"Profanation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have heard in the golden age, floating through the vales of Thessaly, or in the noontide glades of Paphos. The words which had rushed to the lip of Apaecides, in answer to the sophistries of the Egyptian, died tremblingly away. He felt it as a profanation to break upon that enchanted strain—the susceptibility of his excited nature, the Greek softness and ardour of his secret soul, were swayed and captured by surprise. He sank on the seat with parted lips and thirsting ear; while in a chorus of voices, bland and melting as those ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Old Rome thither, but consecrated them as far as possible, and he surrounded himself with Bishops and clergy. His mother Helena made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to visit the spots where our blessed Lord lived and died, and to clear them from profanation. The churches she built over the Holy Sepulchre and the Cave of the nativity at Bethlehem have been kept up ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Now passing out of use as too refined For this rude age, too smooth for our rough tongues, Too rich and delicate for our coarse thoughts. Why should such men make fables so absurd Unless within their rough outside is stored Some precious truth from profanation hid? Revere your own, revile no other faith, Lest with the casket you reject the gems, Or with rough hulls reject the living seed. Doubtless in nature changes have been wrought That speak of ages in the distant past, Whose contemplation fills the mind with ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... edification into a scandal. Therefore I will not speak, sir, of that wherewith I have been fed on the steps of sanctuaries. But, without violating the chaste modesty of my soul, and without exposing to profanation the sacred mysteries, I'll show you God overawing human reason, I'll show you it by the philosophy of pagans, and by the tittle-tattle of ungodly persons. Yes, sir, I'll make you avow that you recognise Him, against your own free will. Much as you want to ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the Pope's galleys and had them brought to Genoa. Now, when the Genoese saw this strange capture convoyed into Genoa—so the tale goes—they were afraid, and crowded round the old Admiral, demanding wherefore he made war on the Church, and some shouted sacrilege and others profanation, while others again besought him with tears what it meant. And he answered, so that all might hear, that it meant that his galleys were stronger ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... habits of mind. The girls had begun to talk of 'sweethearts' and husbands before they were well out of the nursery. In earlier years Emily had only laughed at what she called such foolishness; she could not laugh now. Such ways of thinking and speaking were a profanation of all she held holiest; words which she whispered in trembling to her heart were vulgarised and defiled by use upon these tinkling tongues; it was ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... I feel as if either would be a profanation. Let us walk together down to the Embankment, and sit on one of the benches there, and watch the river flowing in the sunshine, and talk and think of all that we ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... be learned from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons of AEsculapius; they were soldiers as well ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... intelligent mind to study their features and character, in adapting them to his own uses, and, in so doing, to even embellish—if such a thing be possible—such exquisite objects with his own most ingenious handiwork. Indeed, it is a profanation to do otherwise; and when so to improve them requires no extraordinary application of skill, or any extravagant outlay in expense, not to plan and to build in conformity with good taste, is an absolute barbarism, inexcusable in a land like ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... paced the walk a moment, then said, "Well, I don't know. A woman like Grace St. John shakes my faith in our old belief. It seems profanation to assert that she ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... followed, therefore, that he himself must have been labouring under an illusion as to the distance. He almost gave way to an impulse to thrust his bayonet through the corpse; but a dead body, seen under the shadows of night, inspires a certain air of imposing solemnity, which repels profanation; and this, acting upon the spirit of the sentinel, hindered him from ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... particular acceptance of Christ in the new covenant being the only fountain of acceptable entering into national covenants. Hence it concerns all that would be right Covenanters, to search and see how it may be betwixt God and them, because 'tis but a profanation of the covenant to have the hand and tongue at it, and the heart from it: a well informed head without a reformed heart is not sufficient: a good opinion and liking of the covenant without a heart and affection to the covenant avails nothing in ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... was certainly a pupil of Fabritius, and thus "grandson" of Rembrandt. To class him with painters of genre seems almost a profanation of the exquisite sense of beauty with which, almost alone among the Dutch painters, he seems to have been endowed. It is like classing Walter Pater with art critics. But as Vermeer had to express himself in some form, it is perhaps fortunate that the school had developed this kind of poetic portraiture, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... country, and who resented every personal affront as a national indignity. When the tyrant Caligula was suspected of an intention to invest a very extraordinary candidate with the consular robes, the sacrilegious profanation would have scarcely excited less astonishment, if, instead of a horse, the noblest chieftain of Germany or Britain had been the object of his choice. The revolution of three centuries had produced so remarkable a change in the prejudices of the people, that, with the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... her brother and sister Nurse did. They all absented themselves from the examinations in the church, and, when the interruptions of the services became too flagrant, from Sabbath worship. They declared that they took that course, because they disapproved of the permission given to the profanation of the place and the service. At last Mrs. Cloyse, or Goody Cloyse, as she was called in the records of the day, was arrested. Mary Easty and Elizabeth Proctor were also arrested. Mary Easty, sister of Mrs. Nurse, was tried and condemned. On her condemnation and sentence, she made an ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... of trust rose in my bosom. I speak it not profanely—[when a writer says this, be sure of it that, as in the present case, he goes deep as he can in profanation]—when I say that the idea of the yet unknown Saviour, a child among the Doctors of the Temple, occurred ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Dane he saw and judged the Jewish character with a liberality and insight of which no autochthon would have been capable. For all that his tales aroused anything but friendly feelings among his own people. They felt it to be a profanation thus to expose the secluded domestic and religious life of the children of Israel. It is to this sentiment that Dr. Brandes has given utterance in his protest against "perpetually serving up one's grandmother ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... enter it without a feeling of reverence for the presiding divinity of the place. Loud talking, laughing, pushing before others who are examining a picture or statue, moving seats noisily, or any rude or discourteous conduct, seems like profanation in such a place. Avoid them by all means, we entreat you; and though you wear your hat everywhere ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... refuge at the altar; and there even a maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries." ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... conspiracy of so many blind and unreasoning passions against the principles proclaimed and professed throughout the world by all great statesmen and politicians. I protest, in the name of common decency and European law, against this profanation of all that is most august, against the brutal passions which have inspired acts of inconceivable cowardice. And if I must speak out, I protest, in the name of good faith, against this restless and ill-disguised ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... except Mr. Castleford could have prevailed over the fear of profanation in the mind of my father, who was, in his old- fashioned way, one of the most reverent of men, and could not bear to think of holy things being approached by one under a stigma, nor of exposing his son to add to his guilt by taking and breaking further pledges. ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "I enjoy seeing Memling with Signor Carlino, playing classical music with him, discussing a Kempis with him, although this affection he has recently developed for a Kempis seems a profanation, when you consider that he believes in nothing. Je suis catholique autant qu'on peut l'etre lorsqu'on ne l'est pas, but when I hear an unbeliever like your brother read a Kempis so feelingly, I very nearly lose ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... peak and mast-head—in the cheerful voices of the sailors, heard afar off in the stillness—in the measured plash of the sea itself, and the fearless daring of the sea-gulls, as they soared slowly above our heads—there seemed something so suggestive of peace and tranquillity, it struck us as profanation to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... this able essay are these; first that Church and State should be independent of each other:—he speaks of the duty of protesting "against the profanation of Christ's kingdom, by that double usurpation, the interference of the Church in temporals, of the State in spirituals," p. 191; and, secondly, that the Church may justly and by right retain its property, though separated from the State. "The clergy," he says ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... in such agitation that a reporter named Hallard, who shadowed him, feeling in his journalistic bones that a big story would break about him soon, noted his condition and called on Doctor Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the chief confidant of the mistress, and long the chief minister and promoter of the king's debaucheries, who insulted the cardinal with the grossest abuse for his breach of promise.[8] It may be doubted whether such a compromise with profligacy, and such a profanation of the most solemn rites of the Church by its ministers, were not the greatest scandal of all; but it was in too complete harmony with their conduct throughout the whole of the reign. And, as it was impossible but that religion itself ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Greek, had formally expressed his abomination of Le Vice (Rom. i. 26; i. Cor. vi. 8); and we may agree with Grotius (de Verit. ii. c. 13) that early Christianity did much to suppress it. At last the Emperor Theodosius punished it with fire as a profanation, because sacro-sanctum esse ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... her object was to get him ready, and not rather to prolong the divine moments of his creation. She would have liked to have kept him with her in perpetual manuscript, for in this state he still seemed a part of herself. Publicity of any sort was a profanation. When published he would be made to stand in shop windows coarsely labelled, offering himself for sale at four-and-six; he would go into the houses of people who couldn't possibly appreciate him, and would suffer unspeakable ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... which occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied three hours; thus he shortened the time between ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... is one of the most splendid pieces of writing in our language. But I will have no profanation, Arthur;—to your pen again, and write. We'll suppose our hero to have retired from the crowded festivities of a ball-room at some lordly mansion in the country, and to have wandered into a churchyard, damp and dreary with a thick London fog. In the light dress of fashion, he throws himself ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... the effort to serve and comfort that loved sufferer, who, languishing on a hospital cot, had died among strangers; had been shrouded by hirelings. That any other hand than hers had touched her sacred dead, seemed a profanation; and at the thought of the last rites rendered, the loyal child shivered as though some polluting grasp had been laid upon herself. Out of the envelope rolled a broad hoop of reddish gold, her mother's wedding ring; and in zigzag lines ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... is profanation, in the view of the arts, to liken the miserable handy-work of the dealers in wax to the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to that part of Yorkshire, Arthur, not long since. A very pleasant trip—apart from the painful associations connected with the ruin and profanation of a sacred place. There is no doubt about the revenues. I know the value of that productive part of the estate which stretches southward, away from the barren region round the house. Let us return for a moment to Romayne, ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... the oath is justified; but the reader will have remarked that the name of Allah is often taken in vain. Moslems, however, so far from holding this a profanation deem it an acknowledgment of the Omnipotence and Omnipresence. The Jews from whom the Christians have borrowed had an interest in concealing the name of their tribal divinity; and therefore made ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... not refuse to exercise his mind for fear it will lead to insanity; but he takes care to exercise it healthily. So he should not repudiate the friendship of a woman, because it may lead to harm; he should cherish the friendship, and beware of the harm. It is a profanation to judge of the natural effect of intimacy with the innocent or the wise and virtuous from the effects of intimacy with the depraved and guileful. Poor, sinful Tannhauser, long enslaved in the Venusberg, yearned to be free from the degrading bonds of sensuality. Utterly vain were ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... and interlacing overhead, formed an arabesqued roof, through the openings of which the afternoon sunshine sifted, as if through stained glass. With the slender stems of the trees rising on each side in the semi-twilight, the grove was like the transept of a cathedral. It seemed a profanation to speak in such a place. Lynde could have wandered on forever in contented silence, with that tall, pliant figure in its severely cut drapery moving before him. As he watched the pure outline defining itself against ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of all has clothes and put on others to be inspected by witnesses. Fra Bonvicini made no objection, though the suspicion was humiliating; he changed shirt, dress, and cowl. Then, when the Franciscans observed that Savanarola was placing the tabernacle in his hands, they protested that it was profanation to expose the sacred host to the risk of burning, that this was not in the bond, and if Bonvicini would not give up this supernatural aid, they far their part would give up the trial altogether. Savonarola replied that it was not astonishing that the champion of religion ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... King William came from the South unawares on them with a large army, and put them to flight, and slew on the spot those who could not escape; which were many hundred men; and plundered the town. St. Peter's minster he made a profanation, and all other places also he despoiled and trampled upon; and the etheling went back again to Scotland. After this came Harold's sons from Ireland, about midsummer, with sixty-four ships into the mouth of the Taft, where they ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... Continent arrived; and as a detail of the circumstances which immediately followed has been found in Mr. Sheridan's own hand-writing,—drawn up hastily, it appears, at the Parade Coffee-house, Bath, the evening before his second duel with Mr. Mathews,—it would be little better than profanation to communicate them in any ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... of soft colors, of cool aloofness, and as Bat Scanlon breathed the air of it, with its delicate suggestion of scent, he had a feeling that he was venturing too far; he felt that his act was almost profanation. Through an open door at one end he caught a glimpse of a white bed; but it was only a glimpse, for after that he kept his head turned resolutely in ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... against translations—I have ever been against them, and I shall ever be against them. They are immoral in themselves, and render the same injury to literature that persons of loose morals do to society. In general, they are nothing short of a sacrilegious profanation of the dead, and I would almost as soon see the ghost of a departed friend as the translation of a defunct author, for they bear the same relation. The regular translator, in fact, is nothing less than a literary ghoul, who ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of T. C. against the Profanation of the Sabbath by Barbers, Shoe-cleaners, &c. had better be offer'd ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... great language, had been supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven armor, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short, one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of Arles, who use it to pass, by no means, in great numbers, from one part of the town to the other; treading the old marble floor, and brushing, if need be, the empty benches. This ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the seventh day sabbath is not of the law of nature, and so not moral; because though we read that the law of nature, and that before Moses, was charged upon the world, yet I find not till then, that the profanation of a seventh day sabbath was charged upon the world: and indeed to me this very thing makes a great scruple ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... speak patiently of such profanation and cruelty? Papist butchers and Scottish thieves, for the child of your hearth! Were it not better that I stole her safely away and wedded her in secret, so that at least she might have an ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Hilda herself. He thought more than once of putting the question to Rex directly, to be decided by his mysterious art. It would have been a relief to him if the decision had chanced to be contrary to his own vague forebodings, but on the other hand, it seemed like a profanation of his love to explain the situation to his friend. He never spoke of Hilda, and Rex did not know ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... unheard-of form; as a creature no longer of ecstasy only, but of voluptuousness; as Dea, with her head resting on the pillow. He was ashamed of this visionary desecration. It was like an attempt at profanation. He resisted its assault. He turned from it, but it returned again. He felt as if he were committing a criminal assault. To him Dea was encompassed by a cloud. Cleaving that cloud, he shuddered, as though he were raising her chemise. It was in April. The spine has ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... is the negative one that, in two considerable residences there, I never heard of a "Charlesina." I suppose "Caroline" and "Charlotte" sufficed; or perhaps, while Whigs disliked the name (at least before that curious purifier of it, Fox), Tories shrank from profanation thereof. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the snow my creaking feet Disturbed the slumbering village street Like profanation, by your leave, At ten o'clock ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... class. As the dusty and travel-worn party trod the soft carpets and brushed aside their silken hangings in their slow progress with their helpless burden to the lace-canopied and snowy couch of the young gambler, it seemed almost a profanation of some feminine seclusion. Gideon, to whom such luxury was unknown, was profoundly troubled. The voluptuous ease and sensuousness, the refinements of a life of irresponsible indulgence, affected him with a physical terror to which in his late moment of ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... 'all her sins blotted out' in the twinkling of an eye, and while reeking with suds is received in the family of the Redeemer's kingdom. Surely this is a most abominable profanation of all ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... monuments, and tinting the varied hues of time-worn banners. The mellow notes of a deep organ filled the air, and seemed to attune the sense to all the awe and reverence of the place, where the very footfall, magnified by its many echoes, seemed half a profanation. I stood before an altar, beside me a young and lovely girl, whose bright brown tresses waved in loose masses upon a neck of snowy whiteness; her hand, cold and pale, rested within my own; we knelt together, not in prayer, but a feeling of deep reverence stole over my heart, as she repeated ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... desire to prove, actually and by deeds, that this presumptuous claim was unfounded, and, by the destruction of the city, to take from it its fancied holiness, and the glory of holiness. Destruction and profanation are, in their view, inseparably connected. The contrast to the verse under review is formed by vii. 10: "And mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall come upon her who said. Where is the Lord thy ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... will be the destruction of those world-famous curiosities, the white and pink terraces, in the vicinity of Lake Rotomahana and the region of the famous geysers. The natives have a superstition that the eruption of the extinct Tarawera was caused by the profanation of foreign footsteps. It was to them a sacred place, and its crater a repository for their dead. The first earthquake occurred in this region. One side of the mountain fell in, and then the eruption began. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the clergyman, "there is no choice left to me. It would be profanation to take persons in such a mood to make vows, and kneel to receive God's grace, which they evidently make light of. Whoever will not come and apologise ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... war. Nor did they draw the awful sword until the Thirteen Colonies, in Congress assembled, (1774,) solemnly pledged each other to stand as one people in defence of the old local government. This was in the majesty of revolution. It is profanation to compare with this patience and glory the insurrection begun by South Carolina. She—the first time such an organization ever did it—assumed to be a nation; and then madly led off in a suicidal war on the National ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... a meritorious thing to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, much more would it be a pious act to rescue the sacred spot from the profanation of infidels. This was the conviction that changed the pilgrim into a warrior,—this the sentiment that for two centuries and more stirred the Christian world to its profoundest depths, and cast the population of Europe in wave ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... It's a kind of profanation—your sanctity. I don't know. It makes me deliriously happy ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... ever been in love, (we'll talk of that after a while,) you will easily understand what tortures I endured, in thus hearing him speak. That HE should love Eunice! It was a profanation to her, an outrage to me. Yet the assurance with which he spoke! COULD she love this conceited, ridiculous, repulsive fellow, after all? I almost gasped for breath, as I clinched the prickly boughs of the cedars in my hands, and set my teeth, waiting ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... It seemed like profanation to see her exquisite work tortured and murdered. She snatched the cambric from Alison, and set to work to make another perfect stitch herself. At that moment there came the sudden and terrible pain—the shooting agony up the arm, followed by the partial paralysis of thumb ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... madly. Then, indeed, did the spirit of autumn seem to be outraged. The racket came to be an insult. Always the ear expected its discontinuance, until finally the persistence ground on the nerves like the barking of a dog at night. At last it was an indecency, an orgy of unholy revel, a profanation, a provocative to anger of the inscrutable woods god. Then stillness again with the abruptness ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... to do. We don't either of us know what to do. He says he'll go mad with me on the stage, wearing myself out, the object of the jealousy of other women and of love-making from the men. He—says it's a profanation. I tried to tell him it couldn't be a profanation to serve art; but, Kate, he didn't seem to know what I meant. He has such different standards. He wanted to know what I was going to do when I was old. He said I'd have no real home, and no haven of love; and that I'd better be the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... case as we all are in the case of Juliet. She was of no age. She was the ideal woman capable of comprehensions and intentions as far above anything possible to the genus boy as heaven was above earth. It would have been a profanation, a sacrilege too dreadful to be thought of, to compare that ethereal creature with the other things of her age with which he was so familiar. Of her age! Her age was the age of romance, of love, of poetry, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... waltz. These men go unwhipped of an epithet. They are even enticed and flattered by the mothers of the girls. But, for all that, they do not bear without abuse the name of gentleman, and Sidney and Bayard and Hallam would scorn their profanation and betrayal ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... that these six pagan authors, here mentioned to have described the famous profanation of the Jewish temple by Antiochus Epiphanes, should be all lost; I mean so far of their writings as contained that description; though it is plain Josephus perused them all as extant ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... for the purpose of whipping Dash." Whipping Dash!!! Well have I said that Dick was as saucy as a lady's page or a king's jester. Talk of whipping Dash! Why, the young gentleman knew perfectly well that I had rather be whipt myself twenty times over. The very sound seemed a profanation. Whip my Dash! Of course I read master Dick a lecture for this irreverent mention of my pet, who, poor fellow, hearing his name called in question, came up in all innocence to fondle me; to which grave remonstrance the hopeful youth replied by another whistle, half of penitence, ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... the only foundation of happiness in a married state, as it can only produce that high and tender friendship which should always be the cement of this union; and, in my opinion, all those marriages which are contracted from other motives are greatly criminal; they are a profanation of a most holy ceremony, and generally end in disquiet and misery: for surely we may call it a profanation to convert this most sacred institution into a wicked sacrifice to lust or avarice: and what better can be said of those ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... exclaimed, looking down at me as if I were something so exquisite and so precious, that the very thought was profanation. "Work! no, Pauline, you ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... to test his strength in the contest for a prize so well worth the winning. He acknowledged no right that such a man as Hampton could justly hold over so innocent and trustful a heart. The girl was morally so far above him as to make his very touch a profanation, and at the unbidden thought of it, the soldier vowed to oppose such an unholy consummation. Nor did he, even then, utterly despair of winning, for he recalled afresh the intimacy of their few past meetings, his face brightening in memory of this and that brief word or shy glance. There is ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... to him. That Caspar Brooke—his friend, his mentor, almost his hero—should not have been able to live with his wife was bad enough! That his daughter should not admire him seemed to Maurice a sort of profanation! Heavens, what did the girl mean? The mother might have been an aristocratic fool; but the girl?—she looked intelligent enough! There must be a misapprehension somewhere; and it occurred to Maurice that it might be his duty ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... been formerly enacted for God and His people. Improve what was well begun by others before you, and not perfected by them.' Under this latter head he dwelt on the possible abuse of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and the irreligious profanation of the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... not for themselves, but by reason of the usage for which they are chosen and set aside, thereby becoming consecrated, religious. We should respect them in a spiritual way as we respect in a human way all that belongs to those whom we hold dear. Irreverence or disrespect is a profanation, a sacrilege. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... bed-clothes fell in a heap by the side of the bed—she was dragged by her long silken hair completely on to it again. Her beautifully rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed's edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth—a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... genius, and an ardent lover of nature. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He was sincerity itself, and no cant or affectation is to be found in his writings. He was religious in his own way; incapable of any profanation, by act or thought, although his original living and thinking detached him from the social religious forms. He thought that without religion no great deed had ever been accomplished. He was disgusted with ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... literal assistance in the composition of his books and stories: her gifts were wholly unsuited to such employment, and no one apprehended more keenly than she the solitariness and uniqueness of his genius, insomuch that she would have deemed it something not far removed from profanation to have offered to advise or sway him in regard to his literary productions. She believed in his inspiration, and her office was to promote, as far as in her lay, the favorableness of the conditions under which it should ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... but he felt that to use Una's hair as a wrap for the red pulp of a crab's back or the soft, black belly of a limpet was a kind of profanation. He was a keen fisherman, but he would rather have missed the chance of catching the largest lithe that ever swam than lure it with a bait fastened with Una's ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... who here engage in trade, and accumulate much wealth.[12] The family of the chief do not build tombs; and that now raised over the place where the late prince was buried is dedicated as a temple to Siva, and was made merely with a view to secure the place from all danger of profanation.[13] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... have been interested in a colored girl, under any circumstances, and he was engaged to be married to the most beautiful white woman on earth. To mention a negro woman in the same room where he was thinking of Rena seemed little short of profanation. His friend the doctor was a jovial fellow, but it was surely doubtful taste to refer to his wife in such a conversation. He was very glad when the doctor dropped the subject and permitted him to go more into detail about the matter which ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... licentiousness, ran through the convent, until it came to the ears of the Prior himself. This holy man, who hated Father Gebhardt on account of his intimacy with the most respectable houses, was shocked at the scandalousness of the affair, which he considered as a profanation of the holy sacrament; and, refusing to decide on such a weighty matter, he referred it to the Archbishop. The Archbishop, wisely concluding that whatever sinful man wishes or thinks by day he dreams of by night, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... memories, exist only as dishonoured ruins. Some have been pulled down entirely, and the site used for gaols or barracks. Convicts labour where once monks prayed. The renowned abbey of Cluny is a racing stable, and Le Bec, the home of Anselm, has suffered a like profanation. Factories have invaded some of these consecrated sites. Many have been used as quarries for generations. All the carved and wrought stone has been cut off, and used for making bridges and roads and private houses. Nature has covered the remains with clinging ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... notwithstanding;" in vain have the people of the several States solemnly sanctioned these provisions, made them their paramount law, and individually sworn to support them whenever they were called on to execute any office. Vain provisions! ineffectual restrictions! vile profanation of oaths! miserable mockery of legislation! if a bare majority of the voters in any one State may, on a real or supposed knowledge of the intent with which a law has been passed, declare themselves free from its operation; say, here it gives too little; there, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... nature of all things, even from the cedar to the shrub, delivered by tradition, from the father to the son, and so from generation to generation, without writing; or, unless it were casually, without the least communicating them to any other nation or tribe; for to do that they account a profanation. And, yet, it is thought that they, or some spirit worse than they, first told us, that lice, swallowed alive, were a certain cure for the yellow-jaundice. This, and many other medicines, were discovered by them, or ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... admit to herself, something more. She was so sincere herself, so unsullied, so lacking in the callousness often resulting from much contact with the world, that it seemed to her that it would be a profanation henceforth to regard him as the butt of even the innocent ridicule of which she was capable. Yet in all her perplexity and trouble there was a confused exhilaration and a glad ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... doubtful. I will spare him my suspicions, my gropings for the truth, and the checks encountered in the search, and give him the results of my long inquiry. Everything has its appropriate and harmonious reason. I am too fully persuaded of this to believe that the Philanthus commits her profanation of corpses merely to satisfy her appetite. What does the empty stomach mean? May it not—Yes!—But, after all, who knows? Well, let us ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... whose looks are a profanation to any good woman. Ned Bannister, of the Shoshones, was one of them. He looked at his cousin, and his ribald eyes coasted back to bold scrutiny of this young woman's charming, buoyant youth. There was Something in his face ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... unbearable. That quiet and easily satisfied people, whose existence you might forget except when they testify their happiness by their shouts; noisy without a thought of sedition; whose only care is to shun poverty without amassing wealth; lowly in fortune but rich in temper—it is a kind of profanation to rob such people ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... more social importance than he guessed; her marriage would be something of an event. Heaven grant that he might read no journalistic description of the ceremony! Few things more disgusted him than the thought of a fashionable wedding; he could see nothing in it but profanation and indecency. That mattered little, to be sure, in the case of ordinary people, who were born, and lived, and died, in fashionable routine, anxious only to exhibit themselves at any given moment in the way held to be good form; but it was hard to think that custom's tyranny should lay ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... your husband's brother has proposed to you to do is a sacrilege and a profanation. I own to you freely that I look on what I have done toward thwarting your relative in this matter as an act of virtue. You cannot expect me to think it a serious obstacle to a union predestined in heaven, that your son is the squire's heir, and that my grandchild is only ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... the Order, men such as the successors of St. Francis never received, whose history throws a bright light on the simplicity of the early days. It will be remembered with what zeal Francis had repaired several churches; his solicitude went further; he saw a sort of profanation in the negligence with which most of them were kept; the want of cleanliness of the sacred objects, ill-concealed by tinsel, gave him a sort of pain, and it often happened that when he was going to preach somewhere he secretly called together the priests ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... revealed to this terrible detective "the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the royalists, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... do still," Angelot said, and laughed. "But I did not then quite understand the Comtesse. I know now that she detests me. Then, too, she had not seen or thought of Ratoneau—Dieu! What profanation! Was it quite new, the terrible idea? I saw the brute—pah! We were ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... him; he even employed falsehood (ruse), aspersion, cynicism, and immorality: he used even those arms that respect for God and man denies to the wise; he employed his virtue, his honour, his renown, to aid in this overthrow; and his apostleship of reason had too often the appearance of a profanation of piety; he ravaged the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... rich, racy, sparkling, delicate, and luscious wine. Nor does our sex wholly engross this honour; ladies have had their share of the glory; one of them, of the royal blood of France, whom it were a profanation but to name here, surprises the age at once by the transcendent and inventive genius in her writings and the admirable graces of her style. Imitate those great examples if you can; for my part I cannot. Everyone, you know, cannot go ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... outward one. The covenant-people which, inwardly, had submitted to the world, which, by its own guilt, had profaned itself, was, outwardly also, given up to the world, and was profaned in punishment. And this profanation, inflicted upon it as a punishment, again manifested itself just at that place, where the profanation by the guilt had chiefly manifested itself, viz., in the holy city, and in the holy temple. It is with a view to the former manifestation ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... only one of the longest but one of the greatest of English poems; it is also very characteristically Elizabethan. To deal with so delicate a thing by the method of mechanical analysis seems scarcely less than profanation, but accurate criticism can proceed ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... holds slaves cannot, in the nature of things, be a republican; but, in the nature of things, he is on the other hand a despot. I am one. And a nation of such individuals is an association of despots for despotic purposes, and nothing else nor better. Liberty in their mouths is a profanation of the sacred name. It signifies nothing but their liberty to reign. I confess, it is to those who happen to be the kings a very agreeable state of things. I enjoy my power and state mightily. But I am not blind to the fact—my own experience teaches it—that it ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... capable of a comparison with anything but themselves. We hardly inquire whether those for whom we are thus interested, and to whom we are thus knit, are better or worse than others—the question is a kind of profanation—all we know is, they are more to us than any one else can be. Our sentiments of this kind are rooted and grow in us, and we cannot eradicate them by voluntary means. Besides, our judgments are bespoke, our interests take part with our blood. If any ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was a great national calamity, and it was something more: it was a profanation and a sacrilege. The literature which it evoked was a cry of anguish, a prophetic burden of despair. "Chants populaires," writes M. Emile Gebhart (De l'Italie, "Le Sac de Rome en 1527," 1876, pp. 267, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the tropics come days of languor and nights of inactivity so delicious it seems profanation to move. More than one thousand men, who boarded the Massachusetts with the vigor of the North in their veins, have succumbed, one by one, to the lethargy of the soft breeze ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... carriages for separate castes, but compliance with the proposal was of course out of the question; and now high Brahmans and low Chumars—who are never seen in the same temple even though they worship the same gods, as the presence of a Chumar there would be deemed a profanation—may be seen packed in the same carriage in as close contact as two human beings can be. When they separate the Brahmans have recourse to lustrations, and satisfy themselves the impurity has been ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... solemn, and to most minds, affecting religious drama. The oratorios, as with us, are in general on scriptural subjects; and operas on themes of equal sanctity are listened to without the least feeling of profanation. Nor are the more audacious exhibitions of the dark ages by any means exploded. Every traveller on the continent who has much curiosity, must have witnessed, whether with devout indignation or mere astonishment, the strange manner in which scriptural subjects are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... everything, most of all the great cool dairy, which had once been a chapel, and where the piscina was converted to a niche for a polished brass milk-can, to the horror of Angela, who could say no word in praise of a place that had been created by the profanation of holy things. A chapel turned into a storehouse for milk and butter! Was this how Protestants valued consecrated places? An awe-stricken silence came upon her, and she was glad when Denzil remembered that they would ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... is, years; for, as formerly noticed, all these expressions mean the same period of time; the period during which the witnesses prophesy, on the one side, and the gentiles tread the outer court, on the other. The profanation of the holy city,—the church nominal, and the testimony of the witnesses against that conduct, is the same contest which in this chapter is represented under other symbols. The waters of the symbolic flood have spread over all the nations of Christendom, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... Jewish Christians separated from the Old Testament, as interpolations, whatever did not agree with their purer moral conceptions and borrowed speculations. Thus, in particular, they got rid of the sacrificial ritual, and all that was connected with it, by putting ablutions in their place. First the profanation, and afterwards, the abolition of the temple worship, after the destruction of Jerusalem, may have given another new and welcome impulse to this by coming to be regarded as its Divine confirmation (Presupp. Sec. 2). Christianity now appeared as purified Mosaism. In these Jewish Christian ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... was an inclosure planted with olive trees of great antiquity; and at a small degree above the surface of the ground was an altar sacred to AEacus. To divulge the traditions relative to this altar would, it seems, be an high profanation. The author, therefore, keeps them a secret. Just before this sacred septum was the supposed tomb of Phocus, consisting of a mound of raised earth, fenced round with a border of stone work: and a large rough stone was placed upon the top of all. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... temple, Sousa cast down and destroyed all the idols, demolished all the curious workmanship of the pagoda, and carried away every thing that could be removed, after which he killed some cows in its most sacred recesses, which is the greatest possible profanation in the opinion ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... thereupon baptised under the name of Juan de Atahualpa. The name John was given to him because this baptism in extremis took place on St. John the Baptist's day. Rarely, if ever, has there been a more ghastly profanation of ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... sacred vessels with the help of an intermediary vessel, which stands exactly on the line between the two compartments. This transference, being carried out to the accompaniment of all sorts of reverential gestures and utterances, secures such a profanation of the sacred substance as is without the evil consequences that would otherwise be entailed. Thus the ritual is essentially precautionary. A taboo is the hinge of ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett |
