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Pagan   /pˈeɪgən/   Listen
Pagan

noun
1.
A person who does not acknowledge your god.  Synonyms: gentile, heathen, infidel.
2.
A person who follows a polytheistic or pre-Christian religion (not a Christian or Muslim or Jew).
3.
Someone motivated by desires for sensual pleasures.  Synonyms: hedonist, pleasure seeker.



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"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books



... her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it closely. It had its elegance of outline, ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... have lived on earth, or anywhere else; and there was not in or about them any hint whatever of myth or antique belief. In the pre-Christian days the work of the poet and sculptor taught a kind of history in the statues of the pagan divinities. Bacchus told of some ancient race that had introduced the vine into Europe and Africa. Ceres, with her wheat-plant, recited a similar story as to agriculture. And Zeus, Hercules, Saturn and all the rest were, in all probability—as ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... breast—envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness—which make for world anarchy. He has never been able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide, it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... the Isle of Thanet A.D. 597, and Bede died A.D. 735. The intervening period, that of his chronicle, is the golden age of Anglo-Saxon sanctity. Notwithstanding some twenty or thirty years of pagan reaction, it was a time of rapid though not uninterrupted progress, and one of an interest the more touching when contrasted with the calamities which followed so soon. Between the death of Bede and the first Danish invasion, were eighty years, largely years of decline, moral ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. ALL those WHO FELL, or the Gods of Greece, Asia, and Egypt; the ONE WHO ROSE, or Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan World wore amerced of their worship; and the MANY UNSUBDUED, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... often treated them like beasts of the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize; the latter to vilify than to discriminate. The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both; and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, but ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... too, history had been made in this mountain passage whose walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... voluminous production the Right Reverend Author has maintained, not only that all the seven letters attributed by Eusebius to Ignatius are genuine, but also that "no Christian writings of the second century, and very few writings of antiquity, whether Christian or pagan, are so well authenticated." These positions, advocated with the utmost confidence by the learned prelate, are sure to be received with implicit confidence by a wide circle of readers; and I have felt impelled here openly to protest against them, inasmuch as I am satisfied that they ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen

... necessitate an individual composer, than on the so-called communal elements of refrain, iteration, stock stanzas, stock epithets, stock numbers, stock situations, the frank objectivity of the point of view, the sudden glimpses into a pagan world. ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)

... my purpose allowed it, one would like to point out here how the Apostle accepts the non-Christian notions of the people in whose tongue he was speaking; and here, for the only time in his letters, uses the great Pagan word 'virtue,' which was a spell amongst the Greeks, and says, 'I accept the world's notion of what is virtuous and praiseworthy, and I bid you take ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... countries the development of the spirit of Nonconformity and revolt. Calvinism and a whole group of Protestant schools of thought may stand as examples of the spirit of denial working itself out to its natural consequences; while the exaggerations of Italian humanism, frankly pagan, are fair illustrations of the spirit of assent carried beyond bounds. And those centuries when the tide of life ran high for good or evil, furnish instances in point abounding with interest and instruction, more easily accessible than what can be gathered from modern characters, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... not denying I'm a Pagan—in my amateurish way. Let me give you some asparagus. Do you think a man can be saved who smokes cigarettes ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... is not all. Were he a pagan of the wilderness he were better than these Leaguers. He fights honestly and bravely and generously. He could have had the city before now, save that he will not starve us. He looks the other way, ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle

... days the Church of San Giovanni was surrounded with Roman tombs. Thither would Messer Guido often come at Ave Maria and meditate far into the silent night. He believed, as the Chronicles reported, that this fair Church of San Giovanni had been a Pagan Temple before it was a Christian Church, and the thought pleased his soul, which was enamoured of the old-world mysteries. Especially he loved to look on these tombs, where the sign of the Cross found no place, but which bore Latin inscriptions and were adorned with carven figures of men and gods. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... The Pagan schools of medicine came to an untimely, although in some cases a lingering, end. "The introduction of Christianity," says a medical writer, "had an undoubted influence on the course of medical science; ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... pleasant mead they crown Nor wanted aught besides in honour of the Moon. Now, while the temple smoked with hallowed steam, They wash the virgin in a living stream; The secret ceremonies I conceal, Uncouth, perhaps unlawful to reveal: But such they were as pagan use required, Performed by women when the men retired, Whose eyes profane their chaste mysterious rites Might turn to scandal or obscene delights. Well-meaners think no harm; but for the rest, Things sacred they pervert, and silence is the best. Her shining hair, uncombed, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... he thought, "but it is distinctly pagan; that altar is built to some heathen god. It does not fit into the scheme of a Christian life. I doubt whether it is consistent with the tone of my house. I will sell it this winter. It will bring three or four times what I paid for it. That was ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke

... what the provocation, that it seemed likely that he would continue unchecked to the end. But one man at least in that audience was not hampered by inherited or acquired reverence for the sacred edifice. Norman Douglas was, as Susan had often vowed crisply, nothing more or less than a "pagan." But he was a rampantly patriotic pagan, and when the significance of what Mr. Pryor was saying fully dawned on him, Norman Douglas suddenly went berserk. With a positive roar he bounded to his feet in his side pew, facing the audience, and ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... so that it bounded across the hall. Then cried Horn to the other guests, "The dance is over!" after which he proclaimed a truce, and, throwing himself down on a couch, spake thus to King Aylmer: "I was born in Southland, of a royal race. The pagan Vikings slew King Altof, my father, and put me out to sea with my twelve companions. You did train me for the order of knighthood, and I have dishonoured it by no unworthy deeds, though you did drive me from your kingdom, thinking I meant to disgrace you through your ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... the eternal is too heavy for my arm. Allow me, then, to avoid dishonor by death; let me take refuge in martyrdom. I do not ask you for liberty, as a guilty one would, nor for vengeance, as would a pagan. Let me die; that is all. I supplicate you, I implore you on my knees—let me die, and my last sigh shall be a blessing ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... creed or system with another, and each with the holy Scriptures;—to settle the minds of those who have formed no definite opinions on religious subjects;—and to lead us all, by contrasting the sacred truths and sublime beauties of Christianity with the absurd notions of pagan idolaters, of skeptics, and of infidels, to set a just value on the doctrines of HIM WHO SPAKE AS ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations, making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves.... Night, which Pagan theology could make the daughter of chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order; although no lower than that mass can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the admirer of order and mystical mathematics of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... were given to protect The people from oppressors; Him they served, Acknowledging His goodness—for to Him, The pure, unchangeable, the Holy One! They owed their greatness and their earthly power. But after times produced idolatry, And Pagan faith, and then His name was lost In adoration of ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... was nothing to Michelangelo, but the eternal spirit of truth that broods over and beyond all forms and ceremonies touched his soul. His heart was filled with the poetry of pagan times. The gods of ancient Greece on high Olympus for him still sang and feasted, still lived ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... the people, (not more than five or six percent,) and in order to win, they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old gods must be destroyed. For a short spell the emperor Julian, a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan Gods from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds during a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established the church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the ancient ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... in the name of the universal natural power he is abundantly scornful toward that fond paganism which consists in imagining distinct patrons for various regions of nature or for sundry human activities. In turning to such patrons the pagan regards something purely ideal or, as the Koran shrewdly observes, worships his own passions. Allah, on the contrary, is overwhelmingly external and as far as possible from being ideal. He is indeed the giver ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... spiteful strokes at religion in general; while others make themselves pleasant with the principles of the christian. Of the last kind, this age has seen a most audacious example in the book entitled, a Tale of a Tub. Had this writing been published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... has been borne, good Christian, by some of the noblest of our race. I take it from you with a smile. I am an easiful old pagan, and I am not angry with you at all—you funny, little ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... children be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... breaking living limbs as did the soldiery who mocked and slew the Saviour of the world, and set defenceless creatures up for targets! Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practised on each other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of Christian men! Shall we, so long as these things last, exult above the scattered remnants of that race, and triumph in the white enjoyment of their possessions? Rather, for me, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... the tempests which throw on the shores of Zeeland's little isles the bodies of strange mummied monsters, part man, part boat; and of still, clear dawnings when the fisherfolk of Domburg can discern, far down under the green water, pagan temples of marble, and gleaming statues more perfect than any fashioned by known sculptors, even the greatest masters, when Greek art was in its prime. He told of the great dyke building, and how, at high ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... childhood at their home in Plassans, which is wrecked by the doings of a certain Abbe Faujas and his relatives. Serge Mouret grows up, is called by an instinctive vocation to the priesthood, and becomes parish priest of Les Artaud, a well-nigh pagan hamlet in one of those bare, burning stretches of country with which Provence abounds. And here it is that 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' opens in the old ruinous church, perched upon a hillock in full view of the ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... disputes between Mahometans and idolaters. But, if our Government does take a part, there cannot be a doubt that Mahometanism is entitled to the preference. Lord Ellenborough is of a different opinion. He takes away the gates from a Mahometan mosque, and solemnly offers them as a gift to a Pagan temple. Morally, this is a crime. Politically, it is a blunder. Nobody who knows anything of the Mahometans of India can doubt that this affront to their faith will excite their fiercest indignation. Their susceptibility on such points is ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... printed parallel passages from Saint Paul and Seneca which, for many, seem to show that the men were in communication with each other. Every ethical maxim of Christianity was expressed by this "noble pagan," and his influence was always directed toward that which he thought was right. His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in another ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... whole theory is not only absurd: it is unjust in its implications towards both God and man. And then, and perhaps we need not say any more about it, we know that it is not true. It did not even originate in the Bible, it did not even originate among the Jews: it is nothing in the world but a pagan myth imported into Jewish tradition just a few hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It is of no more authority in rational human thought than the story of Jason or Hercules, not ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... prayer meetings; he met and encouraged the temperance societies; he graced the sewing circles of the ladies with his presence, and even took a needle now and then and made a stitch or two upon a calico shirt for some poor Bibleless pagan of the South Seas, and this act enchanted the ladies, who regarded the garments thus honored as in a manner sanctified. The Senator wrought in Bible classes, and nothing could keep him away from the Sunday Schools—neither sickness nor storms nor weariness. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... recognised something far greater. When he came to the original he was profoundly impressed. It is strange, he says, that he has learnt for the first time at the age of sixty what a really great poem could be. Poor Milton's adaptation of pagan mythology to the Hebrew legends, in order to expound Puritan theology, results in a series of solecisms, which even the poet could not expect his readers to take seriously. The story, taken for history, certainly breaks down sufficiently to justify a severe ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... native African, and educated in America, presents a striking illustration of the capabilities of the Negro. He was born a pagan, and when brought in contact with the institutions of civilization he outstripped those whose earlier life had been impressed with the advantages of such surroundings. There was nothing in his blood, or in his early rearing, to develop him. He came from darkness himself as well as by his ancestry. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... wretched sustenance, To cut his passage to the British throne? One that has suck'd in malice with his milk, Malice, to Britain, liberty, and truth? Less savage was his brother-robber's nurse, The howling nurse of plundering Romulus, Ere yet far worse than pagan harbour'd there. Hail to the brave! be Britain Britain still: Britain! high favour'd of indulgent Heaven! Nature's anointed empress of the deep! The nurse of merchants, who can purchase crowns! Supreme in commerce! that exuberant source ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... teach. A man remote in distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as would a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary atheist, some supposed student in some remote future, reading history in some place from which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our civilization will therefore be wholly alien, ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... faiths whom the one true faith tortured and killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan Christmas of ours is as ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... the traveller, the shade is already a heavenly refreshment; and though a man is not parched with thirst, a cold draught from the Fountain of Egeria is more delicious than any wine, and under the ancient trees of the pagan grove the rose-purple cyclamens and the dark wood-violets are still blooming side by side. The air is full of the breath of life, the deep earth is still soft, and all trees and flowers and grasses still feel the tender youth of the spring that ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... the churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle. There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most disgusting and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... had built as a gift to his brother was nearing completion, and the finishing touches demanded personal supervision. As the heart of a high priest turns to his temple, so turned Paul Burton's heart to this spot at this time. It was a temple, but decidedly a pagan temple. Porphyry columns went up from a mosaic floor to a richly encrusted ceiling, and in conception and detail it was lavishly beautiful and perfect. Hamilton had conceived and planned the structure with a very ferocity ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... say, when as we drove out of that secret harbour at sunrise over a still sea, we two rejoiced and sang as did the knights of old when they followed our great Duke to England. Yet was our leader an heathen pirate; all our proud fleet but one galley perilously overloaded; for guidance we leaned on a pagan sorcerer; and our port was beyond the world's end. Witta told us that his father Guthrum had once in his life rowed along the shores of Africa to a land where naked men sold gold for iron and beads. ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling

... any discussion of this interesting but mysterious people involves so many hypotheses and arguments of detail that it is impossible in a work like the present. Prome was one of their principal cities, their name reappears in P'iao, the old Chinese designation of Burma, and perhaps also in Pagan, one ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... expressions and vulgar gestures. Nothing is omitted which can give a notion, not merely of the sinfulness, but of the sordidness of dishonesty. Curiously enough, the one denizen of this region who is thoroughly dignified and even pathetic, is the pagan Ulysses; and to him Dante does not himself speak, leaving the pagan Virgil to hold all communication with him. Besides Ulysses, Guy of Montfeltro and Ugolino are presented in such a way as to enlist, in some degree, ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religious form. The hero acclaimed by a crowd is a veritable god for that crowd. Napoleon was such a god for fifteen years, and a divinity never had more fervent worshippers or sent men to their death with greater ease. The Christian and Pagan Gods never exercised a more absolute empire over the minds that had fallen under ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... or their friends into power; when gayly dressed crowds thronged the streets on their way to the amphitheatre to see the gladiatorial fight; when there was feasting and revelry in every house; when merchants were exulting in the midst of thriving trade; when the pagan temples were hung with garlands and filled with gifts; when the slaves were at work in the mills, the kitchens, and the baths; when the gladiators were fighting the wild beasts of the arena—then it was that a swift destruction ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... transpire happiness, pleasure healthy, healthful hear, listen heathen, pagan honorable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... Melicent upcast Under a heathen castle at the last: And how a wicked lord of proud degree, Demetrios, dwelleth in this country, Where humbled under him are all mankind: How to this wretched woman he hath mind, That fallen is in pagan lands alone, In point to die, as ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... quotation begins with this last sentence; it is a pity that he did not read the context. If he had read it, his candour would have compelled him to confess that not even a Christian father, with a keen sense of what was ridiculous or degrading in the pagan religion, understood the fatherhood of the gods as he ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... could have comprehended their import,—such language as was spoken in these islands ere Olave planted his cross on the ruins of heathenism. His meaning was dark also, and obscure, like that which the pagan priests were wont to deliver, in the name of their idols, to the tribes that assembled at the Helgafels.... I answered him in nearly the same strain, for the spirit of the ancient Scalds of our race was upon ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... shops—that it might be sightly even in Espana, and in it the Sangleys have generously assisted. [86] For they had a common fund for current expenses, and they amass in it yearly about twenty thousand pesos. Each Sangley, pagan or Christian, pays, if he wear a cue, three reals of four to the peso, in two payments. For this fund there are Spanish collectors with a sufficient salary. What I regret is that, in all these cunning devices to obtain their money, and the exaction of these contributions, the money is taken ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various

... grandfathers built their places of worship we have seen strange changes in American church buildings—changes in material, location and adaptation to ritual uses. We have had a revival of pagan temple-building in wood and stucco; we have seen Gothic cathedrals copied for the simplest Protestant uses, until humorists have suggested that congregations might find it cheaper to change their religion than their unsuitable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... the temple enclave the invocation was droning like a threshing machine. Asako's Catholic conscience, now awakening from the spell which Japan had cast upon it, became uneasy about its share in these pagan rites. In order to drive the echo of the litany out of her ears, she tried to concentrate her attention upon watching ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... lived at the time of the Christian era, has collected from the fictions of the early Greeks and Oriental nations, and woven into one continuous history, the pagan accounts of the Creation, embracing a description of the primeval world, and the early changes it underwent, followed by a history of the four eras or ages of primitive mankind, the deluge of Deuca'lion, and then onward down ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... a small Onondaga Indian boy, a good-looking, black-eyed little chap with as pagan a heart as ever beat under a copper-colored skin. His father and grandfathers were pagans. His ancestors for a thousand years back, and yet a thousand years back of that, had been pagans, and We-hro, with the pride of his religion ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... of trust and hope. Hope and confidence are the best religion, and the truest worship. I who do not believe in the existence of the gods am therefore to be commended for my religion more than many of the staunchest defenders of Pagan, Christian, or Jewish superstitions, who too often, it seems to me, feel and act as if the world were abandoned of all divine care, and its affairs and events the sport of a blind chance. What is best for man and the condition of the world, must be most agreeable to the gods—to the creator and ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... presented illustrations of several articles found in a Mid[-e]/ sack which had been delivered to the Catholic priest at Red Lake over seventy years ago, when the owner professed Christianity and forever renounced (at least verbally) his pagan profession. The information given below was obtained from Mid[-e]/ priests at the above locality. They are possessed of like articles, being members of the same society to which the late owners of the relics belonged. The first is a birch-bark roll, the ends of which were ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman

... a pagan predecessor, Brigit, a poetess of the Tuatha de Danann, and whom we may perhaps regard as a female Apollo. Cormac in his Glossary tells us she was a daughter of the Dagda and a goddess whom all poets adored, and whose sisters ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... more vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... of ignorance. If it suggests anything positive, it is the Idea of Good, as the ultimate end of affection. The subject is one of special interest in ancient Ethics, as being one of the aspects of Benevolent sentiment in the Pagan world. In Aristotle we first find a definite handling ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... am surprise you ask who is M. le Cure. Only the pagans have not knowledge of him. Are you one pagan? I think you say that to make laugh. It is very bad to mock yourself of ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell

... Tholus thy enemies put to smart, Jair and Jephtha gave praises to thy name. These, to leave idols, thy people did court. Samson the strongest, for his part did the same. Samuel and Nathan thy messages did proclaim. What though fierce Pharaoh wrought mischief in thy sight, He was a pagan, lay not that in our light. I know the Benjamites abused the ways of right, So did Eli's sons, and the sons of Samuel. Saul in his office was slothful day and night, Wicked was Shimei, so was Ahitophel. Measure not by them the faults of Israel, Whom thou hast loved of long time so entirely, ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... Lawrence Boythom, in Bleak House, whose "combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his Diary, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of English writers. Not merely his themes {242} but his whole way of thinking was pagan and antique. He composed, indifferently, in English or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus portions of his narrative poem, Gebir, 1798, were written ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... contradictions. The Ebionites, or Nazarenes, who were the first Christians, rejected all the Epistles of Paul, and regarded him as an impostor. They report, among other things, that he was originally a Pagan; that he came to Jerusalem, where he lived some time; and that having a mind to marry the daughter of the high priest, he had himself been circumcised; but that not being able to obtain her, he quarrelled ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... moulding or an ornament that comes from the ancients. But there are other points of view perhaps of higher consequence. Their temples were erected to the gods; mistaken as they were in their religious notions, we Christians may be put to shame by the devotion of the pagan. Not to man were their temples erected. Man enjoyed their beauty; gazed with admiration on their exquisite forms, and lingered under their shady porticoes; but the eye of the god to whom each temple was dedicated was supposed to be on ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... still love, at first treated seriously if not tragically, but at a later time in a spirit of gaiety. It is conjectured that all these lyrical forms had their origin in the festivities of May, when the return of spring was celebrated by dances in which women alone took part, a survival from the pagan rites ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... equally important, and requiring for their wise development equal mental capacity. And in the economy of Providence in regard to the distribution of responsibility between the sexes, while man has hitherto modified governments, woman, among Christian nations—and possibly among pagan also—has always moulded society. We glance back thus to repeat our leading idea, because we wish to add here, that to the minds of those who realize the truth of it, the often vexed question of the comparative intellectual ability of the sexes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... little midinette Who goes to work each morning daily; I choose to call her Blithe Babette, Because she's always humming gaily; And though the Goddess "Comme-il-faut" May look on her with prim expression, It's Pagan Paris where, you know, The ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... committee was waiting at the camp. It was the first lion of the expedition, and as such was the signal for great celebration. That night there were native dances and songs around the big central camp-fire and a wonderful display of pagan hilarity. ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... subtlety of logic in the Christian world, it has come to be believed that there can be no love outside the conventional process of courtship and marriage. One life, one love, is the Christian idea, and into this sluice or mold it has been endeavoring to compress the whole world. Pagan thought held no such belief. A writing of divorce for trivial causes was the theory of the elders; and in the primeval world nature apparently holds no scheme for the unity of two beyond the temporary care of the young. That the modern home is the most beautiful of schemes, when ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... "The old pagan!" muttered Susan, as Norman strode away. She did not care if Ellen Douglas did hear her. Susan could never understand why fire did not descend from heaven upon Norman Douglas when he insulted ministers the way he ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... evidence, to a hair's breadth. The witness of conscience, it is of great authority; it commands guilt and fastens it on every soul which it accuses. Conscience will thunder and lighten at the day of judgment; even the consciences of the most pagan sinners in the world will have sufficient wherewith to accuse, to condemn, and to make paleness appear in their faces and breaking in their loins, by reason of the force of its conviction. O the mire ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... there is always somewhere a tossing sea, a stiff breeze above, and a sucking tide below. Great cliffs hundreds of feet high guard it, and from the top of them the land rolls away in long ridges, brown and bare. These wild and rocky moors, full of pagan altars, stone crosses, and memorials of the Jew, the Phoenician, and the Cornu-British, are the land of our childhood's fairy-folk—the home of Blunderbore and of Jack the Giant Killer, and ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... the town of Binondo, which lies near Manila on the other side of the river, is the hospital of San Gabriel, where the Sangleys, both Christian and pagan, are treated. Although the sick who go thither are very few when compared with the so great number of that nation in these islands, since the sick generally do not exceed thirty in number—and perhaps quite naturally, for since they have no hospitals in their country, they shun and despise ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various

... or popular recollection of the Druids or the Druidical mythology existed in Wales. The Welsh bards knew of no older mystery, nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the Christian world.' And Mr. Nash complains that 'the old opinion that the Welsh poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a remote origin' should still find promulgators; what we find in them is only, he says, what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth century, and one great mistake in these investigations has been ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... the Italian peasants, who still believe cattle kneel in their stalls at midnight on the anniversary of Jesus' birth, decorate the mangers on Christmas eve with holly, among other plants, because of a survival of this old pagan notion about its subduing effect ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... you? You made him a traitor, a coward, a liar—through your intrigues, he perjured himself. You made him disloyal and ignoble—you made him false. And yet you call that love! I would rather have the love of a pagan mother than ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay

... people there are many absurd practices and opinions which they derive from their pagan ancestors: They believe that the devil, whom they call Satan, is the cause of all sickness and adversity, and for this reason, when they are sick, or in distress, they consecrate meat, money, and other things ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this fact with all that it involves. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... finest, from all points of view, is that of the Salle-a-Manger, though indeed some of the motives are but plaster reproductions of the originals. The chimney-piece, however, is left, a pure bijou, a model of grace, more like a pagan altar than a comparatively modern mantel. The oratory is in the pure style of the Empire, and the stairway, lighted up by a curiously arranged dome-lantern, gives a most startling effect ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... sentiments. The object of his intercourse with them was, to make them apprehend the mysteries of a theology, which, to the most enlightened, is an abstruse, metaphysical study; and it is not singular they should prefer their pagan superstitions, which address themselves more directly to the senses. Failing in the attempt to Christianize before civilizing them, he inferred that in the intrinsic degradation of their faculties the obstacle ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... that October evening—there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and 'This indeed,' said I to ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... was hoarse and ragged, but for that very reason it moved her. All at once the primitive woman, loving, yielding, glad and proud to yield, stirred in her, rose and dominated her hard ambition. She lifted her head a little and, still with it turned from him, looked at the pagan glory of the day. Her eyes closed with the delight of that moment. She felt her resistance breaking down, the weakening and softening of her resolutions. Was she at last to know the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan or Christian. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the other indirect; and it is sometimes difficult to decide which of these two methods have produced the greatest results. As an indirect worker, she has lightened her husband's labors as a missionary, has softened the fierce temper of the pagan tribes, and by her kind and placid ministrations has prepared their minds for the reception of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... Whereas pagan Greek and Rome had searched for beauty upon earth, it was the dreary belief of the Middle Ages that the world was a place where only misery could be the portion of mankind, who were bidden to look to ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... which is a juvenile production of the poet, has been communicated by his niece, Miss Pagan of Dumfries. The heroine of the song, Eliza Neilson, eldest daughter of the Reverend Mr Neilson of Kirkbean, still lives, and is ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... enthusiastic young monk, his imagination touched by the significance of these answers. He passed on, musing on the incident which had deeply stirred his sympathies, and considering how the light of Christianity could be shed upon the pagan lands whence ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... directed even pagan wise men wholly to interdict swearing in ordinary conversation, or about petty matters, as an irrational and immoral practice, unworthy of sober and discreet persons. "Forbear swearing about any matter," said Plato, cited by Clem. Alex. "Avoid swearing, if you can, wholly," said Epictetus. "For ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't! O! A bone! That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... the Kings, in the first ages, were all filled by the Druids, or Pagan Priests; the Brehons, or Judges, were usually Druids, as were also the Bards, the historians of their patrons. Then came the Physicians; the Chiefs who paid tribute or received annual gifts from the Sovereigns, or Princes; the royal stewards; and the military leaders ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... their pagan books were to the monkish collectors, it was upon their Bibles, their psalters, and their other religious books that these mediaeval bibliomaniacs expended their choicest art and their most loving care. St. Cuthbert's "Gospels," preserved in ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... the frozen sea? Would he of icy clouds a throne carve bright, Or would the demons of the deepest night A bar build where the shining stars sweep free? It gleams like pagan cities fired, kings flee. When Day was anciently destroyed by Night Did Allah amid chaos fix this light To guide ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz

... of this passage there is a drawbridge over what was formerly the moat, but which is now grassed and planted with shrubbery. Up over our heads we saw the great iron teeth of the portcullis. A rusty old giant it seemed up there, like Pope and Pagan in Pilgrim's Progress, finding no scope for himself in ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... liberal soul doth not abhor? Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered, and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with (indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn the blood of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... stages of Trinitarian growth. Incidentally he says that Arian doctrines are openly professed in Transylvania and in some churches of the Netherlands, and adds that 'Nazarene and Arian Churches are very numerous' in Turkish, Mahometan, and pagan dominions where liberty of conscience is allowed. He mentions celebrated scholars who have 'certainly been either Arians or Socinians, or great favourers of them,' such as Erasmus, Grotius, Petavius, ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant

... positions of all without offence, so I forbear. We were glad to turn away and retrace our steps to our carriage. Never, I believe, in any country, Christian or pagan, is there an instance of such total want of respect for the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... a rebel. Do so, and I will thank you; only defile not the memory—slay not the reputation as well as the body. If the house of Aescendune, which was planted in this land when ye Normans were but pagan Danes, is to perish, let it at least go unsullied to its grave. I ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... then, what different scenes might await us upon any of the shores roundabout. But there seemed no danger in the balmy sea; the assured vicinity of land imparting a sense of security. We had ample supplies for several days more, and thanks to the Pagan ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... theirs. How thankful we should be that it does not also enter into our religious life! How thoroughly the Chinese must be impressed with this by their recent experiences of our Latest Crusaders! I was listening the other day to a gentleman descanting "on the darkness that enveloped those Pagan barbarians," and I was thinking of another darkness or blindness which prevented the speaker, and many like him, from seeing the least gleam of light in the East. Yet it does not require much hand-shading of our intellectual eyes to see ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... Why sir what I am is plainly written on my face. Surely you do not take me for a pagan! I might be a black man from Africa, or an Englishman, but an Indian—that, no! But a minute ago you had the goodness to invite me to smoke. How, sir, can a poor man smoke who ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... and sometimes several at once, when the Spirit of the Lord was powerfully bringing home to their hearts the Gospel preached by the early missionaries, the inmates of these abodes moved from their pagan surroundings and began to make themselves Christian homes around ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe

... of Ireland, who formerly had only their idols and pagan ritual, not knowing the Master, have now become His children. The sons of the Scoti and their kings' daughters are now become sons of the Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly born lady among them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... unto us; and even the versification, in which this master excelled, is wanting in fluency and sweetness. I can only account for it from the weight of the subject. Two verses, which are fairly worth two hundred such poems, are from another pagan; he was forced to sigh for the church without ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor

... it is in vain for us to reflect on the absurdity, incongruity and frivolousness, as we apprehend it, of the pagan worship, inasmuch as we find, whatever we may think of its demerits, that the most heroic people that ever existed on earth, in the hour of their direst calamity, regarded a zealous and fervent adherence to that religion as the most ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... themselves thus command obedience to the State, even to a pagan Government, such as the Roman was at the time they wrote, it will scarcely be denied by any Christian that obedience is due to the Church, and to the ecclesiastical government, altogether apart from any question of infallibility. In fact, ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan

... how a ceremony of that kind would soothe the last hours of Tim Hurley," said the pagan Endicott, "but I am curious, if you will pardon me, to know if the holy oils would have a similar effect ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... the country he had unexpectedly come upon his fate and with characteristic impetuosity had pursued and overtaken it. Other girls may have stirred his heart, but it had remained for a wild little pagan of the woods to stir his soul. He had laid bare to her the most secret places of his being, had confessed his sins, and received absolution. From this time on the frivolities of youth lay behind him, and ambition sat upon his brow. He would cut out ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... A Pagan damsel there unwares he met, In shining steel, all save her visage fair, Her hair unbound she made a wanton net, To catch sweet breathing from the cooling air. On her at gaze his longing looks he set, Sight, wonder; wonder, love; love bred his care; O love, o wonder; love new born, new bred, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... human life in sacrifice. We shudder as we picture the priest standing over his victim, his hands wet with the blood of his fellow man. We cry out in horror as we think of the lives these peoples sacrificed. We call it an inhuman glorification of a pagan deity. We call it a ruthless waste of wealth and human life. These practices we pronounce to be the result of a popular delusion—a false sense of obligation to the spirit of war. Yet from the time the Scythian drew the blood of his victim in homage to the great war god, even ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... occasions, amidst a variety of pagan ceremonies, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... author's aim was almost exclusively ethical. It was to win men to a sober life and to the due performance of individual and social duties, that the preacher exhausted his stores of learning, and invoked alike the reproofs of the fathers of the Church, the history and legend of chroniclers, pagan and Christian, and the words of prophets and poets. As a memorial of the literature and learning of the middle ages, it must always possess a permanent value. From it we may learn, and always with interest, what was the literary taste and social ideal of the thirteenth, fourteenth, ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton

... Pagan World disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... made an accepted tribunal, and the same for all 63. If men were truly sincere, and delivered judgment by no canons but those of evident morality, then Julian would be described in the same terms by Christian and pagan, Luther by Catholic and Protestant, Washington by Whig and Tory, Napoleon by patriotic Frenchman ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... history of Ireland, as might be expected, we come upon many instances wherein the dead are solemnly remembered from that period, when still pagan, and one of the ancient manuscripts gives us an account of certain races, it calls them, which were held for "the souls of the foreigners slain in battle." This was back in the night of antiquity, and was no doubt some relic of the Christian tradition ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... comfort and human inertia has reconciled Christianity with secular, pagan governments, and so paralysed the most divine movement in human history. Go to the bottom of all those clever advocacies for unity of Church and State, and you will meet, as their primus motor, the worm of comfort ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... friend, James Kenneth Stephen, too pagan, wayward and lonely to be available for the Souls, but a man of genius. One afternoon he came to see me in Grosvenor Square and, being told by the footman that I was riding in the Row, he asked for tea and, while waiting for me wrote the following parody of Kipling and left ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... principles, by all those ways which are implied in the word "catechising." In the first ages, it was a work of long time; months, sometimes years, were devoted to the arduous task of disabusing the mind of the incipient Christian of its pagan errors, and of moulding it upon the Christian faith. The Scriptures indeed were at hand for the study of those who could avail themselves of them; but St. Irenaeus does not hesitate to speak of whole races, who had been converted to Christianity, without being ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... I 'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... implies any duties in common life beyond ceremonial ones is wholly foreign to paganism in all its forms. The establishment of the opposite idea is wholly the consequence of revelation. So we need not wonder if the pagan conception of service was here in the minds of the vowing assembly. If we look at their vow, as recorded in verses 16-18, we see nothing in it which necessarily implies a loftier idea. Jehovah is their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... to wander in Brooklyn—which no self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except under compulsing!—you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs' Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and twinkle and ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... the Creator's praises. The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible noise, uproar, and confusion, more worthy of some pagan bacchanalia than a procession of Christian people. All the country-folk from five or six leagues around Aix pour into the town on that day to do honour to God. It is the only occasion of the kind, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... never made it, I do think that its significance would have occurred to me, by a sort of instinct, in connection with this discussion. Certainly I would rather be a pagan whose religion was actual, earnest, continual—for week days, work days, and song days—than I would be a Christian who, from whatever motive, shrank from hearing or uttering the name of Christ out of a 'church.' I am no fanatic, but I like truth and earnestness in all things, and I cannot choose ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... time, Gaut exhibited evident feigns of uneasiness, and whispered something in the ear of his counsel, who thereupon rose and went into a labored argument against the admissibility of the evidence of an Indian, who was a pagan, and knew nothing about the God whose invocation constituted the sacred effect of the oath he had taken. But, on the questioning of the court, Moose-killer declared his full belief in the white Christian's God and Bible, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... tribes of Israel only. That is the great worldly difference between Jesus and his inspired predecessors. Christianity is Judaism for the multitude, but still it is Judaism, and its development was the death-blow of the Pagan idolatry.' ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... to confuse. I have no host in battle him to prove, Nor have I strength his forces to undo. Counsel me then, ye that are wise and true; Can ye ward off this present death and dule?" What word to say no pagan of them knew, Save Blancandrin, of ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous

... we have the spruit at our door and mud for the picking up. It needs only a box- mould or two, and it will be funny if I can't turn out as many good bricks in a day as three lazy Kafirs. Old Pagan, the contractor, has said he will buy them, so now it only remains to get ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... Britain. We know that horses were the favorite objects chosen for sacrifice to Poseidon by the nations of antiquity within the Historical Period; they were killed, and cast into the sea from high precipices. The religious horse-feasts of the pagan Scandinavians were a survival of this Poseidon-worship, which once prevailed along all the coasts of Europe; they continued until the conversion of the people to Christianity, and were then suppressed by the Church with ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... determined that you shall hear all about it. Far down a narrow street you listen to a long-drawn, melancholy howl—the voice as of one hired to cry in the most mournful tones for whole generations of old pagan Romans who died unconverted; poor devils who worshiped wine and women, and knew nothing better in this world. And who is their mourner? A great, brawny, tawny, steeple-crowned hat, blue-breeched, two-fisted fish-huckster; and he is trying to sell, by yelling ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... state school, high or low, is absolutely colorless as to religion. Even the morality that is taught is not the morality of the Christian religion, but of philosophical ethics that differ but little from the ethics of the pagan. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... Lady of La Salette, offering to the adoration of the people the most coarse and revolting of impostures. And in the course of the service, an image of the Virgin, from which the taste of a Greek Pagan would have recoiled, was borne round the aisles in procession, manifestly the favorite object of worship in a church nominally devoted to the worship of God. An educated man in France, even one of the best ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... Christian Britons, their Saxon conquerors, even after the conversion of the latter, were 'an accursed race, the children of robbers and murderers, possessing the fruits of their fathers' crimes.' 'With them,' says Dr. Lingard, 'the Saxon was no better than a pagan bearing the name of a Christian. They refused to return his salutation, to join in prayer with him in the church, to sit with him at the same table, to abide with him under the same roof. The remnant of his meals and the food over which he had made the sign of the ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... some degree dangerous to every other communion. Such zeal of proselytism actuates that sect, that its missionaries have penetrated into every nation of the globe; and, in one sense, there is a Popish plot perpetually carrying on against all states, Protestant, Pagan, and Mahometan. It is likewise very probable, that the conversion of the duke, and the favor of the king, had inspired the Catholic priests with new hopes of recovering in these islands their lost dominion, and gave fresh vigor ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... at last regretfully, "it's a pagan world. Men make mistakes. I think it's largely because they want so much to love that they love somebody, anybody, till the ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... use, not even in the age of Homer. It was an Amonian term, joined inseparably with another borrowed from the same people. For [Greek: aristos] was from Egypt, and Chaldea. Indeed, most of the irregular degrees of comparison are from that quarter; being derived from the Sun, the great Deity of the Pagan world, and from his titles and properties. Both [Greek: areion] and [Greek: aristos] were from [Greek: ares], the Arez of the east. From Bel, and Baaltis, came [Greek: beltion], and [Greek: beltistos: ameinon] is an inflection from Amon. From the God Aloeus came [Greek: loios, loiteros], ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... were stretched over twice the former weight of beef. Alaire had even experimented with the Brahman strain, importing some huge, hump-backed bulls that set the neighborhood agog. People proclaimed they were sacred oxen and whispered that they were intended for some outlandish pagan rite—Alaire by this time had gained the reputation of being "queer"—while experienced stockmen declared the venture a woman's folly, affirming that buffaloes had never been crossed successfully with domestic cattle. It was rumored that one of these imported animals cost more than a whole ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... answer, 'lots of people,' and especially those who worship the pagan divinities of literature. The same thing happens—but their fury is more excusable, because they have less natural intelligence—with the lovers of music. Instead of being sorry for the poor folks who have 'no ear,' and whom 'a little music in the evening' bores to extremity, they overwhelm ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... do? Don't make me harden my heart before it has had time to soften naturally. Give my poor pagan sympathies a ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... remembers all about what made you drop down in that faint. And look you here, my lamb, you've got to tell me, Jane Parsons, all about it; and what is more, if I can help you I will. You tell Jane all the whole story, honey, for it 'ud go to a pagan's heart to see you, and so it would; and you needn't be feared, for she ain't anywheres about. She said as she wanted no dinner, and she's safe in her room a-reckoning the money ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade

... in Witchcraft is, indeed, in its full development and most fearful results, modern still more than mediaeval, Christian still more than Pagan, and Protestant not less ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... Gentilism^, Islamism, Islam, Mohammedanism, Babism^, Sufiism, Neoplatonism, Turcism^, Brahminism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sabianism, Gnosticism, Hylotheism^, Mormonism; Christian Science. heretic, apostate, antichrist^; pagan, heathen; painim^, paynim^; giaour^; gentile; pantheist, polytheist; idolator. schismatic; sectary, sectarian, sectarist^; seceder, separatist, recusant, dissenter; nonconformist, nonjuror^. bigot &c (obstinacy) 606; fanatic, abdal^, iconoclast. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... all European nations, and in not very remote times from Norway to the shores of the Mediterranean the glow of St. John's fires might have been seen. The Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century forbade the custom as a heathen rite, but the Church endeavoured to win over the custom from its Pagan associations and to attach to it a Christian signification. In the island of Jersey the older inhabitants used to light fires under large iron pots full of water, in which they placed silver articles—as ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... idea was, of course, the study of Scriptures, but with just as many helps as possible. He thought that commentators, and historians, not alone Christian, but also Hebrew and Pagan, should be studied to illustrate it, and then the commentaries of the Latin fathers, so that a thoroughly rounded knowledge of it should be obtained. He thus began an "Encyclopedia Biblica," and set a host of workers at ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... "rule army" (Modern Ger. walten and Heer), but the discussion of such meanings lies outside our subject. It is, in fact, sometimes difficult to distinguish between the personal name and the nickname. Thus Pagan, whence Payn, with its diminutives Pannell, Pennell, etc., Gold, Good, German, whence Jermyn, Jarman, and many other apparent nicknames, occur as personal names in the earliest records. Their etymological origin is in any case the same as if ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... public spirit, fair play, leadership, these are the virtues which we find may be encouraged by the practice of games at school. It is not a complete list of the Christian virtues, perhaps rather we might call them Pagan virtues, but it is a fine list for all that. And the best of it is that they are as it were unconsciously learnt, acquired by practice, not by inculcation. The boy who follows virtue for its own sake would be, I fear, a sad prig, but the boy who follows a football for the sake of his house, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... with garlands by midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, 'Liberatori Patriae S.P.Q.R.' It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of compensation because he was 'no poet,' that is to say, no pagan. But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim. After the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along with the unrestrained ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... celebration of a sacrament which is the symbol of "the mystical union that there is betwixt Christ and His Church." That deep piety which puts God and God's will before all else would strike a jarring note here, where the dominant note is still the pagan note of the decking of the slave for her new master. It is perhaps not without significance of the direction of the movement of the modern mind that the protests of the emancipated woman are against ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... Jerusalem, rich in sacred history, richer in connection with sacred prophecies—the Jerusalem of Solomon, in which silver was as stones, and cedars as the sycamores of the vale—had come to be but a copy of Rome, a center of unholy practises, a seat of pagan power. A Jewish king one day put on priestly garments, and went into the Holy of Holies of the first temple to offer incense, and he came out a leper; but in the time of which we are reading, Pompey entered ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... deluded by false parallels and imperfect analogies. A voice, like that which is said to have startled the mariner of old on the coasts of Ionia, and to have announced to him the cessation of oracles, comes to us from all the remains of pagan antiquity, warning us that the spirit of that ancient civilization has departed with its forms: and while it bids us look forward to a new destiny for the human race, it teaches us that the maxims and the oracles by which that destiny must be guided, are to be sought elsewhere than in the Republic ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... pagan philosopher as ever. He swims like a little duck; rides well; stands quite severe injuries without complaint, and is really becoming a manly little fellow. Archie is devoted to the Why (sailboat). The ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt



Words linked to "Pagan" :   religious person, idoliser, corinthian, irreligious, idol worshiper, Wiccan, witch, playboy, idolizer, paynim, man-about-town, gentile, nonreligious person, sensualist, idolater



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