"Paganism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her in a new suburb, and in making, wearing, and altering the additional gowns which their joint earnings—for she still worked intermittently at her trade—allowed her to enjoy. After the first infatuation was a little cooled, Sandy discovered in her a paganism so unblushing that his own Scotch and Puritan instincts reacted in a sort of superstitious fear. It seemed impossible that God Almighty should long allow Himself to be flouted as Louise flouted Him. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature—earthquakes, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... and divine revelation little concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and moreover (in this country at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few people, even nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just the same root as Paganism, and that it shares by far the most part of its doctrines and rites with the latter. Till quite lately it was thought (in Britain) that only secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in sungods; and while it ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the Indians now in the territory. The population of the territory, though principally Indians, includes a lot of white men and negroes, amongst whom intermarriages are frequent. The society ranges from an untutored Indian, with a blanket for his dress and paganism for his religion, to men of collegiate education, who are manifesting their christian culture and training by their earnest advocacy ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... any other can be drawn," she continued; "and I know from what I have read and heard that unbelievers usually seek to give that impression. But it's not a fair one. The absurdities of paganism, monkish legends, and even the plausible errors of the Romish Church, will not endure the light of intelligent education; but the more I know the more I see the beauty and perfection of the Christian religion and the reasonableness of prayer, and so it is with far stronger and wiser heads ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... see. Greek and Roman fathers laid a cake dripping with wine, a wreath of violets, a heart of honey-comb, a brace of doves on the home altar, and immediately thereafter, set the example of violating every clause in the Decalogue. Mark you, paganism drew fine lines in morals, long anterior to the era of monotheism and of Moses, and furnished immortal types of all the virtues; yet the excess of its religious ceremonial, robbed it of vital fructifying energies. The frequency and publicity of sacerdotal ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... labours in Cyprus, Pamphylia, Lycaonia, and the surrounding regions, occupies two whole chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. The importance of their mission may be estimated from this lengthened notice. Christianity now greatly extended its base of operations, and shook paganism in some of its strongholds. In every place which they visited, the apostles observed a uniform plan of procedure. In the first instance, they made their appeal to the seed of Abraham; as they were themselves learned Israelites, they were generally permitted, on their arrival ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Papistical Church they be no idols, Master Tremayne!" interposed Blanche eagerly. "Therein lieth the difference betwixt Popery and Paganism." ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... happy end. "But, my friend," added I, "will you give me leave to start one difficulty here? I cannot tell how to object the least thing against that affectionate concern which you show for the turning of the poor people from their paganism to the Christian religion; but how does this comfort you, while these people are, in your account, out of the pale of the Catholic Church, without which you believe there is no salvation? so that you esteem these but heretics, as effectually lost as ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... ABACUS, a mystic staff of office, the peculiar form of which has given rise to such singular conjectures and commentaries, leading to suspicions that this celebrated fraternity of Christian knights were embodied under the foulest symbols of paganism. ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Berberah; eastwards it is bounded by the sea, and westwards by the Gallas around Harar. It derives itself from Dirr and Aydur, without, however, knowing aught beyond the ancestral names, and is twitted with paganism by its enemies. This tribe, said to number 100,000 shields, is divided into numerous clans [47]: these again split up into minor septs [48] which plunder, and sometimes murder, one another in time ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... persecution; its results in the past had only been to strengthen the Christians in their faith. His methods were different. Privileges were granted to the pagans which were denied to the Church; the Galileans, as Julian called the Christians, were ridiculed, and paganism was praised as the only religion worthy ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... related by Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea, who asserts that it was communicated to him by Constantine himself, who confirmed it with an oath. The story is this: Constantine, whose mind was wavering between Christianity and paganism, was on the eve of a great battle. Knowing that Maxentius, his enemy, was seeking the aid of magic and supernatural rites, and remembering also that his father, who had been well disposed to the Christians, ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... young Church, just delivered from paganism. Like lambs in the midst of wolves, they stood amongst bitter enemies, their teacher had left them alone, and their raw convictions needed to be consolidated and matured in the face of much opposition. No wonder then that over and over again, in both letters, we have references ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Paradise dawn; its sense of the dignity of man as man; the religious reverence with which it speaks of all human ties, human strength and beauty—ay, even of merely animal human appetites, as God-given and Godlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire, when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller's Gods of Greece; for on this subject he was more eloquent than on any. He had gradually, in fact, as we have seen, dropped all faith in anything but Nature; the slightest fact about a bone or a weed was more important to him than all ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... prison population. The repeal of an unjust law is seldom carried until a certain number of those who are labouring for the reform have experienced in their own persons the hardships of fine and imprisonment. Christianity itself would never have triumphed over the Paganism of ancient Rome had the early Christians not been enabled to testify from the dungeon and the arena as to the sincerity and serenity of soul with which they could confront their persecutors, and from that time down to the successful struggles of our people for ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... was very strange and even startling to Oowikapun. He had lived all his life in a land dark with superstition and paganism. The Gospel had as yet never been proclaimed there. The name of Jesus had never been heard in that wild north-land, and so as none of the blessedness of religion had entered into the hearts of the people, so none of its sweet, losing, elevating influences had begun ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Rome and Christian Paganism there is small choice—all State religions are very much alike. Caesar was Pope: and no State religion since his time has been an ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... where every Sunday they read the Church of England's prayers, while the heathen at the other end of the ship were left to their false gods and idols. And thus, with Christianity on the quarter-deck, and paganism on the forecastle, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... in his commentary on this passage of Matthew, the reference is to the Jews even at the time when it was yet lawful to keep the legal observances, in so far as he whom they converted to Judaism "from paganism, was merely misled; but when he saw the wickedness of his teachers, he returned to his vomit, and becoming a pagan deserved greater punishment for his treachery." Hence it is manifest that it is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... total absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut like a knife. Facit indignatio versum, he truly says of his own work; with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even Swift only approaches ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... in the situation of those who believed in the ancient polytheistical creed. And yet these believers nearly constituted the whole of the population of the kingdoms of antiquity. Even those who professed to have shaken off the prejudices of their education, and to rise above the absurdities of paganism, had still some of the old leaven adhering to them. One of the last acts of the life of Socrates, was to order the sacrifice of a cock to be made ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... hell. In these the guide stays the men of his party to prove the character of the places to them from the frescos and statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so indulged had not better taken the guide's word for the fact. There can be no doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered which poisons Christian life, and which, while the social conditions remain the same from age to age, will ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... and church he regarded his undertaking as equally important from the religious and from the political side. The twofold purpose of his expedition was, as he himself stated it, "to establish the Catholic faith among a numerous heathen people, submerged in the obscure darkness of paganism, and to extend the dominion of the King, our Lord, and protect this peninsula from the ambitious views of foreign nations." From the first it was his intention that the Cross and the flag of Spain should be carried side by side in the task of dominating and colonizing the new country. ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious deduction ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... and he understood, he was filled with loathing of life and mad desire to wash himself free of its stain; and it was this very hatred of natural flesh that precipitated a perilous worship of the deified flesh of the God. But mysticity saved him from plain paganism, and the art of the Gothic cathedral grew dear to him. It was nearer akin to him, and he assuaged his wounded soul in the ecstacies of incense and the great charms ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... and which has most strenuously been extolled by the zealous and pious fathers of the Roman Church, is the introduction of the Christian faith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire horror, to behold these savages tumbling among the dark mountains of paganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance of religion. It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded; they were sober, frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; but though they acted right habitually, it was all in vain, unless they ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... should be five feet high, ten feet wide, and oval at the top. After the tableaux are arranged on each side of the platform, persons under the stage can revolve the whole with very little exertion. The tableau of Christianity should be formed on the light side, and Paganism on the dark side. By placing numbers on the revolving beam, and corresponding numbers on the washers, the assistant below will be able to tell when the tableau is in the right position above. To represent Paganism, a large idol should be constructed, and seated in the centre, ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... used just such words not only for rheumatism, but for many another disease. And to this hour the fakir on the street corner uses that opening expression, "Hocus pocus." Those words simply prove how slowly the Christian religion was absorbed by ancient Anglo-Saxon paganism; for "Hocus pocus" is but the hastily mumbled syllables of the Catholic priest to his early English congregation—"Hoc est corpus," "this is the body"; and the whole expression used by the old-time doctor meant merely that in the name of the body of Christ he commanded the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the effect such writing may have had, and to forget that those who were capable of being convinced by exposition of this sort would mostly be those who were already convinced without; still, so far as Lucian had any effect on the religious position, it must have been in discrediting paganism and increasing the readiness to accept the new faith beginning to make its way. Which being so, it was ungrateful of the Christian church to turn and rend him. It did so, partly in error. Lucian had referred in the Life of Peregrine ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... seems paganism, or rather barbarism, with a moral veneer. It seems barbarism, because it brings us back to the good old days when mere might was right. Bernhardi, speaking of the right of conquest of new territory inherent in a growing people, tells us that in ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... enrolled as Roman citizens, their chief cities were colonies where the laws were administered by magistrates in the Roman fashion, and the houses, dress, and amusements were the same as those of Italy. The greater part of the towns had been converted to Christianity, though some paganism still lurked in the more remote villages ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... men of burden, the Ish Sabal, and to the craftsmen, corresponding with the first and second degrees of more modern Masonry, but little secret knowledge was confided. Like the aspirants in the lesser Mysteries of paganism, their instructions were simply to purify and prepare them for a more solemn ordeal, and for the knowledge of the sublimest truths. These were to be found only in the Master's degree, which it was intended should be in imitation of the greater Mysteries; and ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... traits of the Dutch character. When, after driving out the awful, vindictive, bloodthirsty Spaniards, the Dutch came into power, it was but natural to think of retaliation: banish the Papists, or persecute the Anabaptists, suppress their paganism, or crush their fanaticism, would have been most natural. Against any such ideas the nation as a whole set its face like a wall of adamant. Very soon the sober convictions of the people were triumphant. And after the most atrociously cruel war, in which ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Cork-tree spring is, because, as the story goes (and they say he himself said so), that was the place where he first saw her. And he has also left other directions which the clergy of the village say should not and must not be obeyed because they savour of paganism. To all which his great friend Ambrosio the student, he who, like him, also went dressed as a shepherd, replies that everything must be done without any omission according to the directions left by Chrysostom, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... had been conquered by the sovereign light of the holy gospel which entered therein, the heathen were baptized, the darkness of their paganism was banished, and they changed their own for Christian names. The islands also, losing their former name, took—with the change of religion and the baptism of their inhabitants—that of Filipinas Islands, in recognition of the great favors ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... statement made in a work by E. Bosc and L. Bonnemere in 1882, [Footnote: Hist. des Gaulois sous Vercingetorix. Paris, 1882.] reproduced by M. Louis Bousrez in 1894, [Footnote: Les monu- ments Megalithiques de la Touraine. Tours, 1894.] which, if true, would show that a lingering paganism is to be found among these people. It is to this effect: "What is unknown to most is that at the present day there exist adepts of the worship (of the Celts) as practised before the Roman invasion, with the sole exception of human ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... with him. The passage bears out what I have often said—that I never yet heard a word from one of that way of thinking, which even touched anything I hold. One of my earliest recollections is of beginning to be at strife with the false system here assailed. Such paganism I scorn as heartily in the name of Christ, as I scorn it in the name of righteousness. Rather than believe a single point involving its spirit, even with the assurance thereby of such salvation as the system offers, I would join the ranks of those who ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... they wear rings of brass wire in their ears. They wear beaver-skin blankets, and carry lances, bows and arrows, and quivers made of the skins of beasts. For the rest they are straight, well made, and generally very tall. Their religion is brute paganism. I will say it once for all, one must be the slave of these savages, listen to them day and night, in council and in private, whenever the fancy takes them, or whenever a dream, a fit of the vapors, or their perpetual craving for brandy, gets possession of them; ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Greek writers, and the most celebrated theologian of Paganism, relates several apparitions both of gods and heroes, and also of the dead. In the Odyssey,[77] he represents Ulysses going to consult the sorcerer Tiresias; and this diviner having prepared a grave or trench full of blood ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... the oldest, the most powerful, and the most occult, of the secret societies of Italy. Its mythic origin reaches the era of paganism, and it is not impossible that it may have been founded by some of the despoiled professors of the ancient faith. As time advanced, the brotherhood assumed many outward forms, according to the varying spirit of the age: sometimes they were freemasons, sometimes they were soldiers, sometimes ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... not only an asylum, but a haunt of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... truth, and to resist the revelation and inspiration of God, until it has conquered for itself the support of the majority of mankind. According to this principle, as Christianity is still in a minority as compared with paganism, we ought all to become followers of Boodh. Such a view cannot bear a moment's serious examination. Every prophet, sage, martyr, and heroic champion of truth has spent his life and won the admiration and grateful ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... unto Valencia, where he had slain or made prisoners all his people, and driven him into the sea, and made spoil of all the treasures which he had brought with him; ... King Bucar calling these things to mind, had gone himself and stirred up the whole Paganism of Barbary, even as far as Montes Claros, to cross the sea again, and avenge himself if he could; and he had assembled so great a power that no man could devise their numbers. When the Cid heard these tidings he was troubled at heart; how beit he dissembled this, ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... however, another had sought to obviate the difficulty of having four records which seem at some points to disagree, by making a combination of the gospels, to which he gave the title "Diatessaron." Tatian, the author of this work, was converted from paganism about 152 A.D., and prepared his unified gospel, probably for the use of the Syrian churches, sometime after 172. His work is one of the treasures of the early Christian literature recovered for us within the last ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... own experience she must have known how profligate was the world in which she lived. About her she saw vice shamelessly displayed or cloaked in sacerdotal robes; she was conscious of the ambition and avarice which hesitated at no crime; she beheld a religion more pagan than paganism itself, and a church service in which the sacred actors,—with whose conduct behind the scenes she was perfectly familiar,—were the priests, the cardinals, her brother Caesar, and her own father. All this Lucretia beheld, but they ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... gingerly unclosed one eye and read, "Audacious attack by Mr. Learned Bore." Sir Simon shivered and hastily closed the one eye he had opened. Then he valiantly tried both eyes and read by way of a second and happy headline, "The Lord Mayor revives Paganism in London." Sir Simon never knew how he finished that article. It was a most ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... having been instructed by this speech, were converted to the Christian faith. They received baptism together with their young freedwoman, Caelia Avitella, who was dearer to them than the light of their eyes. All their tenants renounced paganism and were ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... of more than seventy years after, religion was on the decline, and the idolatry of the Druids prevailed; they were an order of Heathen priests, who performed their rites in groves of oak trees; this was a species of Paganism of great antiquity, being that kind of idolatry to which the Jews were often revolting, of which mention is made in the lives of Ahab, Manasseh, &c. in the books of the kings. These Druids likewise possessed a considerable share of civil power, being the ordinary arbitrators in almost ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... [Hear, hear!] But you do know something about it. You know as much about it as you know of the widow-burning in India, or the cannibalism in the Fejee Islands, or any of those crimes and sorrows of paganism, that induced you to send forth your missionaries. You know it is a great wrong, and a terrible obstacle to the progress of the gospel; and that is enough for you to know to induce you to act. You have as much knowledge as ever induced a Christian community in any part ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... chord of which our Pacific coast is the bow, Hawaii will fall this side of it. Held by a great Nation with whom we were at war, it would be a most formidable and valuable base of supplies. We had sustained a peculiar relation to it. American missionaries had redeemed the people from barbarism and Paganism. Many of them, and their descendants, had remained in the Islands. The native Hawaiians were a perishing race. They had gone down from 300,000 to ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... infrequently occurs, his greatest obstacles were found, not in the hopeless paganism of the degraded tribes of the Dark Continent, but in the apathy, if not antipathy, of the representatives of Christian governments. The British governor would have penned him up within the bounds of Cape Colony, lest he should complicate the relations of the settlers with the ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... from ancient times lovers of song. Much of their early history is preserved in poetry, and no one was more honored among them than the skjald who most skillfully presented their thoughts and deeds in song. Nor was this love of poetry lost with the transition from paganism to Christianity. The splendid folk songs of the Middle Ages prove conclusively that both the love of poetry and the skill in writing it survived into the new age. One can only wonder what fine songs the stirring advent of Christianity might have produced among a people so ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... she, "how good you are to break this sad solemnity. I vow, until you showed your face, I thought the days of paganism were revived, and that lacking men, we were assembled here to celebrate the mysteries of the ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Roman Empire, the expiatory sacrifice of the Messiah, the fear of death destroyed by the blessed hopes of immortality established by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, and the triumphs of Christianity over paganism in the time of Constantine, can I think, hardly fail to acknowledge the reasonableness of the truth of revealed religion as founded upon the early history of man; and whoever acknowledges this reasonableness and this truth, must I think ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... that in time,—when he is a little older and wiser. He has been in to see me once or twice since he took up his residence here for the summer. He tries to discuss religion with me—or rather, I should say. irreligion. His own special 'cult' is the easy paganism ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... jostling throngs, I wandered on through the carnival of Berlin's Level of Free Women. Despite my longing for human companionship I found it difficult to join in this strange recrudescent paganism ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... under a degrading form, of a Frog Princess or a Pig Prince. It may be said with confidence that European "husk-myths" do not explain themselves; the peasants among whom they are current, cannot explain them; and the knowledge we have of ancient European paganism throws no light on their meaning. But in India, where countless variants of such tales exist—many of them preserved in ancient as well as in modern literature, but by far the greater part still current among the common ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... kingdoms of earth and their kings." As he read on, while the summer sun sank in a red sea behind the gaunt Hampstead firs, read of the proud, domineering soul of Manfred, visualised the burst of passion that had prompted the murder in The Last Confession, felt the thundering paganism of the Hymn to Proserpine, he was overcome with a tremendous hatred for the system that had kept literature from him as a shut book, that had offered him mature philosophy instead of colour and youth, and tried to prevent him from seeking it for himself. So this is the way, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... toward Canterbury, bearing before them a silver cross, with a picture of Christ, chanting in concert, as they went, the litany of their Church. Christianity had entered by the same, door through which paganism ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... and opinions, thus sacrificing their consciences to their ease and safety. Many, on the other hand, who had always been Heathens, professed themselves Christians at once out of compliment to their emperor, and without any real conversion of the heart. Thus there was a mixture of Christianity and Paganism in the church, which had never been known before. Constantine too did not dispense with the blasphemous titles of Eternity, Divinity, and Pontifex Maximus, as they had been given to his predecessors. After his death, he was ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... the picture, dear? Have you aught of doubt or fear? Have you any criticism Of my neo-Paganism? If not, dearie, let us fly To that passion-ripening sky, Where our souls may have their fling, And our ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... Female friendship Paganism unfavorable to friendship Character of Jewish women Great Pagan women Paula, her early life Her conversion to Christianity Her asceticism Asceticism the result of circumstances Virtues of Paula Her illustrious friends Saint Jerome and his great attainments His friendship ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... strata, the Christian age, the Middle Ages, and modern times, with their innumerable churches, monasteries, and massive solemn palaces. Christianity built on the ruins of paganism. Ancient and modern times are inextricably mixed. Up there on the Capitoline hill rides a Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in bronze. Look round, and there on the farther bank of the Tiber another horseman looks over the eternal city, the brave ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... and calamitous civil war, in which his enemies were completely overpowered, the barbarian forced a number of the vanquished to embark in their canoes and put to sea; and during the revolution that issued in the subversion of paganism in Otaheite, the rebel chiefs threatened to treat the English missionaries and their families in a similar way. In short, the atrocious practice is, agreeably to the Scotch law phrase, "use and wont," in the South Sea Islands." ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... accounted among the highest possible to humanity, and we observe in ancient accounts of the race that typically Teutonic conception of the woman as seer or prophetess which so strongly colours early Germanic literature. Women, indeed, in later times, when Christianity had nominally conquered Paganism, remained as the sole conservators of the ancient Teutonic magico-religious lore, and in the curtained recesses of dark-timbered halls whiled away the white hours of winter by the painful spelling out of runic characters and the practice of arts which they were destined ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... questioned the works of the Greek chisel with an intelligence full of love, and initiated his countrymen into poetry by a feeling for sculpture! What an enthusiasm he displayed for classical beauty! what a worship of the form! what a fervor of paganism is found in its eloquent pages when he also comments on the admirable group of the Laocoon, or the still purer masterpiece ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... its roots into the historic soil which, in the matter of creeds, is known by the name of paganism or idolatry. At first sight what do we find in the opinions of that ancient world? No trace of the divine unity. Adoration is dispersed over a thousand different beings. Not only are the heavenly bodies ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... when he was at home. When he went out to war his path was by the sea. He hunted down the pirates and destroyed their strongholds in the northern fiords, with none the less zeal because these places were also the last refuge of the old paganism and its Berserker magicians. ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... Woden, had become the divinities of the land, and the Saxons, in whom Christianity had but recently supplanted the superstitions of paganism, were fast returning to the worship of the pagan gods. Edmund and his companions were shocked at the change. On reaching home they found that the ravages of the Danes had here been particularly severe, doubtless in ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... It is best described in her own words: "Might not a poem of some extent and importance, if the execution were at all equal to the design, be produced, from contrasting the spirit and tenets of Paganism with those of Christianity? It would contain, of course, much classical allusion; and all the graceful and sportive fictions of ancient Greece and Italy, as well as the superstitions of more barbarous climes, might ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... anybody likes to fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too much in laying stress on the supernatural element in Wuthering Heights. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Bronte's "mysticism". It is because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Bronte was in love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that Charlotte was in love ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... The legends of the Romish Church, though generally more insipid and less varied than those of Paganism, deserve audience from us on this ground, if on no other, that they have once been sincerely believed by good men, and have had no ineffective agency in the foundation of the existent European mind. The reader must not therefore accuse me of trifling, when I record for him the first ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to realise that there is something in history which we did not experience; ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual disease is the sad fact that confronts every lover of his fellow-men. This paganism is more ancient and universal than any one of the religions founded on writing or teachers of name and fame. Even the applied science and the wonderful inventions imported from the West, so far from eradicating it, only serve as the iron-clad man-of-war ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... passages readily. The conservatism of the Jew prevented his changing the roll form of his scriptures. The Pagan adhered to the rolls with their associations of classic culture. The final passing out of the roll and victory of the book are contemporary with the victory of Christianity over Paganism and its adoption as the religion ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... from wicked Parents to Christ: But to fly from pious Parents to a Monkery, that is (as it too often proves) to fly from ought to stark naught. What Pity is that I pray? Although in old Time, he that was converted from Paganism to Christianity, paid yet as great a Reverence to his idolatrous Parents, as it was possible to do ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... turned a theology back again into a religion: that he revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,— of rites which had become unmeaning,—he substituted an admiration for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable worship. Such worship, I repeat, is not what we commonly imply either ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... which clings to the grave, and even to the gravestone, does not attach to the mound of earth which is wrongly called the grave. This mound is not even a Christian symbol. It is a mere survival of Paganism, being a small copy of the barrow or tumulus, of which we have specimens still standing in various parts of our islands and the Continent, to mark the sepulchres of prehistoric and possibly savage chieftains. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... him, he would redeem him from his apostacy; but, alas! his duty was in Hurdwar, he was bound there and could not move. One day (it was during the fair) he had wandered at a distance from the river, that he might not witness the delusions of Paganism, and his mind was intensely absorbed in prayer. Anon, unusual sounds broke on his ears; sounds well known, sounds reminding him of his country, of his beautiful Italy. They came from a little bower ten steps before him; and as past scenes rushed to ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... horrible relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world, but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished; but it is scotched, and must expire. According to the tendency of things, the sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will hardly light the hovel of a ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... metaphor is drawn really from the Pagan rites of Mithra, where the neophyte was actually placed under a bull at the ceremony of the TAUROBOLIUM, and was drenched, through a grating, with the blood of the slaughtered animal. Such reminiscences of the more brutal side of Paganism are not helpful to the thoughtful and sensitive modern mind. But what is always fresh and always useful and always beautiful, is the memory of the sweet Spirit who wandered on the hillsides of Galilee; who gathered the children around him; who met his ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... readers a sketch of Slavic popular poetry, we must renounce at once any attempt at chronological order. Slavic popular poetry has yet no history. Not that a considerable portion of it is not very ancient. Many mysterious sounds, even from the gray ages of paganism, reach us, like the chimes of distant bells, unconnected and half lost in the air; while, of many other songs and legends, the colouring reminds us strongly of their Asiatic home. But the wonderful tales they convey, have mostly been only ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... the fathers of the Revolution were mistaken in holding slavery wrong. It is a rightful and natural relation, as between an inferior and superior race. The black race is far better off here in America, in slavery, than they would be in Africa, in freedom and in paganism; and if there is something of hardship in their lot, it is only because there is hardship in the lot of every ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... and woe to teach even a few individuals the true principles of religious liberty. Even in Protestant lands, the masses of the people have not yet fully learned that lesson. All over Catholic Europe, and all through the realms of paganism, intolerance still sways her cruel and bloody sceptre. These miserable religious wars in France, the birth of ignorance, fanaticism, and depravity, for seventy years polluted the state with gory scaffolds and blazing stakes. Three thousand millions of dollars ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Gibbons, and others have shown that Christianity is directly descended from Paganism; it was by combining the doctrines of Egypt, Persia, and Greece with the teachings of Jesus that the Christian doctrine was built up. Celsus silenced all the Christian doctors of his time by supplying evidence of this plagiarism; ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... to my subject, he long nourished, says Marcellinus, paganism in his heart; but all his army being Christians, he durst not own it. But in the end, seeing himself strong enough to dare to discover himself, he caused the temples of the gods to be thrown open, and did his uttermost to set on foot and to encourage idolatry. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Eanfrid, of Bernicia, returned to paganism, and the whole people seem to have returned with them; since Paullinus, who was the first Archbishop of York, and who had converted them, thought proper to retire with Ethelburga, the queen dowager, into Kent. Both these Northumbrian ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... beloved child and lord you will be in heaven and on earth most high and holy, and your good deeds, fame, and sanctity will fill all (the four quarters of) Ireland and you will convert your own nation and the Decies from paganism to Christianity. On that account I bind myself to you by the tie of brotherhood and I commend myself to ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... of civilisation, but its effects. The higher religion enters only where the mind is intellectually prepared for its acceptance; elsewhere the forms may be adopted, but not the essence, as mediaeval Christianity was merely an adapted paganism. Similarly, a religion imposed by authority is accepted in its form, but not necessarily ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar- shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and there is no doubt that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities of paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... which naturally claims our attention is the religion of ancient Egypt. But I can show only the main features and characteristics of this form of paganism, avoiding the complications of their system and their perplexing names as much as possible. I wish to present what is ascertained and intelligible rather than what is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... inferiority but which if used in a descriptive and respectful sense is very useful. Christianity and Islam are organized religions. They say (or rather their several sects say) that they each not only possess the truth but that all other creeds and rites are wrong. But paganism is not organized: it rarely presents anything like a church united under one head: still more rarely does it condemn or interfere with other religions unless attacked first. Buddhism stands between the two classes. Like Christianity and Islam ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the Capitol, by the authority, and in the presence, of the magistrates, the majority of that respectable assembly, apprehensive either of the divine or of the Imperial displeasure, refused to join in an act which appeared almost equivalent to the public restoration of paganism. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... of knight-errantry and paganism, one of the old British princes set up a statue to the goddess of Victory in a point where four roads met together. In her right hand she held a spear, and her left hand rested upon a shield. The outside of this shield was of gold ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... it? Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... had lately conquered Balambuan, a small island S.E. from Jortan. The people in these parts are said to be Mahometans; yet, as pagods are still in use, they seem to retain some mixture of the old Indian superstitions, or at least some remnant of paganism is tolerated among the common people. Their chief priest at this time was an old man, said to be an hundred and twenty years of age, who had a large household of wives, who fed the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... event of the History of the world is the revolution by which the noblest portions of humanity have passed from the ancient religions, comprised under the vague name of Paganism, to a religion founded on the Divine Unity, the Trinity, and the Incarnation of the Son of God. It has taken nearly a thousand years to accomplish this conversion. The new religion had itself taken at least three hundred years in its formation. But the origin of the revolution ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of woman; and perchance He is pronouncing that this age is greater than all preceding ages in its possibilities. In His view, it may be that greater deeds may be attempted and accomplished by the Church of to-day than ever in that past age, when she grappled with and vanquished the whole force of Paganism. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"—it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy had given ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... asserted that the Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism. They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious reformation possible or, at all events, effective. Nor can it be denied that ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... is the change of religion," said Winston, "which gives its true antiquity to the past! All that we see of ancient Rome bears the impress of Paganism; every thing in the modern city, of Catholicism. It is this which puts the great gulf between the two, and makes the old Roman to have lived, as it seems to us, in a world so different from our own. Strange! that what in each age is looked upon as pre-eminently unchangeable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... were ever the natural guardians and interpreters, should have assumed that broad, massive simplicity which is its most beautiful characteristic. Amid the rugged features of such a country the refinements of Paganism would have been dwarfed into insignificance. How out of place would seem a Jove with his beard in ringlets—a trim Apollo—a sleek Bacchus—an ambrosial Venus—a slim Diana, and all their attendant groups of Oreads and Cupids—amid the ocean mists, and icebound ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Pans and Nymphs. The underlying paganism of the Bishop produces a strangely incongruous mixture on his tomb—the Savior, St. Praxed, Moses, Pan, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... man of the fifteenth century, inheriting its strange web of belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of pedantic impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination towards a self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth, was rilling the air ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... one curious letter to Reynolds, referring to Wordsworth's calling the exquisite Hymn to Pan, in "Endymion," "a pretty piece of Paganism." Keats took the words in a contemptuous sense, and wrote a letter from the feelings it excited, reminding us in its style of an essay by Emerson. We extract it as almost the best ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... young queen to the throne and long stood there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life——" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is well mirrored in his novels—for he was a man who felt at home in mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the accidents that must ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the old philosophies and religions, he is at his best as a scorner, but he has "the scorn of scorn" and some of "the love of love" which, Tennyson declares, is the poet's dower. His lament for the Greek paganism runs: ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... intercepted a tender passage between herself and a rajah. Further embroideries assert that Lola's father was the son of a Lady Gilbert, and that her mother was the daughter of a "Moorish warrior who abjured paganism." To this rigmarole he adds that she was sent to a boarding-school at Bath, kept by a Mrs. Olridge, where she had an ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Christianity supplied by Paganism, of which Krishna "burnishing the head of the serpent" is a striking example, may be easily accounted for, and their source pointed out. As a corruption of the earliest revelation, Paganism contains, as might be expected, a portion of truth blended with much error. Indeed, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... must surely be a sense of superiority in knowing oneself a century or two in front of one's fellow-creatures that counterbalances the sense of solitude. Queen Mab had no such consolation. She was an anachronism hundreds of years on the wrong side; in fact, a relic of Paganism. ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... been as old as Paganism, wherein, whilst all voluntary acts are attributed to the individual, all involuntary ones are ascribed to the Deity. Even sneezing was so considered: hence the phrase common in the lower circles in England, "Bless us," and in a higher grade in Germany, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... transaction took some moments, during which he thoroughly felt, while he put down money and pretended—it was quite hollow—to estimate change, that Chad's higher spirit, his youth, his practice, his paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence, whatever it might be, had consciously scored a success. Well, that was all right so far as it went; his sense of the thing in question covered our friend ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... with his luxuriant gayety, which procured for him a preference, even with Milton, a poet so opposite by intellectual constitution. It is but reasonable, therefore, that this function of the miraculous should bear the name of Ovidian. Pagan it was in its birth; and to paganism its titles ultimately ascend. Yet we know that in the transitional state through the centuries succeeding to Christ, during which paganism and Christianity were slowly descending and ascending, as if from two different strata of the atmosphere, the two powers interchanged whatsoever ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... will advise you to make the same use of it that the Roman Catholics say they do of the pictures and images of their saints, which is, only to remind them of those; for the adoration they disclaim. Nay, I will go further, as the transition from Popery to Paganism is short and easy, I will classically end poetically advise you to invoke, and sacrifice to them every day, and all the day. It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... new superstition will come, but it is in the very essence of things that its apostles should have no suspicion of its real nature; that they should no more recognise the common element between the new and the old than the early Christians recognised it between their faith and Paganism. If they did, they would be paralysed. Others say that the new fabric may be seen rising on every side, and that the coming religion is science. Certainly its apostles preach it without misgiving, but it is not on that account less ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... material and external paganism, makes its way to the heart of the ancient society, kills it, and deposits, in that corpse of a decrepit civilization, the germ of modern civilization. This religion as complete, because it is true; between its dogma and its cult, it embraces a deep-rooted ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... have made it something clever, but it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing all the other deities of Paganism, the Muse should have been retained by common consent; for, in sober reality, writing good verses seems to depend upon something separate from the volition of the author. I sometimes think my fingers set up for themselves, independent ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... of enemies who have quarrelled over a shadow which suddenly vanishes away. They had lost their love for each other, they had lost Catherine. But her soul, though it was given to Mark Sirrett, had not lost their impress. Both the Puritanism of her mother and the paganism of her father were destined to play their parts in the guidance of her strange ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... mere existence can hardly be called life. Its basic thought has much in common with that of Frank Wedekind's "Earth Spirit," but Schnitzler spiritualizes what the German playwright has vulgarized. There is a lot of modern heresy in that thought—a lot of revived and refined paganism that stands in sharp opposition to the spirit of Christianity as it has been interpreted hitherto. It might be summarized as a twentieth century version of Achilles' declaration that he would rather be a live dog than the ruler of all the shades ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... which Hilda, for three years past, had been wandering without a protector or a guide. She had trodden lightly over the crumble of old crimes; she had taken her way amid the grime and corruption which Paganism had left there, and a perverted Christianity had made more noisome; walking saint-like through it all, with white, innocent feet; until, in some dark pitfall that lay right across her path, she had vanished out of sight. It was terrible to imagine what hideous ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... much as my sister, but what she liked best about me was my voice. She always declared that my voice was modulated for prayers, and my delight in the convent appeared to her quite natural. She loved me with a gentle pious affection, and Madame Guerard loved me with bursts of paganism. These two women, whose memory is still dear to me, shared me between them, and made the best of my good qualities and my faults. I certainly owe to both of them this study of myself and the vision ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... district-visitors, and tract-distributors, to women in the mass. Her influence is a quiet protest against the injustice of the present religions of the world in excluding woman from those ministerial functions with which Paganism invested her. It is an odd transition from the quiet parson's wife to the priestess of Delphi; but while the parson's wife exists there is at any rate a persistence in the claim of woman's right to resume her ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... he often attacked with real fury. I eventually succeeded in persuading him that my studies and inclinations had always led me to German antiquity, and to the discovery of ideals in the early Teutonic myths. When we came to paganism, and I expressed my enthusiasm for the genuine heathen legends, he became quite a different being, and a deep and growing interest now began to unite us in such a way that it quite isolated us from the rest of the company. It was, however, impossible ever to settle anything without a heated ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age. The old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose from the dead, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... has now reached its Byzantine period of decadence. During the Middle Ages Catholicism suited the Latin races very well on the whole. Their ancestral paganism was allowed to remain substantially unchanged—the nomina, but not the numina were altered; their awe and reverence for the caput orbis, ingrained in the populations of Europe by the history of a thousand years, made submission to Rome ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... God'—a man-child, who was to contend with the dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and rule all nations with a rod of iron. This prophecy was at that time understood universally by the sincere Christians to refer to the birth of Constantine, who was to overwhelm the paganism of the city on the seven hills, and it is still so explained; but it is evident that the heathens must have looked on it in a different light, and have regarded it as a foretelling of the birth of that Great One who should master ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... understand Latin peruse the extracts I give from Bishop Kenrick, Debreyne, Burchard, Dens or Liguori, and the most incredulous will learn for themselves that the world, even in the darkest ages of old paganism, has never seen anything so infamous ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... pretends to fight behind Luther's shield the deftest thrusts are not the reformer's, but the essayist's own. Fundamentally, I fancy, this is an outbreak of that artistic paganism which is so prevalent among the so-called "advanced" Hebrews. The idea that obedience to law is degrading; that conformity to traditional morals is soul-crippling and unworthy of a free spirit; that only by giving sway to passion will the individual attain that ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ecclesiastical character of early Christian art, is another grand feature which at once destroys all analogy between this art and the creations of pagan antiquity. In Hellenic paganism, we behold the triumph of humanity. The human form in its most ideal beauty is the type of all things divine. Christianity starts at once with the peremptory condition of a renunciation of individual beauty and strength. Christianity counted sensual beauty as nothing: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Christianity, Paganism made its last stand in the temples of Asklepios. The miraculous healing of the saints superseded the cures of the heathen god, and it was wise to adopt the useful ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... of the Swedes and Danes, and establish the Christian religion, together with his own lawful sovereignty. Success crowned his efforts, and he was enabled to release his people not only from foreign domination but also from the thralls of paganism, many of them embracing Christianity. His enemies, however, proved too strong for him, and he was again exiled and took refuge in Russia. Returning soon after, he raised an army to recover his kingdom, but was slain by his infidel and rebellious subjects ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... "compared with what I had lost. And as it is the privilege of the Christian to blame either the Almighty or the devil for whatever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless challenging of the Inevitable—termed Fate and Destiny by classical Paganism,—so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... syllabus. By this you will be sensible how much interest I take in keeping myself clear of religious disputes before the public; and especially of seeing my syllabus disembowelled by the Aruspices of the modern Paganism. Yet I enclose it to you with entire confidence, free to be perused by yourself and Mrs. Adams, but by no one else; and to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... day, its superstition and its scepticism, and the sophistry that strove to make the two as one; its monks and its bravoes; its processions and its pantomimes; its cult of the Passion and its cult of Paganism; the opulence of its past and the impotence of its present; will be found depicted by sympathetic genius in the ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... for its subject the story of that St. Catherine of Alexandria whom the Emperor Maximinus caused to be beheaded after she had converted the fifty orators entrusted with the care of bringing her back to paganism by dint of their eloquence. The fifty orators received baptism, and were burnt alive.[775] The representation was managed by a Mancel of good family called Geoffrey, whom Richard, abbot of St. Albans, had ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... in history than that of the facility and enthusiasm with which the Anglo-Saxons, a people conservative then as now to the degree of extreme obstinacy, accepted Christianity and the new learning which followed in the train of the new religion. After a few lapses into paganism in some localities, we find these people, who lately had swept Christian Britain with fire and sword, themselves became most zealous followers of Christ. Under the influence of the Roman missionaries who, under St. Augustine, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one Fetich for another. The delighted negroes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the early struggle of Paganism against Christianity,(30) the work of Lardner, Collection of Ancient Jewish and Heathen Testimonies to the Truth of the Christian Religion (1764-7) (Works, vols. vii.-ix.), is well known for carefulness of treatment ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... bishops and abbots began to consider learning as pernicious to true piety, and confounded illiberal ignorance with Christian simplicity," says Warton. The study of Pagan authors was declared to inculcate Paganism; the same sort of reasoning led others to say that the reading of the Scriptures would infallibly change the readers to Jews; it is amusing to look back on these vain efforts to stop the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the lack of this subordination and relationship, we know that many kingdoms which were converted to the faith returned to paganism. A good example of this is furnished in Eastern Yndia, where the apostle St. Thomas converted innumerable souls in the kingdom of Bisnaga, Cuylan, Cochin, and Caratuete. But after the death of St. Thomas, as there was no communication either with Palestina or Roma, in three or four ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... right in not accepting from Europe what is known as the "revival of learning;" at least, as carried almost to the excess of modern paganism by its first promoters. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... gold for a title of nobility, was worthy of that emperor: "I can enrich thee," he said, "but only thy own virtue can enoble thee" All true grandeur, excellence, and dignity, are the offspring of virtue. Even the most renowned oracles of paganism proclaim this, and the very persecutors of holiness are often constrained to pay homage to their victim. No wonder, then, that whenever we are privileged to find one of those rare mortals, whom virtue has unmistakably marked as her own, we lovingly attach an exceptional importance ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... habit; and when habit fails them, they are like unskilful sailors who have lost the landmarks of their course, and have no compass and no celestial charts by which to steer. In the years which preceded the French Revolution, Cagliostro was the companion of princes—at the dissolution of paganism the practicers of curious arts, the watches and the necromancers, were the sole objects of reverence in the Roman world;—and so, before the Reformation, archbishops and cardinals saw an inspired prophetess in a Kentish servant girl; Oxford heads of colleges sought ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... were his; all western Europe indeed, from the borders of Slavonia to the Atlantic, with the exception of Spain, was his. He was the bulwark of civilization against the barbarism of the north and east, the right hand of the church in its conflict with paganism, the greatest and noblest warrior the world had seen since the days of the great Caesar, and it seemed fitting that he should be given the honor which was his due, and that in him and his kingdom the great empire of Rome ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... bloodthirsty savages consecrated by their leader to the meek service of Christ. An enthusiast may deceive himself, and I did not question his sincerity. I knew his heart, black with all the lusts of paganism. I knew that his purpose was to deluge the land with blood. But I knew also that in his eyes his mission was divine, and that he felt behind him all ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... (1295), after an absence of a quarter of a century, the forerunner of a new series of travellers was entering southern China by way of the Indian seas. This was John of Monte Corvino, another Franciscan who, already some fifty years of age, was plunging single-handed into that great ocean of paganism to preach the gospel according to his lights. After years of uphill and solitary toil converts began to multiply; coadjutors joined him. The Papal See became cognizant of the harvest that was being reaped in the far East. It made Friar John archbishop in Cambaluc (or Peking), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... and effect, but always against the Greeks from mere partiality to Hector. It would perhaps be too much to say, that in this partiality to Hector, we detect the spirit of the Dorian worship, the only Paganism of antiquity that tended to perfect the individual—Apollo being the expression of the moral harmony of the universe, and the great spirit of the Dorian culture being to make a perfect man, an incarnation of the {kosmos}. This Homer ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... universe. It was neither the Olympus of the common people, nor the Semitic Jehovah, but rather the conscious and inevitable order of nature. Although, either as an Olympus or as a dogma, the deity was confounded with men or constrained them to follow a more rational rule of life, yet paganism clearly distinguished the gods from men in their concrete personality, and the action of humanity was therefore distinct from ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... did this squadron guide, That in his youth from Christ's true faith and light To the blind lore of Paganism did slide, That Clement late, now Emireno, hight; Yet to his king he faithful was, and tried True in all causes, his in wrong and right: A cunning leader and a soldier bold, For strength and courage, young; ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... Remains of paganism are to be found in some of the sayings. A curse still existing says, "May Perun (i. e., the lightning) strike thee." The god Perun, the Thunderer, resembles Thor, and like him carries a hammer. He has been transformed into Elijah, the prophet Ilya, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... modifying power; not so this cave of Gibraltar, for, judging from its appearance, there is not the slightest reason for supposing that it ever served for aught else than a den for foul night birds, reptiles, and beasts of prey. It has been stated by some to have been used in the days of paganism as a temple to the god Hercules, who, according to the ancient tradition, raised the singular mass of crags now called Gibraltar, and the mountain which confronts it on the African shores, as columns which should ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... what a miserable plight have such people put themselves, that have cast off coming to God by Christ, as he is the propitiation for their sins, and that seek to come another way? Such are lapsed again to Gentilism, to Paganism, to Heathenism; nor will it help at all to say they rely on the mercy and goodness of God, for there is no such thing as spiritual and eternal mercy can come from God to him, that comes not to him by Christ. The Turks, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... come, and promised to put their lives on a higher level. He stands over against us with the same challenge. He points to the blackened fields of battle, to the economic injustice and exploitation of industry, to the paganism and sexualism of our life. Is this old order of things to go on forever? Will our children, and their children, still be ground through the hopper? Or have we faith to adventure our life in a new ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... relics takes the place of the old fetish-worship; the virtues of the ephod pale before those of holy coats and handkerchiefs; shrines and calvaries make up for the loss of the ark and of the high places; and even the lustral fluid of paganism is replaced by holy water at the porches of the temples. A touching ceremony—the common meal originally eaten in pious memory of a loved teacher—becomes metamorphosed into a flesh-and-blood sacrifice, supposed to possess exactly that redeeming ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... bewildered us with his fancies, as uncritical as Edward Davies's; with his neo- Druidism, his Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the mysteries; and above all, his ape of the sanctuary, 'signifying the mercurial principle, that strange and unexplained disgrace of paganism,' Mr. Nash comes to our assistance, and is most refreshingly rational. To confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only. Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,—to whom, he says, 'great sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... cattle having been dug up in St. Paul's Churchyard, the monks, ever eager to discover traces of that Paganism with which they amalgamated Christianity, conjectured that a temple of Diana once stood on the site of St. Paul's. A stone altar, with a rude figure of the amazon goddess sculptured upon it, was indeed discovered in making the foundations for Goldsmiths' Hall, Cheapside; ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury |
