was strong even to martyrdom; and the eloquence with which he illustrated and defended them had all the charm of sincerity and of enthusiasm. Very seldom has any blunder committed by fools, or any villany devised by impostors, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to strike at me, where kings should be struck at—in the head. Mine was a martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature, debt is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and brokers in it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it is a beginning of knavery; ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the father, "that it would be useless to work with YOU. You are just fool enough to imagine that suffering means martyrdom. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... have produced them and whose proudest possessions they are. It would show us the endless fight which the good and genuine works of all periods and countries have had to carry on against the perverse and bad. It would depict the martyrdom of almost all those who truly enlightened humanity, of almost all the great masters in every kind of art; it would show us how they, with few exceptions, were tormented without recognition, without any to share their misery, without followers; how they existed in poverty and misery whilst fame, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... prepared to cook at the shortest notice. It was fascinating to see her, at first in the almost brimming lock, majestically erect (she was a regal figure) challenging the horizon with a gaze at once proud, prescient of martyrdom, and prepared; and then, as Sam opened the sluices, to watch her descend, inch by inch, into the dark lock-chamber. Each time this happened Mr. Mortimer exhorted her—"Courage, my heart's best!"—and she made answer each time, "Nay, Stanislas, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to fetters are consign'd, To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom And Freedom's fame finds wings ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... about two months after his arrival in Frankfort, "the company of the muses and correspondence with friends will bring pleasure into a sickly, solitary life, which for a youth of twenty years would otherwise be something of a martyrdom."[54] In spite of the affectionate solicitude of Fraeulein von Klettenberg and other friends, he found Frankfort a depressing place after gay Leipzig. "I could go mad when I think of Leipzig," wrote his sprightly friend ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings—most of all in that perpetual auto-da-fe where young womanhood is the sacrifice."—O. ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... describe further what I saw—what loathsome evidences of foul neglect. I have no heart for it, and I feel as if it insulted the memory of a gentleman to recall the evidences of the long and miserable martyrdom he had endured. They had kept him stabled like a wild beast—those accursed Austrians—for twenty years, and during all that time the martyred wretch had never known the use of the simplest appliance of cleanliness. In all the years I have lived I have never met ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... monument of glory, for from it a hero and a martyr passed to his reward. I forget the base and criminal burdens it has borne, and see only the "lifting up" of one man who had courage equal to his convictions. His martyrdom came ere he ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... machine which attained a sufficient height to frighten Cayley's coachman, whom he had persuaded to act as pilot. The rather unwilling aviator, fearing a loftier flight, jumped out and broke his leg. Though by virtue of this martyrdom his name should surely have descended to fame with that of Cayley it has been lost, together with all record of any later performances of the machine, which unquestionably embodied some of the basic principles of our modern ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... carefully gathered up, secured, and hoarded, as the rich treasures, the very jewels of liberty. To this end, popular and representative right has kept up its warfare against prerogative, with various success; sometimes writing the history of a whole age in blood, sometimes witnessing the martyrdom of Sidneys and Russells, often baffled and repulsed, but still gaining, on the whole, and holding what it gained with a grasp which nothing but the complete extinction of its own being could compel it to relinquish. At length, the great conquest over executive power, in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Pius VII. confer on Napoleon the First what belongs to Louis XVIII.? Would Jesus Christ, if upon earth, have acted thus? Would his immediate successors, the Apostles, not have preferred the suffering of martyrdom to the commission of any injury? If the present Roman pontiff acts differently from what his Master and predecessors would have done, can he be the vicar ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... towers dimly a greater. The great phenomenon of war it is—this, and this only—which keeps open in man a spiracle—an organ of respiration—for breathing a transcendent atmosphere, and dealing with an idea that else would perish—viz., the idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its realization in such a battle as that of Waterloo—viz., a battle fought for interests of the human race felt even where they are not understood; so that the tutelary angel of man, when he traverses such a dreadful field, when ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the finest specimens of its period: the effigy of the prelate is represented as resting beneath a cinquefoil canopy in his robes, bearing his crosier, with a lion and dragon under his feet; beneath this is a representation of the martyrdom of St. Edmund, a prince of East Anglia, by the Danes, commemorative of his having been lord abbot of Bury before he was preferred to the see of Ely; the niches in the sides of the prelate's stall have statuettes—on the left, St. Etheldreda, an abbess crowned, and a nun; on the right, a king, an ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... and put aside this apology with a gesture. The queen of France had knelt and kissed his mutilated hands, and the courtiers of Louis had praised his martyrdom. But such ordeals of compliment were harder for him to endure than the teeth ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... immediate and future significance. The man followed as Jesus drew apart from the others on the shore; yet a few years and Peter would follow his Lord to the cross. Without doubt Peter comprehended the reference to his martyrdom, as his writings, years later, indicate.[1385] As Christ and Peter walked together, the latter, looking backward, saw that John was following, and inquired: "Lord, and what shall this man do?" Peter wished to ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... understood it, without reckoning the vast changes in culture and other conditions, and yet it is impossible not to have a deep sympathy with the men most of whose demands were just and who sealed their faith with perpetual martyrdom. {100} [Sidenote: Spread of radicalism] Notwithstanding the heavy blow to reform given in the crushing of the peasants' rising, radical doctrines continued to spread among the people. As the poor found their spiritual ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was little less than slow martyrdom. The country was wild, the inhabitants were half barbarous, speaking a language unintelligible to him; the monks were violent, unruly, and dissolute, openly living with concubines; the lands of the monastery ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... wreaths of palm, which is said to have been chosen as a symbol of victory, because of the elasticity with which it rises after the pressure of the heaviest weight—an explanation, perhaps, more appropriate to it as the emblem of spiritual triumphs—the Palm of Martyrdom and ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sacrificed; but it ought not to regret its blood when it was shed to reveal eternal truths. God has put this price on the germination and maturation of all His designs in regard to man. Ideas vegetate in human blood; revolutions descend from the scaffold. All religions become divine through martyrdom. Let us, then, pardon each other, sons of combatants and victims. Let us become reconciled over their graves to take up the work which they have left undone. Crime has lost every thing in introducing itself into the ranks of the republic. To do ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... self-conceit, that the difficulty of life would lie solely in the direction of losing these precious ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the mystery and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... momentous quarrel. The streets were instantly crowded with innumerable swarms of men, women, and children; the legions of monks, in regular array, marched, and shouted, and fought at their head, "Christians! this is the day of martyrdom: let us not desert our spiritual father; anathema to the Manichaean tyrant! he is unworthy to reign." Such was the Catholic cry; and the galleys of Anastasius lay upon their oars before the palace, till ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... want a hand to lead him in his darkness, or a voice to whisper comfort in his misery; angel, that badst depart for ever the glories of thy own bridal day, lest he that had shared thy nursery in childhood, should want the honors of a funeral; idolatrous, yet Christian Lady, that in the spirit of martyrdom trodst alone the yawning billows of the grave, flying from earthly hopes, lest everlasting despair should settle upon the grave of thy brother,' &c. In fact, though all the groupings, and what I would call permanent attitudes of the Grecian ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... left the whole affair to the Serbs and then in two years it would be a solid thing. It may be thought that the local Government, since they left him at large, endorsed his theories; but they were reluctant to give him a halo of martyrdom. They imagined that he was nervous because he was losing ground—they acknowledged, though, that he still gave pleasure to a great many Serbs, who were carried away by his appeals to their old prejudices. It is undeniable that with the peculiar ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... call to be a missionary. Christina suggested this to him more than once, and assured him of the unspeakable happiness it would be to her to be the wife of a missionary, and to share his dangers; she and Theobald might even be martyred; of course they would be martyred simultaneously, and martyrdom many years hence as regarded from the arbour in the Rectory garden was not painful, it would ensure them a glorious future in the next world, and at any rate posthumous renown in this—even if they were not miraculously ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... altar-pieces and other subjects for the churches, the chief of which are four pictures in S. Maria di Monte Santo, representing Daniel in the Lions' Den, Tobit and the Angel, the Resurrection of Christ, and the Raising of Lazarus; the Martyrdom of St. Cosimo and St. Damiano, in ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Persius, and others, whom scholars know well. And to these men, heathens though they were, God certainly did teach a great deal about Himself, and gave them courage to rebuke the sins of kings and rich men, even at the danger of their lives; and to some of them he gave courage even to suffer martyrdom for the message which God had given them, and which their neighbours hated to hear. And this was the message which God sent by them to the heathen: that God was good and righteous, and that therefore His everlasting wrath must be awaiting sinners. They rebuked their ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... performance amid such touch-and-go surroundings Melicent considered to be august. And consciousness of his words' poverty, as Perion thus lightly played with death in order to accord due honour to the lady he served, was to Dame Melicent in her high martyrdom as is the twist of a dagger in an already fatal wound; and made ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... continued to torture the confessors; and I was led back to Alexandria by an ardent thirst for martyrdom. I found on my arrival that the persecution had ceased three days before. Just as I was returning, my path was blocked by a great crowd in front of the Temple of Serapis. I was told that the Governor was about to make one final example. In the centre of the portico, in the broad light of day, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... Fischer, and Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887, after fruitless appeals to the higher courts; Lingg committed suicide in prison, and Fielden, Neebe and Schwab were sentenced to long terms in prison. The four executed leaders met their death with the heroic calmness of martyrdom. "Let the voice of the people be heard!" were Parsons' last words. Fielden, Neebe and Schwab might have rotted away in prison, were it not that one of the noblest-minded and most maligned men of his time, in the person ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... water to live on, the squealing and fluttering of bats to listen to, and drifting clouds to watch through one little window slit. The anti-Pagan section of the community began to talk portentously of the boy-martyr. The martyrdom was mitigated, as far as the food was concerned, by the carelessness of the tower warden, who once or twice left a portion of his own supper of broiled meat and fruit and wine by mistake in the prince's cell. After the punishment was over, Vespaluus was closely watched for any further symptom ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... point connected with religion. Some passages occur in the work before us for which the writer's sole apology must be the uncontroulable disposition to indulge the peculiarity of his vein of humour—a temptation which even the saturnine John Knox was unable to resist either in narrating the martyrdom of his friend Wisheart or the assassination of his enemy Beatson, and in the impossibility of resisting which his learned and accurate biographer has rested his apology for this ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... order of Nature that it should deify Mirabeau in the Pantheon, only to dig up his dishonoured remains and trundle them under an unmarked stone at the meeting of four streets, that it should set Bailly on a civic throne, only to drag him forth, under a freezing sky, to his long and dismal martyrdom amid a howling mob, that it should acclaim Lafayette as the Saviour of France, only to hunt him across the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... that he owed the entire obligation to St. Lawrence, on whose festival the battle was fought. His gratitude or hypocrisy found a fitting monument in the celebrated convent and palace of the Escurial, which he absurdly caused to be built in the form of a gridiron, the instrument of the saint's martyrdom. When the news of the victory reached Charles V. in his retreat, the old warrior inquired if Philip was in Paris? but the cautious victor had no notion of such prompt manoeuvring; nor would he risk against foreign enemies the exhaustion of forces destined ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... the ships in the ports, with very little expense and bloodshed. To this might be added the punishment of the factious chiefs by impeachment or bill, if their persons can be secured; but till then any judicial proceedings would provoke, not hurt, and confer the palm of martyrdom without the pain of it, which is the perfection of fanatical beatitude. In respect to the other colonies south of New England, a strict execution of the Act of Navigation, and other restrictive laws, would probably be sufficient at present; and a small addition of frigates and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... think that I am a coward and tremble at the death that hangs over me. I neither fear the future nor regret the past. In every true cause some one is called to martyrdom. To die for the right, for humanity, to lay down all you hold most dear for the sake of the poor and the weak and the down-trodden and God's holy justice—it is a magnificent duty, a privilege! And I am ready. If my death is enough, ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... partook of the Jews' feast of the Passover, and drank from their festal wine-cup. [5] This, however, is not the cup to which I call your at- tention,—even the cup of martyrdom: wherein Spirit and matter, good and evil, seem to grapple, and the human struggles against the divine, up to a point of discovery; namely, the impotence of evil, and the om- [10] nipotence of good, as divinely attested. ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... quarrel between the houses of Guise and Chatillon was ended by the decease of the chief of the latter, Coligni de Chatillon—a death so saintly after its new fashion that the long-delayed vengeance of Henri de Guise on the presumed instigator of the murder of his father seemed a martyrdom. And around that central barbarity the slaughter had spread over Paris in widening [129] circles. With conflicting thoughts, in wild terror and grief, Gaston seeks the footsteps of Colombe, of her people, from their rifled and deserted house to the abodes of their various acquaintance, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... who were in the service of the religious. Their right ears were cut off, and they were paraded through the streets of Miaco and through those of the cities of Fugimen, Usaca, and Sacai, [88] to the great grief and sorrow of all Christians who saw their sufferings. The sentence and cause of their martyrdom was written on a tablet in Chinese characters, which was carried hanging on a spear; ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... and repeatedly dashes his head against the ground in rage and despair. Then, his legs being also tied, the man with the hissing red-hot iron in the form of a letter, brands him on the side with the token of his dependence on the lord of the soil. Some of the bulls stand this martyrdom with Spartan heroism and do not utter a cry; but others, when the iron enters their flesh, burst out into long bellowing roars, that seem to echo through the whole country. They are then loosened, get upon their legs again, and like so many branded Cains, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... freely." Beyond the statement that the English Jesuits were indignant, we hear of no evil consequences of this imprudence. Perhaps the Jesuits saw that Milton was of the stuff that would welcome martyrdom, and were sick of the affair of Galileo, which had terribly damaged the pretensions ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... victim of that kind of nervous exaltation which makes martyrdom appear preferable to yielding, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... apprentice Crispinus, by the Roman Princess Laodice, daughter of Maximinus, is very lively and dramatic: the sprightliest scene, I should say, ever played out on the stage of Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St. Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... will not permit us now to even touch upon, much less delineate, the all-important principles symbolized by the recorded martyrdom of Jesus, and the doctrine of atonement. But they, and all the eschatology of the Gospels, and with which the apocalyptic book of riddles is filled, will be readily unravelled as we still farther trace the working ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... to hand from Bishop Puginier regarding the martyrdom of the Chinese priest Cap. For three days he suffered excruciating torments. On the fourth day the mandarin asked him to translate the Lord's Prayer. When he came to the third petition, "Thy kingdom come," he was asked of what kingdom he spoke. He replied, "Of God's kingdom." The mandarin ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... can chatter as she does with her mouth full of pins is to me a perfect miracle. Once or twice in the week I have to endure a certain ordeal which, although a positive pleasure to some women, is to my disposition intense martyrdom, termed dressing to go out; and I think I never hated it more than the night of Lady Horsingham's ball. Lady Horsingham is my poor uncle's widow; and as Aunt Deborah is extremely punctilious on all matters relating to family connections, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... place in Brussels, by the orders of Albert, who at that time held the highest dignity of the Christian priesthood, next to that of its supreme head. A poor servant girl, named Anne Vanderhove, arrested on a charge of heresy, refused, in all the pride of martyrdom, to renounce her faith. She was condemned to the grave—not to the common occupancy of that cold refuge of the lifeless body, but to all the horrors of living contact and hopeless struggles with the suffocating clay. She suffered her punishment, in the midst of a crowd of curious fanatics; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... knew he would be carefully attended; and he also endeavoured to reason with him on the absurdity of his self-assumed mission, assuring him that unless he desisted, and behaved with circumspection, he would inevitably be seized by the Inquisition. But the prospect of Martyrdom augmented his zeal; and the representations of the benevolent Catholic only stimulated his enterprise; so that in the course of a few days, much to his own exceeding great joy, and with many comfortable salutations ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... excite them the more. They sacrifice their personal interest, their family—everything. The very instinct of self-preservation is entirely obliterated in them, and so much so that often the only recompense they solicit is that of martyrdom. The intensity of their faith gives great power of suggestion to their words. The multitude is always ready to listen to the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it. Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... "Martyrdom," answered Garret, a quick flash in his eye, which the light, just kindled, seemed to reflect back. "I shall die for the faith at last. I know it, I feel it. And there be moments when I could wish that that day had come, and that I might take the crown which is promised to those who are ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... should command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of being burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... there would be an end of you and your services. If you care anything for a cause, you can do something better than get shot for it; and if you want martyrdom, there is a nobler martyrdom than death. The Christians who were trundled in barrels with spikes in them deserve higher honour than those who died in a moment, before they could recant. The highest form of martyrdom, though, is not even ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... of contempt. All His life He walked in the solitude of uncomprehended aims, and at His hour of extremest need appealed in vain for a little solace of companionship, and was deserted by those whom He trusted most. His was a lifelong martyrdom inflicted by men. His was a lifelong solitude which was most utter at the last. And He brought it all on Himself because He would be God's Servant in being ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... and words savoured almost of wizardry. He was accustomed to urge upon me the necessity of 'speaking for Jesus in season and out of season', and he so worked upon my feelings that I would start forth like St. Teresa, wild for the Moors and martyrdom. But any actual impact with persons marvelously cooled my zeal, and I should hardly ever have 'spoken' at all if it had not been for that unfortunate phrase 'out of season'. It really seemed that one must talk of nothing else, since if an occasion was not in season it was out ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... other, 'Look at our champion!' He glanced proudly at the Infidels, but when his eyes fell upon the Franks they were soft and gentle. 'Go slowly, noble barons,' said he; 'the Unbelievers to-day are seeking their martyrdom, and you will find richer booty than ever ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... heart,") is not less touching than that of Griselda. It is simple and heroic to the last degree. The poetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it, connected with the manners and superstitions of the age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the Iroquois mission, of course you know what to expect. I have nothing at all to complain of. Why, they have used me very much better than they did Father Jogues, Father Breboeuf, and a good many others whom I could mention. There were times, it is true, when I was quite hopeful of martyrdom, especially when they thought my tonsure was too small, which was their merry way of putting it. But I suppose I was not worthy of it; indeed I know that I was not, so it only ended in just a ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... five hundred thousand dollars in all—in your state alone. And we didn't ask a single bit of new legislation. All the money was paid just to escape persecution under those alleged laws! Yet they call this a free country! When I think of the martyrdom—yes, the mental and moral martyrdom, of the men who have made this country—What are the few millions a man may amass, in compensation for what he has to endure? Why, Sayler, I've not the slightest doubt you could find well-meaning, yes, really honest, God-fearing ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... Duke of Mizrox and the ministers were already in the castle and had been there since the previous afternoon. In the royal palace the excitement was intense, but it was of the subdued kind that strains the nerves to the point where control is martyrdom. ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... not as our thoughts not His ways as our ways. Her feeble body began to suffer from the rudest assaults of pain; day and night, night and day, she lived through a martyrdom in which what might have been a lifetime of suffering was concentrated into a few months. To witness these sufferings was like the sundering of joints and marrow, and once, only once, thank God! my faith in Him staggered and reeled to and fro. "How can He look down on such agonies?" ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... made the door For Rome's imperial seed to issue: there In anguish too they wail the fatal snare Whence dead Deidamia still must grieve, Reft of Achilles; likewise they receive Due penalty for the Palladium." "Master," I said, "if in that martyrdom The power of human speech may still be theirs, I pray—and think it worth a thousand prayers — That, till this horned flame be come more nigh, We may abide here; for thou seest that I With great desire incline to it." And he: "Thy prayer deserves great praise; which willingly I grant; but thou ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... powers and all dangers, but also their ardent passion for propagating it without any motive but the yearning to make their fellows share in its benefits and its hopes. They confronted, nay, they welcomed martyrdom, at one time to maintain their own Christianity, at another to make others Christians around them; propagandism was for them a duty almost as imperative as fidelity. And it was not in memory of old and obsolete mythologies, but in the name of recent deeds and persons, in obedience to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... had not yet received that limp effect of age. And, like the gaudiest Mexican head piece, the band of this sombrero was of purest gold, beaten into the forms of various saints. Ronicky Doone knew nothing at all about saints, but he approved very much of the animation of the martyrdom scenes and felt reasonably sure that his hatband could not be improved upon in the entire length and breadth of Stillwater, and the young men of the town agreed with him, to ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... taken refuge in forests and caverns; if you had gone from place to place, risking your lives to instruct and rally the people, until the first shock of the enemy was past; and had you even courageously exposed yourselves to martyrdom—as in fact those have done who have endeavoured to perform your duties in your absence—perhaps the examples of constancy, or zeal, or of piety you had discovered, might have animated your flocks, revived their courage, and arrested the fury of your enemies." ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... that they knew too well awaited them, while others seemed to forget themselves in their desire to comfort their companions. Among the timid ones was pretty little Ra-Ruth. Perhaps her vivid imagination enabled her to realise more powerfully the terrors of martyrdom. It may be that her delicately-strung nerves shrank more sensitively from the prospect, but in spite of her utmost efforts to be brave she trembled violently and was pale as death. Yet she did not murmur, she only laid her head on the sympathetic bosom of her queen-like friend ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... its honours and preferments. Not long, indeed, after he took orders, he published, in prose, 1728, a true Estimate of Human Life, dedicated, notwithstanding the Latin quotations with which it abounds, to the queen; and a sermon preached before the house of commons, 1729, on the martyrdom of king Charles, entitled, an Apology for Princes, or the Reverence due to Government. But the Second Discourse, the counterpart of his Estimate, without which it cannot be called a true Estimate, though, in 1728, it was announced as "soon to be published," never ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... had no room for antics of martyrdom. He gave human nature first place in his plan of dealing with human affairs. He did not allow his mind to be disturbed by trifles. He had big jobs to tackle, and he never doubted that he was the one and only man who could carry them to a successful issue. He took his instructions from Elizabeth ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... shameful thing to speak of, but we are not telling tales of pleasant sins; we are telling of true facts, which it would be better, no doubt, to pass over in silence, if we did not believe that it is needful from time to time to reveal the martyrdom of those who are condemned without bearing, scorned without judging; shameful it is, but this mother answered the daughter that they had already scarce enough for two, and would certainly not have enough for three; that such children ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... peasantry. And yet, who can pity the moujik? His cheeks are altogether too round, and his morals too superbly bestial; he has clearly been created to sing and starve by turns. But the Italian peasant who speaks in the tongue of Homer and Virgil and Boccaccio is easily invested with a halo of martyrdom; it is delightful to sympathize with men who combine the manners of Louis Quatorze with the profiles of Augustus or Plato, and who still recall, in many of their traits, the pristine life of Odyssean days. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... railway station; even the porters with their old-fashioned knots and their new-fashioned barrows, who await the traveller at the foot of the gang-plank, followed in wondering delight. Fortunately the Peterhead train was just about to start, so that the martyrdom was not unnecessarily prolonged. In the carriage the glorious Highland costume was unseen, and as there were but few persons at the station at Yellon, all went well there. When, however, the carriage drew near the Mains of Crooken ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... hardly secure herself from the wrath and mystery of God; she draws as near as possible to the Son. Next to her the Baptist, the Twelve Apostles, and all the saints of God, each one showing to the tremendous Judge the symbol of the martyrdom by which he glorified God: St. Andrew the cross, St. Bartholomew his skin, St. Lawrence the gridiron, St. Sebastian the arrows, San Biagio the combs of iron, St. Catherine the wheel, and others other things whereby they are known. ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... slow sorrow, Tisza found again in her child, a true daughter of Hungary like herself; and, as Marsa grew up, she told her the legends, the songs, the heroism, the martyrdom, of Hungary, picturing to the little girl the great, grassy plain, the free puszta, peopled with a race in whose proud language the word honor recurs ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... as have spent all their days in a religious, hard, and penitential life, and such as have (as thy poore father hath done) consumed all their time in pleasure and ease;'" and so he proceeded to enlarge on their merits and martyrdom. His grandson, Cresacre More, referring to this scene, says, "By which most humble and heavenly meditation, we may easily guess what a spirit of charity he had gotten by often meditation, that every sight brought him new matter ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Simon Magus, Peter said: He is in pain enough, knowing him to be overcome in his heart; our master hath taught us for to do good for evil. Then said Simon to Peter and Paul: Yet is it not come to you that ye desire, for ye be not worthy to have martyrdom, the which answered: That is, that we desire to have, to thee shall never be well, for thou liest ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... night when Dr. Temple contradicted so emphatically what Dr. Gunnip had told her she says she felt as if she had been dead and buried all those dreadful weeks and had come back to life. Miss Crilly insists that if it hadn't been for Miss Twining's "martyrdom" we never should have had "spunk" enough to go to Mr. Randolph with our awful story. I guess she is right. That stirred us up to do something. Miss Twining is pretty well now. She writes nearly every day, and as she can sell as much as she likes she earns a good ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... be baptized, and that the betrothed couple must before marriage visit the Pope and the sacred shrines. After taking leave of their parents, the Prince and Princess depart on their expedition, but Ursula has had a vision in her sleep in which an angel has announced her martyrdom. She is accompanied on her journey by 11,000 virgins, and they are received by Pope Cyriacus in Rome. The Pope then makes the return journey with them as far as Cologne, where, however, they are assaulted and massacred by the Huns, after which Ursula is accorded ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... he had still hoped that the question might be answered in his favour. He had so hoped, although he was burdened with Mary Snow, and although he had spoken of his engagement with that lady in so rigid a spirit of self-martyrdom. But the question had been answered against him. The offer of a further asylum in the seclusion of that bedroom had been made to him by his friend with a sort of proviso that it would not be well that he should go further than the bedroom, and his inner feelings at ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... in the field of action which Shakespeare takes in that of imagination and Bacon in that of thought. For this something more was needed, the long torture of imprisonment, the final crown of judicial martyrdom. The slow tragedy closing on Tower Hill is the necessary ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... their views. Mr. Lawson sought to make them impartial purveyors of unbiased news to all parties. Hardly had the blue pencil of supervision dropped from Mr. Stone's fingers before Field made an opportunity to unburden his soul upon the subject of his martyrdom in the following extraordinary ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... public. In addition to the gladiatorial combats and other shows, they sometimes threw members of the hated sect into the arena of the Coliseum and turned wild beasts in upon them. It is estimated that seventy thousand Christians suffered martyrdom in this place. This has made the Coliseum holy ground, in the eyes of the followers of the Saviour. And well it might; for if the chain that bound a saint, and the footprints a saint has left upon a stone he chanced to stand upon, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the Cross, to gain renown in fights against the Infidels—as the Moors were then called,—to "obtain martyrdom" among the followers of Mohammed—these were reckoned by the Christians of crusading days as the highest honor that life could bring or death bestow. It is no wonder, therefore, that in a family, the father of which had been himself a fighter of Infidels, ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... not notice his departure. She was too deep in thought. Her brain was steadier now, and she found it possible to think. For the first time she was asking herself if she would be justified in bringing her long martyrdom to an end. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain, patiently, conscientiously, unflaggingly, throughout those seven bitter years. She had married her husband without loving him, and he had never sought to win her love. He had married her ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... hurry down into the square The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race, Who would not injure us, and cannot serve; Who, from their short and measured slumber risen, In the faint sunshine of their balconies, With a half-legend of a martyrdom And some weak wine and withered graces before them, Note by their foot the wheel of melody That catches and rolls on the sabbath dance. To drag the steady prop from failing age, Break the young stem that fondness twines around, Widen the solitude of lonely ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... uttered wonders, and many more than can here be repeated—commending highly the patience of a certain gamester, who would remain all night playing and losing; yea, though of choleric disposition by nature, he would never open his mouth to complain, although he was suffering the martyrdom of Barabbas, provided only his adversary did not cut the cards. At a word, Rodaja uttered so many sage remarks, that, had it not been for the cries he sent forth when any one approached near enough to touch him, for his peculiar dress, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... aims that chiefly concern others, and with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern herself. Both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. Isabel has her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had, but these seem to me, on the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned women in modern fiction; and I think Isabel is the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of their husbands, cut their hair close off, and spend all their remaining life in neglect; whence it happens, that many young women are ambitious to die with honour, as they esteem it, throwing themselves for lore of their departed husbands into the flames, as they think, of martyrdom. Following their dead husband to the pile, and there embracing his corpse, they are there consumed in the same fire. This they do voluntarily, and without compulsion, their parents, relations, and friends joyfully accompanying them; and, when the pile of this hellish sacrifice ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... voice as this is related to be came, and from an unknown original also, to the famous Polycarp, as he was going to martyrdom, bidding him "play the man;" as the church of Smyrna assures us in their account of ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Germanicus, which Lanzi pronounces one of his finest productions. He next painted the Taking of Jerusalem by Titus. These works gave the Cardinal so much satisfaction that he procured for him the commission to paint a large picture of the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, for St. Peter's, now in the pontifical palace at Monte Cavallo. These works procured him the friendship and patronage of the Cav. del Pozzo, for whom he painted his first set of pictures, representing the Seven Sacraments, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... society. Truly has it been said, The life and the cross of Christ shed a splendor from heaven upon a new and till then unheard of order of heroism—that which may be called the feminine order—meekness, endurance, long-suffering, the passive strength of martyrdom. For Christianity does not say, "Honor to the wise," but, "Blessed are the meek." Not "Glory to the strong," but "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Not the Lord is a man of war; Jehovah is his name, but God is love. In Christ, not intellect, but love, is glorified. ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... afternoon, like the waves of the ocean, they continued in warm conflict with each other, and great numbers were slain on both sides. Mooseh Khan and Eeseh Khan, who commanded the right and left wings of Khan Mahummud's line, drank the sherbet of martyrdom, and their troops broke; which misfortune had nearly given a blow to the army of Islaam. At this instant Mahummud Shaw appeared with three thousand fresh horse. This restored the spirits of Khan Mahummud as also of the disordered troops, who rallied and joined him. Mukkrib Khan, ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... season when the inexplicable attraction of it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madder and a grain ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and cxxx - and the fourth was that touching utterance of personal religious experience, Nun fruet euch, lieben Christen g'mein. But the critics can hardly be mistaken in assigning as early a date to the ballad of the Martyrs of Brussels. Their martyrdom took place July 1, 1523, and the "New Song" must have been inspired by the story as it was first brought to Wittenberg, although it is not found in print until the Enchiridion, which followed the Eight ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... intimation that her life was an impediment to the security of the received religion, "she seemed with a certain unwonted alacrity to triumph, giving God thanks, and rejoicing in her heart that she was held to be an instrument" for the restoration of her own faith. This note of exultation as in martyrdom was maintained with unflinching courage to the last. She wrote to Elizabeth and the Duke of Guise two letters of almost matchless eloquence and pathos, admirable especially for their loyal and grateful ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... kind of a Cross did Saint Andrew bear? Who was Saint Andrew? (Saint Andrew was one of the twelve apostles, and is believed to have suffered martyrdom on a cross shaped something like the letter X, that is, one made of two beams of equal length crossing in the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... many judges would travel on passes. There are many judges whose decisions any number of passes would not affect; but if passes are not to have any effect upon legislation and litigation, why are congressmen, legislators, judges, and other court officials singled out for this kind of martyrdom? If the men who attain these positions remained private citizens, would passes be thrust ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... for God's sake! It is too horrible! Not that I would care for myself. I would be proud to share her martyrdom of ignominy, if it had to be; but it is the sacrilege, the blasphemy of even thinking of her in ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... With a self-sacrifice which some of our readers will appreciate, she resolved, instead of comfortably making her own bed, sweeping and dusting her own chamber,—which she had hitherto done, in utter scorn of all offers of help from the chambermaid of the establishment,—to condemn herself to the martyrdom of instructing Topsy to perform these operations,—ah, woe the day! Did any of our readers ever do the same, they will appreciate the amount ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and taciturn, Whose name has perished, with his towers of stone, And all his actions save this one alone; This one, so terrible, perhaps 't were best If it, too, were forgotten with the rest; Unless, perchance, our eyes can see therein The martyrdom triumphant o'er the sin; A double picture, with its gloom and glow, The splendor ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... child need not shrink from. Then disease and decay, however painful to living friends to look upon, have but little pain for him who is undergoing them. For it is not only amidst the tortures of actual martyrdom that Christians have been more than conquerors,—in common life, on the quiet or lonely sick bed, under the grasp of fever or of consumption, the conquest has been witnessed as often and as completely. It is not a little thing when the faintest whisper of thought ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... banished; upon Tuesday the Lord appeared to him at Pontiniac, saying, Thomas, Thomas, my church shall be glorified in thy blood; upon Tuesday he returned from exile, upon Tuesday he got the palm or reward of martyrdom; upon Tuesday 1220, his venerable body received the glory and renown of translation, fifty years after his ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... revoke the doctrine, and are ready to suffer death therefor. We also can not bring ourselves to believe that the Lord God has given more grace to Zwingli, than to the dear saints and teachers, who have suffered martyrdom and death for the faith. We can not see that he leads such a spiritual life, nay, that he is rather inclined to disturbance, than to peace and quiet. Therefore we desire to send no one to him, nor to any like him. Indeed, if we had him, and would find that true, which ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom. Rowland's eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it. If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... first this subject for Heroic Song Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late; Not sedulous by Nature to indite Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument Heroic deem'd, chief maistrie to dissect With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights 30 In Battels feign'd; the better fortitude Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom Unsung; or to describe Races and Games, Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd Shields, Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds; Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgious Knights At Joust and Torneament; then marshal'd Feast ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... in an ecstasy of delight; and from that time he became a different man; in consequence, I presume, of his having stumbled upon an object which excited within him a genuine interest. During the week of my stay with him in town he went everywhere with me, though his normal condition was that of martyrdom to gout; and on my receiving my appointment to the "Juno" he insisted on presenting me with an entire new rig-out from stem to stern; including a very fine and powerful telescope, the best sextant that could be bought for money, ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... words aloud, she could not have expressed their meaning more plainly than in that glance, full of a thousand thoughts, in which terror, hope, pleasure, the dangers of their mutual situation all took part. He had passed, in that one moment, from heaven to martyrdom and from martyrdom back to heaven! So then, the brave young seigneur, light-hearted and content, walked gaily to his doom; thinking that the horrors of the "question" were not sufficient payment for the delights of ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... and pity, and in fact makes Frederic out to be a sort of sublime and suffering martyr. He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would have breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he could from her, and leading her a wretched, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Him. In this union and in this joy great benefits often come to men, and many mysterious and marvellous secrets of divine treasures are manifested and disclosed. When a man meditates, at this reception, on the martyrdom and sufferings of the precious body of Christ, whom he is receiving, he enters sometimes into so loving a devotion and so great a compassion, that he desires to be nailed with Christ to the cross, and to shed his heart's blood for the honour of Christ. ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... black petticoats, so as to show his purple stockings and jolly fat calves, and went trembling down the steps towards the boat. The good old man! I wish I had had a shake of that trembling podgy hand somehow before he went upon his sea martyrdom. I felt a love for that soft-hearted old Christian. Ah! let us hope his governante tucked him comfortably in bed when he got to Faro that night, and made him a warm gruel and put his feet in warm water. The men clung around him, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... where soul and body smoke, as it were, after the conflagration of an anger which has driven all forces, physical and intellectual, to their utmost tension. It is an unspeakable and supreme splendor, which reveals itself only under the pressure of some frenzy, be it resistance or victory, love or martyrdom. She had left home in a dress with alternate lines of brown and yellow, and a collarette which she pleated herself by rising before daylight; and she had not yet noticed the condition of her gown soiled by her struggle on the grass, and her collar torn in Catherine's ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... Marteen's library with an ever-growing anxiety. Only the presence of the child, who clasped his hand in such fear and grief, kept him from giving way. The long reign of terror that had dragged his heart and mind to the very edge of martyrdom had worn thin his already exhausted nerves, and now—now that the lost was found again, it was to learn by what a slender thread of life they held ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... class of genius, compensated that defect by a ready application of his powers to the promotion of piety. The attempt to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion, was, I think, first made by Mr. Boyle's Martyrdom of Theodora; but Boyle's philosophical studies did not allow him time for the cultivation of style; and the Completion of the great design was reserved for Mrs. Rowe. Dr. Watts was one of the first who taught the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... our blessed Savyour. Compare 'The Martyrdom of King Charls I. or His Conformity with Christ in his Sufferings. In a Sermon preached at Bredah, Before his Sacred Majesty King Charls The Second, And the Princess of Orange. By the Bishop of Downe. Printed at the Hage 1649, and ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... but what Fray Ignatius tells us—that the Americans have been everywhere pulling down churches, and granting martyrdom to the priests, and that everywhere ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... now was Lincoln's greatness understood. He has come to personify for us the triumphs and glories, the sadness and the pathos, of the great struggle which he guided. His final martyrdom seems almost a fitting crown for his achievements. It has, without doubt, done much to secure him the exalted niche which he occupies in the hearts of the American people, whom, in a way, he died to save. Had he lived through ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... when the Catholic Inquisitions of Europe became the merciless executioners of vindictive wrath, upon those who dared to worship God, instead of bowing down in unholy adoration before "my Lord God the Pope," and when England, too, burnt her Ann Ascoes at the stake of martyrdom. Suffice it to say, that the Church, after having been driven from Judea to Rome, and from Rome to Piedmont, and from Piedmont to England, and from England to Holland, at last stretched her fainting wings over ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... among them; their garments wave, their jewels flash, as they dance and sing in the crimson blaze. The music ceases, a sound of crashing boards is heard and a great cry,—"Hallelujah!" What a glory and consecration of the martyrdom! Where shall we find a more triumphant vindication and supreme victory of ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... giddy altitude—that point from which it had seemed equally impossible to go forward or backward. To wean myself from opium I had resolved inexorably, and finally I accomplished my vow. But the transition state was the worst state of all to support. All the pains of martyrdom were there; all the ravages in the economy of the great central organ, the stomach, which had been wrought by opium; the sickening disgust which attended each separate respiration; and the rooted depravation of the appetite and the digestion—all ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... asked Burr to give me the kiss that I would have killed him for," said she, in a voice so sharpened by her stress of spirit that it might have come out of the flames of martyrdom. "Now I ask you to give me the kiss that I almost took your ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that her father in delivering her over to the seclusion of The Horns had intended to preclude her from showing herself in London. She was conscious that she was being treated with cruelty, and had a certain pride in her martyrdom. She would obey her father to the letter; she would give him no right to call her conduct in question; but he and any other to whom he might entrust the care of her, should be made to know that she thought him cruel. He ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... a creature to jump herself down into a gulf and be lost for ever. She's gone, extinguished—there she is, under the penitent's hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and that's what she has married!—a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom. Oh! I'm not awake. But I never dreamed of such a thing as this—not the hard, bare, lump-of-earth-fact:—and that's the only thing to tell ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... modest and simple, and a life so private that it seems almost a wrong to speak of them publicly, yet a character so firm and tranquil and self-possessed that if necessary it would have met without doubt or hesitation any form of martyrdom, can hardly be described without apparent exaggeration. She was born, in our familiar phrase, a lady, and from the beginning, throughout a long life, she was surrounded with perfect ease of circumstance. She was singularly beautiful in her youth, and to the close of her life ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... sufferings that he was forced to self-impose to keep it up, as he afterwards confessed, had nearly conquered him on the third day: that he was a man of the most enduring courage to brave a whole week of such martyrdom, must be conceded to him. Had the farce continued a day or two longer, he would have had the disagreeable option forced upon him, either of being seriously ill, or of returning instanter to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... that the Place du Martroi was not the scene of Joan's martyrdom, and yet this wide, noble square, with her monument in the centre, from which diverge so many streets associated with her history, stood for infinitely more to us than anything we had seen at Rouen, the ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... probable plot. Love of Eudore and Cymodocee; conversion of the latter; jealousy and intrigues of Hierocles; adventures past and future of Eudore; transfer of scene to Rome; prevalence of Galerius over Diocletian; persecution, martyrdom, and supernatural triumph. But the "fillings up" are not banal; and the book is well worth reading from divers points of view. In the earliest part there is a little too much Homer,[34] naturally enough perhaps. The ancient ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... one is the power of fashion, for it might well become fashionable in a certain house not to attend chapel. Those who know anything of the inside of schools know how such a fashion would deter many of the best boys from going, and martyrdom ought not to be part of the training of school life. The other difficulty is more subtle, but none the less real it originates in the boys' quite healthy fear of claiming merit. Those in authority, if wise, would not count attendance at chapel for righteousness, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... a warning I remain; Although my sharpest pain Be elsewhere written, so that many a pen Is tired already, and, in every vale, The echo of my heavy sighs is rife, Some credence forcing of my anguish'd life; And, as her wont, if here my memory fail, Be my long martyrdom its saving plea, And the one thought which so its torment made, As every feeling else to throw in shade, And make me of myself forgetful be— Ruling life's inmost core, its ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the Apostles in Jerusalem, 52 The disciples have all things common, ib. The appointment of the deacons, 54 The Apostles refuse to obey the rulers of the Jews, 55 The date of the martyrdom of Stephen, ib. The gospel preached in Samaria, 56 The baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, and of Cornelius the centurion, 57 The conversion of Saul, his character, position, and sufferings, 59 His visit to Jerusalem, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... with a thinly veiled air of martyrdom, and with raising objections whenever opportunity offered. Only after Denvil's first dinner did she venture a direct attack. For on this occasion economy was not. Wine and cigars appeared with the dessert; and the two men sat an ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... such an air of martyrdom," his sister told him. "I know you have a book half read; you want to get back ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... in those days in Hawikuh. Father Martin who passed there in the moon of the Sun Returning, on his way to establish a mission among the People of the Coarse Hanging Hair, reported to his superior that Father Letrado was ripe for martyrdom. ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al |
