"Heathendom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought is the life-giving influence of the river. Everything lived whithersoever it went. Contrast Christendom with heathendom. Admit all the hollowness and mere nominal Christianity of large tracts of life in so-called Christian countries, and yet why is it that on the one side you find stagnation and death, and on the other side mental and manifold ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... grounds of this languor are, first, my utter ignorance of God's purposes with respect to the Heathens; and second, the strong conviction, I have that the conversion of a single province of Christendom to true practical Christianity would do more toward the conversion of Heathendom than an army of Missionaries. Romanism and despotic government in the larger part of Christendom, and the prevalence of Epicurean principles in the remainder;—these do indeed lie ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the possible original unity of widely separated nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;[161-1] and lastly the metaphysical explanation, which seems at present to be the fashionable one, expressed nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Mueller, which cuts the knot by crediting man with "an innate consciousness of the Absolute," or as Renan ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... referred only to the intellectual side of one's education. The spiritual equipment is even more important. In heathendom one comes in contact with towering systems of idolatry and superstition, venerable with age and rooted deeply in the nature and habit of the people. The Christian teacher realizes that, in his conflict with these systems, he is powerless, unless backed ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... in magic throughout Saxo's work, showing how fresh heathendom still was in men's minds and memories. His explanations, when he euhemerizes, are those of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... in society is its only saving power. It is this Christ love which sends men into the slums of the cities to work for their fellow men. It is this love that is the moving power of the missionary of the cross, when he goes into the heart of heathendom. It is this love that has brought into the world all the reforms that are worth having and caused it to care for its sick ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... working under him—among them a personal friend of mine—able and ready to do their best to mend a state of things in which most of the children in the island, born nominal Roman Catholics, but the majority illegitimate, were growing up not only in ignorance, but in heathendom and brutality. Meanwhile, the clergy were in want of funds. There were no funds at all, indeed, which would enable them to set up in remote forest districts a religious school side by side with the secular ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... newly-founded nunnery a house of doves. Someone sent her a freshly-discovered dove, a sort of carrier, but which had in the white feathers of its head and neck the form of a religious cowl. The nunnery flourished for more than a century, when, in the time of Penda, who was the reactionary of heathendom, it fell into decay. In the meantime the doves, protected by religious feeling, had increased mightily, and were known in all Catholic communities. When King Offa ruled in Mercia, about a hundred and fifty years later, he restored Christianity, ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion. Most days in real life end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned. We do not find, as a rule, when we go to the houses—the literal little mud houses, I mean, of literal heathendom—that anyone inside has been praying we might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines were most remarkable. They do not happen here. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... foolish people who grope in this miasma of delusion. Silly women, yielding to the natural vanity of their sex, may mistake hysterics for inspiration. Vacillating and vacant men may seek a new sensation by encouraging a revival of the demoniacal epidemics of heathendom. But you, who have been a preacher of the gospel, though, as I must now more than ever believe, after a devitalized and perverted method,—you, to leave the honest work of a dweller upon earth, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... merit and the glory of Mohammed that, beside founding twenty spiritual empires and providing laws for the guidance through centuries of millions of men, he shook the foundations of the faith of heathendom. Mohammed was the impersonation of two principles that reign in the government of God,—destruction and salvation. He would receive nations to his favor if they accepted the faith, and utterly destroy them if they rejected ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... coast of Scotland, came the new impulse which gave Christianity its fixed footing in England, and finally drove paganism from Britain's shores. Oswald, of Northumbria, became the bulwark of the new faith; Penda, of Mercia, the sword of heathendom; and a long struggle for religion and dominion ensued between these warlike chiefs. Oswald was slain in battle; Penda led his conquering host far into the Christian realm; but a new king, Oswi by name, overthrew Penda and his army in a great defeat, and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... symbolic form the promise that Jehovah will now fulfil the popular hopes and destroy the wicked foes who have preyed upon his people, and thus vindicate his divine rulership of the world. In one passage Judah's worst foes, the Edomites, represent aggressive heathendom. Again, in a still more impressive picture, suggested by an experience in his own childhood when the dread Scythians swept down from the north, he portrays the advance of the mysterious foes from the distant north under the ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... is the other shore of that shifting and arid sea. Looking at it from the West and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far more mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be. Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feel the virtue of the Moslem movement. It belonged to the desert, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... them so as to hold them to be necessary unto salvation, as though faith in Christ could not justify without the legal observances. On the other hand, there was no reason why those who were converted from heathendom to Christianity should observe them. Hence Paul circumcised Timothy, who was born of a Jewish mother; but was unwilling to circumcise Titus, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... heard of Dr. Hartwell's intended journey to the East? What an oddity he is! Told me he contemplated renting a bungalow somewhere in heathendom, and turning either Brahmin or Parsee, he had not quite decided which. He has sold his beautiful place to the Farleys. The greenhouse plants he gave to mother, and all the statuary and paintings are to be sent to us until his return, which cannot be predicted ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... century, the writer who struck the keynote of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called 'Carmina Burana.' A frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the rhymed verses. Reading them through at a stretch, we can scarcely help coming ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... was duly married. He took as his last name that of Wilberforce after the English philanthropist, who was dear to all Colored people, and from that time on this native and his family became attached to the mission, and were known by the name of Wilberforce. This man had children born in heathendom and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... 428), Ortwein (3l5), Tilte (370), and others who have written of Christmas, show the importance attached in the folk-mind to the time of the birth of Christ, and how around it as a centre have fixed themselves hundreds of the rites and solemnities of passing heathendom, with its recognition of the kinship of all nature, out of which grew astrology, magic, and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Abraham, and said,—I am the Almighty God, walk before Me, and be thou perfect. Know that He has spoken to you as He spoke to Moses, saying,—I am the Lord thy God, who have brought you, and your fathers before you, out of the spiritual Egypt of heathendom, and ignorance, sin, and wickedness, into the knowledge of the one, true, and righteous God. But know more, that He has spoken to you by the mouth of Jesus Christ, saying,—I am He that died in the form ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... of the great and good of earth long be withheld from the heralds of salvation on heathen shores. The majesty of the missionary enterprise is beginning to develop itself; success is crowning the toil of years; and heathendom is assuming a new aspect. Under the faithful labors of self-denying men, the wilderness is beginning to blossom as the rose. Here and there, amid the sands of the wide desert once parched by sin and consumed by the fiery blaze of heathenish cruelty, the plants of grace are beginning to appear, and ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... "No, no, indeed," he continued, "they are not green, for greenness implies verdure, and beauty, and there is not a single atom of verdure in their parched and withered up souls." Under the burning satire and mellowing pathos of his tremendous appeal for heathendom, tears welled out from every eye in the house. I leaned over toward the reporter's table; many of the reporters had flung down their pens—they might as well have attempted to report a thunder storm. As ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... a message of fire unto Thy prophet Elijah, so come down even now to visit these unbelieving and mocking hearts with the terror of Thy just wrath. Make bare Thy arm of infinite power that this abomination of heathendom may be purged of its vain idolatry, and that Thy Israel may triumph over the hosts of the sinful. Even as Thou didst scatter the forces of the Egyptians in the waters of the Red Sea, even so, O Lord, visit now Thy wrath upon those who mock Thee and degrade Thy image. ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... his Christianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of the Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which the older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen" the conception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows in fact the delicate ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... sunny nature read in the glow of the dying clay the promise and dawn of a brilliant morrow. If the expected succor should arrive—if the good cause should triumph here in Alexandria—if the rising were to be general throughout Greek heathendom, then indeed had he been rightly named Olympius by his parents—then he would not change places with any god of Olympus—then the glory of his name, more lasting than bronze or marble, would shine forth like the sun, so long as one Greek ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be reminiscences of that of their ancient heathendom, partly that borrowed from the European almanacs of the century 1550-1650. These, as is well known, were crammed with predictions and divinations. A careful analysis, based on a comparison with ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... Constantine, like his father, in the spirit of the Neo-Platonic syncretism of dying heathendom, reverenced all the gods as mysterious powers; especially Apollo, the god of the sun, to whom in the year 308 he presented munificent gifts. Nay, so late as the year 321 he enjoined regular consultation of the soothsayers in public misfortunes, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... outvalue the Great Mogul's best diamond, which he holds at an incalculable sum. Wherefore, I am minded to put the Great Carbuncle on shipboard, and voyage with it to England, France, Spain, Italy, or into Heathendom, if Providence should send me thither, and, in a word, dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the earth, that he may place it among his crown jewels. If any of ye have a wiser plan, let ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... this far better than long disquisitions. The classical language of Greece had a word for 'saviour' which, though often degraded to unworthy uses, bestowed as a title of honour not merely on the false gods of heathendom, but sometimes on men, such as better deserved to be styled 'destroyers' than 'saviours' of their fellows, was yet in itself not unequal to the setting forth the central office and dignity of Him, who came into the world ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... catechumen, should know for yourself what would have been the fate of Alexandria had the devil's plot of two days since succeeded. What if the people struck too fiercely? They struck in the right place. What if they have given the reins to passions fit only for heathens? Recollect the centuries of heathendom which bred those passions in them, and blame not my teaching, but the teaching of their forefathers. That very Peter.... What if he have for once given place to the devil, and avenged where he should have forgiven? ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... corresponds in general history to the difference between the earlier "heroic" age and the age of chivalry. The "epics" of Hildebrand and Beowulf belong, if not wholly to German heathendom, at any rate to the earlier and prefeudal stage of German civilisation. The French epics, in their extant form, belong for the most part in spirit, if not always in date, to an order of things unmodified by the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Franks, in the year 755. You will have concluded also from it, that Catholic Christianity is in its extreme agony; that the worship and name of our Lord, and the fountains of sacramental grace are about to be extinguished for ever, and that nothing but heresy or heathendom can follow. Then you will be quite mistaken. These Lombards are pious Catholics. Builders of churches and monasteries, they are taking up the relics of the Roman martyrs, to transfer them to the churches ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... female attire by the priesthood, however, was not confined to the worshippers of Venus Urania; it was widely spread throughout Heathendom; so widely that, as we learn from Tacitus, the priests of the Naharvali (in modern Denmark) officiated in the dress of women. Like many other heathenish customs and costumes, traces of this have descended to our own times; such, for example, may have been the exchange of dresses on New ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom. I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the land. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ever upbuilded with his busy fingers, the dear city of Cecrops, which Saint Augustine called the dear City of God—in a word, Athens, was surely the loveliest wherein to live. But with all respect to Messer Brunetto, I would maintain that no city of Heathendom or Christendom could be more beautiful than Florence at any season of the year. What if it be now and then windy; now and then chilly; now and then dusty? I have talked with a traveller that told me he had found the winters mighty ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the greater civilising and conquering forces struggling for mastery; before the age of the Crusades, before the eleventh century, it was plainly weaker than the Moslem powers; it seemed unable to fight against Slav or Scandinavian Heathendom; it was only saved by distance from becoming a province of China; India, the world's great prize, was cut off from it by the Arabs. Even before the rise of Islam, under Constantine or Theodosius ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Heathendom is the foul and stagnant pool, parted from Christ, the Fount of life. Christendom, in spite of all its sins and short- comings, is the stream always fed from the heavenly Fountain. And holy baptism is the river of the water of life, which St. John saw in the Revelations, ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... on the hitherto unknown children whom God hath given him, 'Behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?' Then, though our names may have perished from earthly memories, like those of the simple fugitives of Cyprus and Cyrene, who 'were the first that ever burst' into the night of heathendom with the torch of the Gospel in their hands, they will be written in the Lamb's book of life, and He will confess them in the presence of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... were pulled down by the Spanish settlers, who found there a convenient quarry for their own edifices. But the cross still remained spreading its broad arms over the ruins. It stood where it was planted in the very heart of the stronghold of Heathendom; and, while all was in ruins around it, it proclaimed the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... and torn to pieces by wild beasts, in the public amphitheater, and others to be roasted alive in red-hot iron chairs, for no other offense but that they avowed themselves Christians. Such are these boasted saints and heroes of heathendom. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson |
