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More "Priestcraft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and propagation of his theory that Christianity is part of an epoch (or rather an aberration, since it began as recently as 6000BC and is already collapsing) produced by the necessity in which the numerically inferior white races found themselves to impose their domination on the colored races by priestcraft, making a virtue and a popular religion of drudgery and submissiveness in this world not only as a means of achieving saintliness of character but of securing a reward in heaven. Here you have the slave-morality view formulated by a Scotch philosopher ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... and writers, steeped in the rhetoric and the commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust, vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... you in sympathy with the priestcraft that would keep people virtuous through ignorance?" said the minister, laughing. "Alf must learn to do right, knowing all the facts. I don't believe he will shy a stone at a bird this coming year unless it is ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... considering as common to all the natives of India, Hindustanis as well as Hindus, those customs and restrictions which are peculiar to the Hindus alone. Among the latter, as is well known, both the priestcraft of the Brahmins, and the impediments to the marriage of a widow,[20] exist in full force at this day; and it would have been more candid on the part of the Khan, even at the expense of a little of his Moslem pride, to have set his fair opponent right on these points, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... worthy subjects, became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all petrified shells, and only admitted them as lusus naturae, he entirely ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... heaven into a doctrine of immortality and deification, prophecy into a learned exegesis and theological science, the bearers of the spirit into clerics, the brethren into laity held in tutelage, miracles and healings into nothing, or into priestcraft, the fervent prayers into a solemn ritual, renunciation of the world into a jealous dominion over the world, the "spirit" ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... coxcomb whom Moliere ridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the landowner who is no longer ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... are no millionaires—and therefore next to no Socialists. As to why there are no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of priestcraft a curious thing was discovered—that if you kill every usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or disconnected ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... frank but dry, blunt, and he has hitherto been ruder, more ignorant, more fond of quarrel and drinking, more given up to superstition and old things than others; for his land was the home of priestcraft and monkery. You may ever distinguish the national Bavarian by his nervous squat body, small round head, and beer-belly, immediately beneath which the trousers begin; hence the braces or belt is indispensible. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... display a banner because of the truth, but let love always be our flag-staff. Let us be jealous for the truth, but let it be a godly, that is to say, a loving jealousy. When we contend for purity of doctrine and for purity of worship, when we protest against popery and priestcraft, when we resist rationalism and infidelity, when we do battle now for national religion, as we call it, and now for the freedom of the church, let us do it all in love to all men, else we had better not do it at all. If we ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... by the by they degenerate into that appalling subtlety which is their ruling passion gone crooked. And then comes a new revelation and a great simplifying. They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft. They want to prune life of its foolish fringes and get back to the noble bareness of the desert. Remember, it is always the empty desert and the empty sky that cast their spell over them—these, ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... and Norwegian stateliness." His favourite names are Greek: Cythna, Ianthe, and the like. The ruined cathedral in "Queen Mab"—a poem only in its title romantic—is coupled with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike "works of faith and slavery," symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft which Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love in a regenerated universe. How different is the feeling which the empty cathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, now ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... just administration, and a bursting energy which manifested itself in a multitude of ways—in literature, in commerce, in politics, in scientific thought. And all this had come into existence in a nation which had curbed the power of the monarchy, done away with priestcraft, established the liberty of the Press, set its face against every kind of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and, through the means of free institutions, taken up the task of governing itself. The inference was obvious: in France also, like causes would lead to like results. When he was ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... than he entered into an investigation of the Hebrew tongue, in which he was a connoisseur; and the doctor at the same time attacked the mendicant on the ridiculous maxims of his order, together with the impositions of priestcraft in general, which, he observed, prevailed so much among those who profess the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... up into some ebullition of very low church zeal; there was some talk of an evening lecture, the schools were to be remodelled, certain tracts were actually distributed. But Lord Marney soon stopped all this. "No priestcraft at Marney," said this gentle proprietor ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... indiscreet, it was because he was blinded by the success that attended his efforts, and he failed to see the clouds that were gathering. {225a} Borrow saw the danger of Graydon's reckless evangelism, and although he himself had few good words for the pope and priestcraft, he recognised that a discreet veiling of his opinions was best calculated to further the ends he ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Antichrist, sufficiently distinguished from the Western. The western combination against real Christianity never attained to power by successful conquest of the nations; but on the contrary by chicanery, insidious policy, flattery of princes and priestcraft. This enemy is described with sufficient accuracy and peculiar precision in the subsequent part of the Apocalypse. Prophecy has a determinate meaning; and we are not at liberty to give loose reins to our imagination: otherwise we ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... the image with his battle-axe. The helpless statue offers no resistance. Another blow rolls the head of the idol on the floor. It is said that a colony of frightened rats ran forth from its interior. The kingcraft, and priestcraft, and solemn swindle of seven hundred years are exploded in a shout of laughter; the god is broken to pieces, his members dragged through the streets. The recesses of the Serapion are explored. Posterity is edified by discoveries of frauds by ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... to workout their realization myself. I shall begin by being German myself. I intend to do away with ceremony, priestcraft, and foreign influence. To that intent, my lord chamberlain, you will see that all foreigners are dismissed from the palace, and their places supplied by Germans. My two Italian valets I make over to Porhammer. Nothing but German shall be spoken at court. I will have ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... crucifix in one of the sanctuaries of the great teocalli. There Father Olmedo celebrated Mass, and the Te Deum was chanted by the soldiers, side by side with the sacrificial stone; the abominable war-god's image, and all the attendant machinery of its savage priestcraft. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... leaving a drinking-shop. Your grandsons both owe Max more than three thousand francs. The scoundrel told the lads to try and find out our intentions; he reminded them that you had once thought of getting round my uncle by priestcraft, and declared that nobody but you could guide me; for he thinks, fortunately, that I am nothing more ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... physiological science affords of the Law of Universal Development: let us close this part of our subject with the illustrations afforded by the rise and progress of Science as a whole. The first germs of science were very simple, existing in connection with Art, and subserving the purposes of priestcraft. For a long time the range of scientific inquiry was so limited that the same individual was able to grasp it entire. But one branch after another has sprung up, diverging more and more into the realms of the unknown, until no one mind can hope to obtain even a general knowledge ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a plain white dress, is standing erect before his idol at his devotions, with his ministers behind him. On the other two sides he is at his favourite field sports. What strikes one most in all this is the entire absence of priestcraft. He wanted all his revenue for his soldiers; and his tutelary god seems, in consequence, to have been well pleased to dispense with the mediatory services of priests.[17] There are few temples anywhere to be seen in the territories of these Jat chiefs; and, as ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the fact. I don't believe she would do anything contrary to its teachings as she understands them. We men may think what we please, but we have confidence in a woman who looks as she does now. She is not in the least inclined to devotional rhapsodies or to subserviency to priestcraft, like so many women abroad. She merely appears to recognize a divine power as she accepts nature, only more reverently and consciously. I suppose I am an agnostic as much as anything, yet I should only be too glad to have Stella at my side with such an expression on her face. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... emotion as when she first visited the Fujinami house. Now, she had heard her father's authentic voice. She knew his scorn for pretentiousness of all kinds, for false conventions, for false emotions, his hatred of priestcraft, his condemnation of the family wealth, and his contempt for the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... not merely to be happy, but to have what they called their "rights" respected; a protest against authority, not only because it was cruel, but because it was arbitrary, tyrannical. Hence it was aimed against priestcraft as well as against monarchy. It was based on the conviction that no one is so justly entitled to pass judgment on a man's affairs as a man himself. But it was a cry from the depths, the bitter resentment of a long-standing abuse. Therefore it took the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the first French Revolution; and how utterly inconsistent are the arguments of M. Comte and the Positive School with those of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. Formerly, Religion was wont to be ascribed to priestcraft; it was supposed to have been invented by fraud, supported by falsehood, and professed in hypocrisy; and the Church, but especially the hierarchy of Rome, was the object of incessant ridicule or malignant abuse. But now, Religion is discovered to be the natural, necessary, and salutary result of ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... to the Parson, of which he ought to have thought long before—viz., the Papistical religion of the Italian. Dr. Riccabocca was professedly a Roman Catholic. He so little obtruded that fact—and, indeed, had assented so readily to any animadversions upon the superstition and priestcraft which, according to Protestants, are the essential characteristics of Papistical communities—that it was not till the hymeneal torch, which brings all faults to light, was fairly illumined for the altar, that the remembrance of a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... nose," sufficiently apparent in his portrait, was a favourite theme for contemporary personalities. Of the moral essays, the most remarkable are a set of four papers, entitled An Apology for the Clergy, which may perhaps be regarded as a set-off against the sarcasms of Pasquin on priestcraft. They depict, with a great deal of knowledge and discrimination, the pattern priest as Fielding conceived him. To these may be linked an earlier picture, taken from life, of a country parson who, in his simple and dignified surroundings, even ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and fought on our side at the battle of Mons, and who believe that miracles occur quite frequently at Lourdes, nevertheless boggle at the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, and reject it as a trick of priestcraft. I cannot tell why people who will not believe Matthew's story of three kings bringing costly gifts to the cradle of Jesus, believe Luke's story of the shepherds and the stable. I cannot tell why people, brought up to believe the Bible in the old literal way as an infallible ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... to do with the isolation in which they live. Since a period long preceding that time, bitter jealousy existed between the Spano-Mexican and Anglo-American races. This feeling had been planted by national animosity, and nursed and fomented by priestcraft. Events that have since taken place had already cast their shadows over the Mexican frontier; and Florida and Louisiana were regarded as but steps in the ladder of American aggrandisement; but the understanding of these matters was of course ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... The Rouen physicians treated with utter scorn this surgeon, this barber fellow, this mere sawbones. The Court gave him no encouragement. Still, he held on his way in a treatise which will live yet. He accepts this battle of science against priestcraft, declaring, as Wyer did in the sixteenth century, that "in all such matters the right judge is not the priest but the man of science." With great difficulty he found some one bold enough to print, but no one willing to sell his little work. So in broad daylight ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... provoked by the mixture of kingcraft and priestcraft discernible throughout this great enterprise, and the mistaken zeal and self-delusion of many of its most gallant and generous champions. The romantic coloring seemed to belong to the nature of the subject, and was in harmony with what I had seen in my tour through ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... be obliged to worship the creative power, whether under the name of the Animus Mundi, or any other whatsoever. The interference of the Deity in the affairs of mankind he entirely disowned, having proved to his own satisfaction that the idea originated entirely in priestcraft. In short, with the shadowy metaphysical exception aforesaid, Mr. Joshua Bletson of Darlington, member for Littlefaith, came as near the predicament of an atheist, as it is perhaps possible for a man to do. But we say this with the necessary salvo; for we ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... economy of instruction from heaven. Reflect that it was in nations where even the sovereign authority professed homage to the religion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as a grand national institution, that the popular mass was thus reduced to a material fit for all the bad uses to which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and bodies of its slaves. And then consider what should have been the condition of this great aggregate, wherever Christianity was acknowledged by all as the true religion. The people should have consisted of so many beings having ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... how little used he had been to receive command from any, it will be easily understood how this wild, tanned, quaintly dressed band filled the inhabitants of the towns through which they passed with terror and dismay. Garibaldi's violent tirades against priests and priestcraft; the liberation of a gang of miscreants arrested by order of the Roman Government, had not prepossessed men of order and of discipline in his favor; and although personal contact dispelled all unfavorable prepossessions, one sees ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... And slyly winked and sagely shook his head. "My fawning dog," the sage satanic said, "Wags not his tail for me but for my bread. Brains rule to day as they have ruled for aye, And craft grown craftier in this modern day Still rides the fools, but in a craftier way; And priestcraft lingers and survives its use; What was a blessing once is now abuse: Grown fat and arrogant on power and pelf, The old-time shepherd has become a wolf And only feeds his flocks to feast himself. To clink of coin the pious juggler jumps, For still he thinks, as in the days of old, The key ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... question of a different kind whether the sacerdotal spirit which has of late years so largely spread in the English Church can extend without producing a violent disruption. To cut the tap roots of priestcraft was one of the main aims and objects of the Reformation, and, for reasons I have already stated, I do not believe that the party which would re-establish it has by any means the strength that has been attributed to it. It is true that the Broad Church ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter the fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical perversion of the facts of life, and a preparation of the mind for the seeds of Priestcraft. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... since those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it possible that the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... exclusive of the address," tells the whole story? and when we have read that "the insurgents are triumphant everywhere, the king left the capital at four o'clock, a provisional government was proclaimed this morning," and suchlike, what do we care for the sonorous periods in which official priestcraft chants ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... MOTT said: It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. The Church and State have been united, and it is well for us to see it so. We have had to bear the denunciations of these reverend (irreverend) clergymen, as in New York, of late. But if we look to their authority ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the old worn-out thunder of the Vatican, which lately made a feeble noise in America, has rolled through France with the same assertion, 'Discussion cannot be tolerated'; and what has been the result? Simply this,—that all the intellectual force of the country is arrayed against priestcraft;— and the spirit of an insolent, witty, domineering atheism and materialism rules us all. Even young children can be found by the score who laugh at the very idea of a God, and who fling a jeer at the story of the Crucifixion ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... not, as Villehardouin would say, fighting for the truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they thought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different. They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is merely ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... duties he had no inclination to practice, and condemn faults he did not like to renounce. It is no wonder, therefore, that Humphreys wrought himself into a most patriotic resolution, no longer to submit to tyranny and priestcraft, and to vow that the next time the Doctor admonished him, he would retort with "Ye take too much upon ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Anglican Church in the Queen's reign has not hesitated to assert that the tenets against which Lord John Russell protested in the Durham Letter were, in his judgment, of a kind which are 'destructive of all reasonable faith, and reduce worship to a mere belief in spells and priestcraft.' Cardinal Vaughan, it is needless to say, does not sympathise with such a view. He, however, has opinions on the subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... such priests as these—and I should say such priests form a full half of the North Italian priesthood—are perfectly free from that bad furtive expression which we associate with priestcraft, and which, when seen, cannot be mistaken: their faces are those of our own best English country clergy, with perhaps a trifle less flesh about them and a trifle more of a ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... doctrines, as the peculiar appanage of their own class. They invented endless fables which gave rise to Mythology. They ruled the people by the might of superstition, and acquired wealth, honor, and power, for themselves.[17] We arrive then at nearly the culminating point of Egyptian priestcraft, the days of "wise men," "sorcerers," and "magicians."[18] Such men ever {20} have, and we presume ever will employ secrecy as the chief element of their clever jugglery. Mankind love to be deceived. Let an Adrian, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... ambassadors of God, to preach His message of forgiveness; to bring the Saviour in His human life to those who have never understood Him; to save the perishing, and bind them as with golden chains to the feet of God. They are battling with error, and breaking up the iron systems of priestcraft, inhumanity, and wrong, which have enslaved men for ages, and have shut off from them the light and love of their Heavenly Father. They are staying the progress of crime; they lay the hand of law on the slaveholder; they appeal to the drunkard; ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... tight to ten years' labor as well as yoursel', Faulkner; and neither man nor de'il can come between him and his religion; but—' 'BUT,' shouted Faulkner; 'there is no BUT! It is God and our right! God and our right, against priestcraft and despotism!'" ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... still call this Religion, and cast aside the crucifix for the sword, the gun and the firebrand. The Inferno has never yet been portrayed or even outlined. Its name is Priestcraft and Intolerance under ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... the ignorant multitude; as in sacred groves a tree might have been made to speak by the simple contrivance of a man concealed within the hollow stem, which to outward appearance would have been considered solid. The devices of priestcraft to bring grist to their mill are not yet obsolete, as will be seen in many ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... apostles and the Church of which they would be in charge; then the destruction of Jerusalem, with all the horrors of merciless warfare was to follow; and this in turn was to be succeeded by a long period of priestcraft and apostasy with bitter sectarian dissension and cruel persecution of the righteous. The brief reference to the non-localized, universal phenomena, by which His advent is to be signalized, is a parenthetical demonstration of the false claims as to where Christ would be found; later the Lord ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... equal right to happiness? Nature made no other distinction than that of higher and lower degrees of power of mind and body. But what mysterious distribution of character has the craft of statesmen, more fatal than priestcraft, introduced? ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... all, except Sandy, quite free from slaveholding priestcraft. It was in vain that we had been taught from the pulpit at St. Michael's, the duty of obedience to our masters; to recognize God as the author of our enslavement; to regard running away an offense, alike against God and man; to deem our enslavement a merciful and beneficial arrangement; ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... has rendered you superstitious, Cornelius. I have no faith in the religious cant of the present day, in priests or priestcraft.' ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... living body calls itself Protestant; the living body abjures Catholicism, flings off the name and the thing, hates the Church of Rome, laughs at sacramental power, despises the Fathers, is jealous of priestcraft, is a Protestant reality, is a Catholic sham. This existing reality, which is alive and no mistake, you wish to top with a filagree-work of screens, dorsals, pastoral staffs, croziers, mitres, and the like. Now most excellent Bateman, will you hear my ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... fumes of some intoxicating drug or powerful gas or vapour, or drinking some beverage which produced a temporary suspension of the reason, the mind of the enquirer was predisposed to feverish dreams:[21] if priestcraft were concerned in the interpretation of such dreams, or eliciting senses from the wild effusions of the disordered brain of the Pythoness, Science presided over the investigation of the causes of this phrenzy, and the advantages which the Thaumaturgists might derive from it. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... say how many This noble woman led, To break their bonds asunder, Who were to priestcraft wed? And as I close this ballad, Historically true, Learn, reader, that its heroes Toiled not ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... my dear Sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through. The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards not forwards for ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... but I can be always warm if I like in my winter-garden. I turn my horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle—a carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years. Red shafts, green roof, and here and there ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... homes, a large quantity of beer and spirits, while it was setting the misguided world right on science, politics, and religion. The marvel, indeed, to Foster and his friends was how ignorance, bigotry, priestcraft, and tyranny could venture to hold up their heads in Crossbourne after his club had continued its meeting regularly for the ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... ceremonial of ancestor worship the thin end of the wedge of priestcraft was rigorously excluded. "For the words of prayer and blessing and those of benediction to be kept hidden away by the officers of prayer of the ancestral temple, and by the sorcerers and recorders, is a violation of the rules of propriety. This may be called keeping ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... there can be to the trouble of the world. Each man must realize this for himself, each man will do so surely in time, and all will come into the haven of rest. Surely this is a simple faith, the only belief that the world has known that is free from mystery and dogma, from ceremony and priestcraft; and to know that it is a beautiful faith you have but to look at its believers and be sure. If a people be contented in their faith, if they love it and exalt it, and are never ashamed of it, and if it exalts them and makes them ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... has ceased to demand any heavy effort of self-sacrifice, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion—and, loud in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... quitted the world with composure and peace. Well she might. She had not that insupportable weight of iniquity which sinks me to despair. She found consolation in that religion which I have ridiculed as priestcraft and hypocrisy. But, whether it be true or false, would to Heaven I could now enjoy the comforts ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... N. church, churchdom; ministry, apostleship^, priesthood, prelacy, hierarch^, church government, christendom, pale of the church. clericalism, sacerdotalism^, episcopalianism, ultramontanism^; theocracy; ecclesiology^, ecclesiologist^; priestcraft^, odium theologicum [Lat.]. monachism^, monachy^; monasticism, monkhood^. [Ecclesiastical offices and dignities] pontificate, primacy, archbishopric^, archiepiscopacy^; prelacy; bishopric, bishopdom^; episcopate, episcopacy; see, diocese; deanery, stall; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... well cared for. No children nor wives cluttered the devil devil doctor's house. Several old women, a fly-flapping girl of eleven, and two young men who had graduated from the canoe house of the youths and who were studying priestcraft under the master, composed the household and waited upon Jerry. Food of the choicest was his. After Agno had eaten first-cut of pig, Jerry was served second. Even the two acolytes and the fly-flapping maid ate after him, leaving the debris for the several old women. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... Jacobin party hailed it with joy. Up to this time they had a lingering fear that the First Consul was about to play the part of Monk. The pomp of the Tuileries and the hated Concordat seemed to their crooked minds but the prelude to a recall of the Bourbons, whereupon priestcraft, tithes, and feudalism would be the order of the day. Now at last the tragedy of Vincennes threw a lurid light into the recesses of Napoleon's ambition; and they exclaimed, "He is one of us." It must thenceforth be war to the knife between the Bourbons and Bonaparte; and his rule ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... understanding of its meaning. A large association of ignorant men can not for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression from the educated few, but will inevitably sink into acquiescence to the will of intelligence, whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our institutions. They are worth preserving, because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest proportion of the population of any ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee), Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce travell'd ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... constituted on the principles of fraternity and equality; but the passion of my life, to which I have sacrificed military position, and perhaps," he added in a lower tone, "perhaps even military fame, has been to destroy priestcraft, and, so long as the pope rules in ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before the presence of the Divine glory with exceeding joy (Jude 24). The Gospel of "the Word made flesh" is not the meaningless cant of some petty sect nor yet the cunning device of priestcraft, though it has been distorted in both these directions; but it can give a reason for itself, and is founded upon the deepest laws of the threefold constitution of man, embracing the whole man, body, soul and spirit. It is not opposed to Science but is ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... great divinity of the Algonkian tribes of the Great Lakes, Dr. D. G. Brinton says: "Michabo, giver of life and light, creator and preserver, is no apotheosis of a prudent chieftain, still less the fabrication of an idle fancy, or a designing priestcraft, but, in origin, deeds, and name, the not unworthy personification of the purest conceptions they possessed concerning the Father of All" ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a real wickedness of the priest that is different from other wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and strange perversions of instinct affect it. Let a former Archbishop of Canterbury speak ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... join any already established body of Christians, anathemas are hurled at their heads, and they are told that they are guilty of the heinous crime of schism—schism, in the sense they give it, a figment of sacerdotalism, priestcraft, and imposture. But does the crime of schism not exist? Ay, it does; but it is schism from the true Church of Christ, the Church of which He is the head corner-stone, the beautified in Heaven, the ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—the "Baptist," the "Medea," the "Jephtha," and the "Alcestis"—there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the "Baptist" against tyranny and priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to veneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once; and, as his Scots ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... proposed by the abolishing of Christianity is, that it would very much enlarge and establish liberty of conscience, that great bulwark of our nation, and of the Protestant religion, which is still too much limited by priestcraft, notwithstanding all the good intentions of the legislature, as we have lately found by a severe instance. For it is confidently reported, that two young gentlemen of real hopes, bright wit, and profound judgment, who, upon a thorough examination of causes and effects, and ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... observation, and may here elucidate one phenomenon by another—the past by that which still exists. Oppression, insecurity, and the influence of a very rude priestcraft, are the powerful causes which operated on the Germans and Italians of the Middle Ages, as they now continue to operate on the Abyssinians of the present day. However these people may differ from us in their descent, their manners and their customs, the ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... banished, or sent to the galleys, and the children of Protestants were taken from their parents, and committed to the care of their nearest Catholic relations, or such persons as judges appointed. All the terrors of military execution, all the artifices of priestcraft, were put forth to make converts and such as relapsed were subjected to cruel torments. A twentieth part of them were executed, and the remainder hunted from place to place. By these cruelties, France was deprived of nearly six hundred thousand of the best people in the land—a great misfortune, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... not for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression from the educated few, but will inevitably sink into acquiescence to the will of intelligence, whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our institutions. They are worth preserving, because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest proportion of the population of any form of government yet devised. All other forms of government approach ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... night as they were leaving a drinking-shop. Your grandsons both owe Max more than three thousand francs. The scoundrel told the lads to try and find out our intentions; he reminded them that you had once thought of getting round my uncle by priestcraft, and declared that nobody but you could guide me; for he thinks, fortunately, that I am nothing ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... sufficiently apparent in his portrait, was a favourite theme for contemporary personalities. Of the moral essays, the most remarkable are a set of four papers, entitled An Apology for the Clergy, which may perhaps be regarded as a set-off against the sarcasms of Pasquin on priestcraft. They depict, with a great deal of knowledge and discrimination, the pattern priest as Fielding conceived him. To these may be linked an earlier picture, taken from life, of a country parson who, in his simple and dignified surroundings, even more closely resembles the Vicar of ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... under the dominion of the priests, and naturally possessing a fanatic zeal. Churches at that period were too often but monuments of superstition for the celebration of mummery, for sheltering criminals, receptacles for pretended relics, and in fact instruments for maintaining the power of priestcraft. This same Saint Louis, so lauded by some authors, had some excellent notions of his own, and was very fond of practising summary justice, recommending to his nobles that whenever they met with any one who expressed any doubts regarding the Christian religion, never ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... young men; none went thither but the old men; whom he called their Oowookakee, that is, as I made him explain it to me, their religious, or clergy; and that they went to say O! (so he called saying prayers,) and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said. By this I observed, that there is priestcraft even amongst the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all religious ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... religion. There you see the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.' You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... or his son of their duty to the dead. Farewell, friend and cousin. God guard you and yours in these dreadful times with which it has pleased Him to visit us for a season, that through us perhaps this country and the whole world may be redeemed from priestcraft and tyranny. Greet your honoured wife, Lysbeth, from me; also your son Foy, who used to be a merry lad, and whom I hope to see again within a night or two, although it may be fated that we shall not meet. My blessing ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... middlemen in the corruption of the gods. And if matters don't go quite so far as that, where is the religion whose adherents don't consider prayers, praise and manifold acts of devotion, a substitute, at least in part, for moral conduct? Look at England, where by an audacious piece of priestcraft, the Christian Sunday, introduced by Constantine the Great as a subject for the Jewish Sabbath, is in a mendacious way identified with it, and takes its name,—and this in order that the commands of Jehovah for the Sabbath (that is, the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Yes, then came the fate which Hartmut had pictured so beautifully, yet so vividly. Will was fully determined to transfer the lesson which Arivana had taught him to Burgsdorf. Surely the punishment invoked by the furious priestcraft, would be no worse than the vial ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... vestments—vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their political truncheons—to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy and Cunning go to form a word. Deadmanship, I call it."—To quote my uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!—"Parsons and princes are happy with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... before I leap, or consign my actions into such spiritual keeping. However, if the worst come to the worst, if I do make this compact, and am deceived,—if, above all, I am ever seduced, or led blindfold into one of those snares which priestcraft sometimes lays to the cost of honour,—why, I shall have a sword, which I shall never be at a loss to use, and it can find its way through a priest's gown as ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... holy water,—when we had descended the stony pathway, for it was so worn as scarcely to merit the name of staircase,—when, standing once more on the chapel-pavement, with minds excited by the thought of those monkish days when priestcraft ruled the land,—our eyes naturally fell on the old oak chest. What further revelation might not this disclose! What sacred relics, what curious church-plate, what vellum manuscript, might not be hidden beneath this heavy lid! Would she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... this book speak for itself; I trust it is honest, charitable, and rationally religious. If I have (and I show it through all my writings) a shrinking from priestcraft of every denomination, that feeling I take to be due to some ancient heredity ingrained, or, more truly, inburnt into my nature from sundry pre-Lutheran confessors and martyrs of old, from whom I claim to be descended, and by whose spirit I ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... awed the ignorant multitude; as in sacred groves a tree might have been made to speak by the simple contrivance of a man concealed within the hollow stem, which to outward appearance would have been considered solid. The devices of priestcraft to bring grist to their mill are not yet obsolete, as will be seen in many ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... greatness was not dreamed of, that was to pour in through this gate which to-day's work was to open. For, not only that fear and hatred of Popery which marked his age, but, already, that American love of liberty, to which priestcraft is so inimical, burned within him. A touch of Winkelried's fervor kindled his eye. If into his breast, and into the breasts of his comrades, the bayonets of the enemy were to be planted, yet should a way be made for ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... I wished to prove the value of Religion, would you think I served it much, if I took as my motto, 'Religion is power?' Would not that be a base and sordid view of its advantages? And would you not say he who regards religion as a power, intends to abuse it as a priestcraft?" ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... supposed to imply speed, never reached lone country places till weeks after they had been printed on their one duodecimo sheet of thin coarse paper. Religion, too, just emerging into glorious light from the darkness of popery, had still her superstitions; and the mantle that priestcraft had contrived to throw over her exquisite, radiant, and simple form, was not then wholly and finally withdrawn. Romanism still hovered in the form ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... woman—playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come—that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... what can be more clear than that all men have an equal right to happiness? Nature made no other distinction than that of higher and lower degrees of power of mind and body. But what mysterious distribution of character has the craft of statesmen, more fatal than priestcraft, introduced? ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... embrace, no matter what the wrong may have been. If you say this is dangerous doctrine, I say it is here. What other meaning can you give to it? At the same time I am astonished to find it here, astonished that priestcraft and the enemy of souls should not have erased it. Sacred truth! Is it not moving to think of all the millions of men who for eighteen hundred years have read this parable, philosophers and peasants, in every climate, and now are we reading it to-day! Is it not moving—nay, awful—to ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... and hesitated so badly over the prayers that one or two worshippers felt sure he had been drinking; which was not the fact. The Widow Copping took no interest in collecting-boxes; and, besides, she could not read. So the innovation missed fire. Moreover, it suggested neither popery nor priestcraft, and only a fool would suspect ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... or God of the Tartars, is composed of such frail materials as mere mortality; contrived, however, by the power of priestcraft, to appear immortal; the succession ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.' A keen sense of honour and respect for personal uprightness, a hatred of cruelty and treachery, created and long maintained in the English Church an intense repugnance against the priestcraft of the Roman hierarchy, feelings which have only died down because the bitter memories of the sixteenth century have at last become dim. A jealous love of liberty, combined with contempt for theories of equality, produced a system of graduated ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... knowledge of any kind was a very dangerous possession, and the truths of science and philosophy, equally with religious ideas other than those in vogue among the multitude, had to seek the protection of obscurity. If this necessity gave designing priestcraft its opportunity, it nevertheless offered the security and silence needed by the thinker and seeker after truth in dark times. Hence there arose in the ancient world, wherever the human mind was alive and spiritual, systems of exoteric and esoteric ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... its morals, the experiment has been made to arouse the attention and excite the enthusiasm of its followers by the adoption of ceremonies and processions; but these are declared to be only the innovations of priestcraft, and the Singhalese, whilst they unite in their celebration, are impatient to explain that such practices are less religious than secular, and that the Perrehera in particular, the chief of their annual festivals, was introduced, not in honour ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... "Yes, that is just it. Sta. Catarina is really haunted; and much as my reason revolts against the idea as superstitious and savouring of priestcraft, yet I must acknowledge I see no way of avoiding the admission. I do not presume to offer any explanations, I only state the fact; and the fact is that to-night one or other of you will, in all human—or unhuman—probability, receive a visit ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... it fell, The pained on earth is pained in hell!" So priestcraft from its altars cursed The mournful ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding the Scripture from the public in popish countries." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. The Church and State have been united, and it is well for us to see it so. We have had to bear the denunciations of these reverend (irreverend) clergymen, as in New York, of late. But if we look ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... secured him from the mortification of continually hearing Dr. Beaumont insist on duties he had no inclination to practice, and condemn faults he did not like to renounce. It is no wonder, therefore, that Humphreys wrought himself into a most patriotic resolution, no longer to submit to tyranny and priestcraft, and to vow that the next time the Doctor admonished him, he would retort with "Ye take too much upon you, ye ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Under the influence of Lady Marney, the worthy vicar had once warmed up into some ebullition of very low church zeal; there was some talk of an evening lecture, the schools were to be remodelled, certain tracts were actually distributed. But Lord Marney soon stopped all this. "No priestcraft at Marney," said this gentle proprietor of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... his soldiers. On the opposite side of the dome, Ranjit Singh, in a plain white dress, is standing erect before his idol at his devotions, with his ministers behind him. On the other two sides he is at his favourite field sports. What strikes one most in all this is the entire absence of priestcraft. He wanted all his revenue for his soldiers; and his tutelary god seems, in consequence, to have been well pleased to dispense with the mediatory services of priests.[17] There are few temples anywhere to be seen in the territories of these Jat chiefs; and, as few of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... studied man merely in books and philosophical treatises; or, in other words, you have been thrashing empty straw. But the film will soon fall from your eyes. We will shortly quit this dirty country of yours, where priestcraft, pedantry, and oppression reign unmolested and undisturbed. I will usher you upon a stage where the passions have a freer scope, and where great energies are ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable assumptions. Indeed, they may think it to be but the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... insincere, because a pagan (as Swinburne was) could have committed suicide had he really felt these things. Swinburne, like most modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating God. Chesterton's note is truer. He knows that the pagan has all the good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Atheism and infidelity. Mr. Draper, in his work entitled "Conflict between Religion and Science," wishes his readers to understand that he uses the term Christianity in the sense of Roman Catholicism. The entire work is one grand scientific effort against popecraft and priestcraft. His work is well worth a reading; but it is to be remembered by all who would do Mr. Draper justice that his great antagonist is the Roman Catholic Church. Will she defend herself against the charge of being in conflict with science? ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee), Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce travell'd by the breeze ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... steeped in the rhetoric and the commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust, vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... disciple of truth, will seek, some more solid grounds for holding it. But it is but too obvious, we fear, that the disposition to enjoin this obsequious mood of mind is prompted by a strong desire to revive the ancient empire of priestcraft and the pretensions of ecclesiastical despotism; to secure readmission to the human mind of extravagant and preposterous claims, which their advocates are sadly conscious rest on no solid foundation. They feel that reason is not with them, it must be against them: and reason therefore ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... and I intend to workout their realization myself. I shall begin by being German myself. I intend to do away with ceremony, priestcraft, and foreign influence. To that intent, my lord chamberlain, you will see that all foreigners are dismissed from the palace, and their places supplied by Germans. My two Italian valets I make over to Porhammer. Nothing but German shall be spoken at court. I will have neither French nor Italian ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... all," I said one day, "the great practical objection still remains unanswered—the clergy? Are we to throw ourselves into their hands after all? Are we, who have been declaiming all our lives against priestcraft, voluntarily to forge again the chains of our slavery to a class whom we neither trust ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... began to moralize about the corrupt morals of the Italian race, and went on to speak of tyranny, priestcraft, slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, primogeniture, brigandage, and ten ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... that there was evil here, I could not endure that my master should be deceived; that one like him, so pure and noble, should respect what, if my suspicions were true, was worse than the ordinary deceptions of priestcraft. I could not tell how far he might be led to countenance, and otherwise support their doings, before he should find cause to repent bitterly of his error. I watched the new procession yet more keenly, if possible, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... liberty will, we doubt not, pardon that long digression into which we were led at the close of the last chapter, to prevent our history from being applied to the use of the most pernicious doctrine which priestcraft had ever the wickedness ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... dire need is not at all the confederacy of augurs which Mr. Froude, perhaps in recollection of his former profession, so glibly suggests, with an esoteric creed of their own, "crystallized into shape" for profession before the public. The day of priestcraft being now numbered with the things that were, the exploitation of those outside of the sacerdotal circle is no longer possible. Therefore the religion of mere talk, however metaphysical and profound; the religion of scenic display, except such display ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... himself well cared for. No children nor wives cluttered the devil devil doctor's house. Several old women, a fly-flapping girl of eleven, and two young men who had graduated from the canoe house of the youths and who were studying priestcraft under the master, composed the household and waited upon Jerry. Food of the choicest was his. After Agno had eaten first-cut of pig, Jerry was served second. Even the two acolytes and the fly-flapping maid ate after him, leaving the debris for the several ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... sufficiently distinguished from the Western. The western combination against real Christianity never attained to power by successful conquest of the nations; but on the contrary by chicanery, insidious policy, flattery of princes and priestcraft. This enemy is described with sufficient accuracy and peculiar precision in the subsequent part of the Apocalypse. Prophecy has a determinate meaning; and we are not at liberty to give loose reins to our imagination: otherwise we shall bewilder, rather than satisfy ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... of his existence; civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secure and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and the French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... and sublimity of its language, or in the facility with which it treats the most abtruse and difficult subjects. It is, without exception, the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced, in the investigation of morals and theology—in the destruction of priestcraft and superstition —and in developing the sources of all those passions and prejudices which have proved so fatal to the tranquillity of ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... Protestantism has greatly modified Catholicism. But it is worse off than any other great pagan field in that it is dominated by a single mighty hierarchy—the mightiest known in history. For centuries priestcraft has had everything its own way all over the continent, and is now at last yielding to outside ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... for the universal benefit, that Nature acts, and Necessity speeds on her awful course. This is the morality of the dread agents of the world—it is mine, who am their creature. I would preserve the delusions of priestcraft, for they are serviceable to the multitude; I would impart to man the arts I discover, the sciences I perfect; I would speed the vast career of civilizing lore: in this I serve the mass, I fulfill the general law, I execute the great ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... in our religious ceremonies. Within Christianity itself are systems of priestcraft where the individual believer has no glad, free access to his Father's presence, but where his approach must be mediated by a priestly ritual, his forgiveness assured by a priestly declaration, his salvation sealed by a priestly sacrament. This idea that God must be approached ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... let love always be our flag-staff. Let us be jealous for the truth, but let it be a godly, that is to say, a loving jealousy. When we contend for purity of doctrine and for purity of worship, when we protest against popery and priestcraft, when we resist rationalism and infidelity, when we do battle now for national religion, as we call it, and now for the freedom of the church, let us do it all in love to all men, else we had better not do it at all. If we cannot do it with clean and all-men-loving hearts, let us leave all debate ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... which then governed human action; for controverted points of religion (such as belief in the Real Presence) had ceased to be a principle of human action. He maintained that the cause of the Pope, as a political force, was as dead as that of the Stuarts; that priestcraft was a superannuated folly; and that in Ireland a new political religion had arisen, superseding all influence of priest and parson, and burying for ever theological discord in the love of civil and religious liberty. Clare, who was not only a shrewder observer but a much more deeply ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins—nor any other kind of craft. He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman; that is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... had imbibed a bitter hatred for the land indelibly associated with such haughty privileges for the rich and such contemptuous disdain for the poor. He had not even the consolation of having received an education. His nature revolted at the religious formalism of priestcraft; his mind turned in disgust from the scholastic husks of its superficial knowledge. What he had learned came from inborn capacity, from desultory reading, and from the untutored imaginings of his garden at Brienne, his cave at Ajaccio, or his barrack chambers. What more plausible ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... remind him that the Catholics are singularly fortunate in England compared with the religious freedom or tolerance enjoyed by Protestants in Catholic countries—in Italy for instance, or in Spain. As for "bigotry," let him look only at Catholic France during the reign of priestcraft there, where an actor of the position of Talma, writing with reference to a proposed monument to his English brother, John Kemble, could add by way of shameful contrast, "Je serai trop heureux ici si les pretres me laissent une tombe ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... combated, provided the army was constituted on the principles of fraternity and equality; but the passion of my life, to which I have sacrificed military position, and perhaps," he added in a lower tone, "perhaps even military fame, has been to destroy priestcraft, and, so long as the pope rules in ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the landowner who is no longer powerful enough to; set the ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my winter-garden. I turn my horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle—a carpet at which Nature has been at work ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... that the success of Christianity is not measured by hospitals. Rather, their continuance attests the lamentable failure of its orthodox misinterpretation. I have been a priest, Doctor. I do not want to see this splendid country forced into the iron shackles of priestcraft." ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... be quite evident that the principle of knightly honor has no essential and spontaneous origin in human nature. It is an artificial product, and its source is not hard to find. Its existence obviously dates from the time when people used their fists more than their heads, when priestcraft had enchained the human intellect, the much bepraised Middle Age, with its system of chivalry. That was the time when people let the Almighty not only care for them but judge for them too; when difficult cases were decided ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of massive lead, and thus thrown into prison, where he was starved to death beneath the crushing weight. We sometimes hear of the cruelties of the Inquisition, of the barbarity of the Irish, of the tyranny of priestcraft; but such cruelties, barbarities, and tyrannies, however highly painted, pale before the savage vengeance which English kings have exercised, on the slightest provocation, towards their unfortunate subjects. But we ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... its own sake, made use of it as a cord by which to draw the simpletons after them; that there were many religions in this world, all of which had been turned to excellent account by the priesthood; but that the one the best adapted for the purposes of priestcraft was the popish, which, he said, was the oldest in the world and the best calculated to endure. On my inquiring what he meant by saying the popish religion was the oldest in the world, whereas there could be no doubt that the Greek ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... owe to the governed, and which, as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft? We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... But pure monotheism existed only among the Jews. All other nations had a variety of gods and peculiar forms of worship. In most of the pagan religions there were elements of truth and beauty, but they lacked in ethical principles and in moral application to life. Most of their priestcraft was a vulgar imposition upon the ignorance and credulity of the common people. The prevailing philosophies—which, among the more enlightened, took the place of religion—were the Grecian, adopted also by the Romans, and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... had produced a schism in the Gallican church, and well nigh involved that country in civil war and confusion. It was opposed by the parliaments and lay tribunals of the kingdom; but many bishops, and the Jesuits in general, were its most strenuous assertors. All the artifices of priestcraft were practised on both sides to inflame the enthusiasm, and manage the superstition of the people. Pretended miracles were wrought at the tomb of abbe Paris, who had died without accepting the bull, consequently was declared damned by the abettors ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... fashion so wholly unexpected as to be divine,—as great fires, great famines, and great wars are called divine,—a mighty hand had been stretched out to take away the remaining incubus of superstition, priestcraft, and bigotry under which England had hitherto been labouring. The proposed disestablishment of the State Church of England was, of course, the subject of this ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... peculiar appanage of their own class. They invented endless fables which gave rise to Mythology. They ruled the people by the might of superstition, and acquired wealth, honor, and power, for themselves.[17] We arrive then at nearly the culminating point of Egyptian priestcraft, the days of "wise men," "sorcerers," and "magicians."[18] Such men ever {20} have, and we presume ever will employ secrecy as the chief element of their clever jugglery. Mankind love to be deceived. Let an Adrian, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... equality which is implicit in all the "Liberalizing" movements of the world. In the place of an essential equality, distorted only by tradition and early training, by the artifices of those devils of the Liberal cosmogony, "kingcraft" and "priestcraft," an equality as little affected by colour as the equality of a black chess pawn and a white, we discover that all men are individual and unique, and, through long ranges of comparison, superior and inferior upon countless scores. It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... impassioned love, and has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has not only been the highest pattern of virtue, but the highest incentive of practice: amid all the sins and failing; amid all the priestcraft, the persecution and fanaticism which have defaced the church, it has preserved IN THE CHARACTER OF ITS FOUNDER AN ENDURING PRINCIPLE OF REGENERATION." If such be the fountain let the ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... it,—to demand it,—to beg that you may be permitted to found a colony among them,—why, in that case, come to me again, and I will grant you the land. I am not prejudiced one way or the other, but I will not hand over any of my subjects to the influence of priestcraft, so long as they desire me to defend ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... years the government seemed to become conscious of the great number of beggars in Rome, and of the reproach they offered to the wise and paternal regulations of the priestcraft. Accordingly, for a short time, they carried on a move in the right direction, which had been begun by the Triumvirate of 1849, during their short career. Some hundreds of the beggars were hired at the rate of a few baiocchi a day to carry on excavations in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced to agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with each other. These scholars have further shown the two accounts to be not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but evidently fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies, accepted in good faith and brought together for the noblest of purposes by those who put in order the first of our ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Churchdom.— N. church, churchdom; ministry, apostleship[obs3], priesthood, prelacy, hierarch[obs3], church government, christendom, pale of the church. clericalism, sacerdotalism[obs3], episcopalianism, ultramontanism[obs3]; theocracy; ecclesiology[obs3], ecclesiologist[obs3]; priestcraft[obs3], odium theologicum[Lat]. monachism[obs3], monachy[obs3]; monasticism, monkhood[obs3]. [Ecclesiastical offices and dignities] pontificate, primacy, archbishopric[obs3], archiepiscopacy[obs3]; prelacy; bishopric, bishopdom[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and gave out oracular responses in seven verses, and that these sounds were heard till the fourth century after Christ. These phenomena, attested by many ancient and modern writers, are variously accounted for by the learned, as priestcraft, peculiar construction, escape of rarified air, &c. This statue is in excellent preservation. The head is of rose-colored granite, and the rest of a kind of black stone. Two other colossal statues, about fifty feet high, are ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... late been used as an argument against reform. It proves nothing against reform. It proves only this, that laws have no magical, no supernatural, virtue; that laws do not act like Aladdin's lamp or Prince Ahmed's apple; that priestcraft, that ignorance, that the rage of contending factions, may make good institutions useless; that intelligence, sobriety, industry, moral freedom, firm union, may supply in a great measure the defects of the worst representative system. A people whose education and habits are such that, in every ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... stay. My determination is strengthening, my mission is pure; no harm can come to thee. I think not of myself. Listen! There will come a time when thou wilt be free from this thraldom of priestcraft, when that spirit of thine will live on in the Elysian. I will live well and ever love thee, and this is my story to-night. I will love thee as lasting as the sun, wait on for thy emancipation, and meet thee in the spirit-world. ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... lawnsleeves, on one hand, and Miss Sophia, with no lawn about her, on the other, which would you be for?' 'For both, to be sure,' cried the chaplain.—'Right Frank,' cried the 'Squire; 'for may this glass suffocate me but a fine girl is worth all the priestcraft in the creation. For what are tythes and tricks but an imposition, all a confounded imposture, and I can prove it.'—'I wish you would,' cried my son Moses, 'and I think,' continued he, 'that I should be able to answer you.'—'Very well, Sir,' ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, 95 And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Rouen physicians treated with utter scorn this surgeon, this barber fellow, this mere sawbones. The Court gave him no encouragement. Still, he held on his way in a treatise which will live yet. He accepts this battle of science against priestcraft, declaring, as Wyer did in the sixteenth century, that "in all such matters the right judge is not the priest but the man of science." With great difficulty he found some one bold enough to print, but no one willing to sell his little work. ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... in His human life to those who have never understood Him; to save the perishing, and bind them as with golden chains to the feet of God. They are battling with error, and breaking up the iron systems of priestcraft, inhumanity, and wrong, which have enslaved men for ages, and have shut off from them the light and love of their Heavenly Father. They are staying the progress of crime; they lay the hand of law on the slaveholder; they appeal to the drunkard; they clear out the dens of vice; and to the hopeless ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... is a mistake to talk, as some do, of the power of the Russian Church, or of "priestcraft." The Church has little political power or social prestige. It is the power of religion, not that of ecclesiastical institutions, which is the arresting fact about modern Russia. It is not so much that Russia has a church, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... contrary to its teachings as she understands them. We men may think what we please, but we have confidence in a woman who looks as she does now. She is not in the least inclined to devotional rhapsodies or to subserviency to priestcraft, like so many women abroad. She merely appears to recognize a divine power as she accepts nature, only more reverently and consciously. I suppose I am an agnostic as much as anything, yet I should only be too glad to have ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... clerical—the power of clerks, arises; the might of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force embodied, as often before, as priestcraft—the strength of priests: craft meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue. This great force, too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes malignant. Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing penitent ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... two approximate, and each helps to restore the balance and comes a little nearer to a final equilibrium. The error of the French philosophers had been their negative and purely critical tendency. They had thought that it was enough to sweep away superstition, priestcraft, and despotism, and that no constructive process was necessary. They had not perceived the necessity of social discipline, of loyalty to rulers, or of patriotic feeling among the subjects. They had, therefore, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... singular papers among these fragments. One title of a work is "Priesthood without Priestcraft; or Superstition distinguished from Religion, Dominion from Order, and Bigotry from Reason, in the most principal Controversies about Church government, which at present divide and deform Christianity." He has composed "A Psalm before Sermon in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... shall be the duty of all brethren of this benevolent band, in their becoming members of this Christian (!) fraternity, to deny the principles of the book called the Bible, to be other than the work of priestcraft, got up to delude the weaker portion of mankind, and whose principles have been carried out to the uttermost parts of the earth, until even the heathen have suffered by the base intrigue of missionaries, of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... rebuke. ... The thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter the fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical perversion of the facts of life, and a preparation of the mind for the seeds of Priestcraft. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... when inhaling the fumes of some intoxicating drug or powerful gas or vapour, or drinking some beverage which produced a temporary suspension of the reason, the mind of the enquirer was predisposed to feverish dreams:[21] if priestcraft were concerned in the interpretation of such dreams, or eliciting senses from the wild effusions of the disordered brain of the Pythoness, Science presided over the investigation of the causes of this phrenzy, and the advantages which the Thaumaturgists might ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune. This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they thought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different. They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could be explained by "Wanderlust" was current about twenty years ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." The taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days," "Snow-Bound," "Ramoth Hill," and "Telling ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... pay for it, but they like to have the handling of the article for which they pay. As the descendants of Puritans and other godly Protestants, they will submit to religious teaching, but as republicans they will have no priestcraft. The French at their revolution had the latter feeling without the former, and were therefore consistent with themselves in abolishing all worship. The Americans desire to do the same thing politically, but infidelity has had no charms for them. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... great advantage proposed by the abolishing of Christianity is, that it would very much enlarge and establish liberty of conscience, that great bulwark of our nation, and of the Protestant Religion, which is still too much limited by priestcraft, notwithstanding all the good intentions of the legislature, as we have lately found by a severe instance. For it is confidently reported, that two young gentlemen of real hopes, bright wit, and profound judgment, who upon ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... administration, and a bursting energy which manifested itself in a multitude of ways—in literature, in commerce, in politics, in scientific thought. And all this had come into existence in a nation which had curbed the power of the monarchy, done away with priestcraft, established the liberty of the Press, set its face against every kind of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and, through the means of free institutions, taken up the task of governing itself. The inference was obvious: in France also, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... in the middle of summer. As a mere religions observance this same fast, enjoined by Muhammad, is the most absurd, the most demoralizing, and the most hurtful to health that ever was invented by priestcraft. The people are forced to starve themselves during the whole day, and consequently they overeat themselves during the whole night, when they ought to be asleep in their beds, as nature intended. Hence they fall by thousands an easy prey to ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... marked the breaking down of the boundaries which held it firm in the religious mores. The Babylonian custom described by Herodotus seems to be a variation by which every woman was held bound to the goddess. Then sensuality, priestcraft, greed, and frivolity easily used such a custom until it became a root of corruption. This is what happened, and forms of the custom which had no sense but the gratification of licentiousness spread ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... name of Diana Vaughan, and to this we owe most of the revelations. Furthermore, with the death of Albert Pike the cultus of Lucifer is said to have undergone a significant transfiguration. For him the conception of Satan was a blasphemous fiction, devised by Adonaite priestcraft to obscure the veridic lustre which inheres in the angel of the morning-star; but this view represented, as it is said, rather the private opinion of the Masonic pontiff, impressed by his strong personality on the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... eyes brightened faintly. In his desolate position, Father Benwell was the one friend on whom he could rely. Penrose was far away; the Lorings had helped to keep him deceived; Major Hynd had openly pitied and despised him as a victim to priestcraft. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin; When man on many multiplied his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly confined; When nature prompted, and no law denied Promiscuous use of concubine and bride; Then Israel's monarch after Heaven's own heart, His vigorous ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Chaldean Magic, 226, 238.] Moses appears to have been very fond of this particular miracle. It is mentioned as having been effective here at Taberah, and it was the supposed weapon employed to suppress Korah's rebellion. Moses was indeed a powerful enchanter. His relations with all the priestcraft of central Asia were intimate, and if the Magi had secrets which were likely to be of use to him in maintaining his position among the Jews, the inference is that he would certainly have used them to the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... prelates of the Anglican Church in the Queen's reign has not hesitated to assert that the tenets against which Lord John Russell protested in the Durham Letter were, in his judgment, of a kind which are 'destructive of all reasonable faith, and reduce worship to a mere belief in spells and priestcraft.' Cardinal Vaughan, it is needless to say, does not sympathise with such a view. He, however, has opinions on the subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address at Preston on September ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... to right of them, M. D.'s to left of them, Priestcraft in front of them, Volleyed and thundered! [10] Into the jaws of hate, Out through the door of Love, On to the blest above, Marched the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... years of age, Herbert Spencer leaves behind him an enduring monument such as few men have been able to build for themselves. He helped to rid the world of superstition and to destroy priestcraft; he put the idea of a God-direction of the world, and its counterpart, the eternal subjection and the dependence of man, into the waste paper basket of history. He cleared the way for the feet of the army ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... thing can be done in many forms besides this. "I am the last man to mention party politics; but when I see the Empire rent in pieces by irresponsible Radicals," etc. "In this hall we welcome all creeds. We have no hostility against any honest belief; but only against that black priestcraft and superstition which can accept such a doctrine as," etc. "I would not say one word that could ruffle our relations with Germany. But this I will say; that when I see ceaseless and unscrupulous armament," etc. Please don't do it. Decide to make a remark or not to make ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... a question of a different kind whether the sacerdotal spirit which has of late years so largely spread in the English Church can extend without producing a violent disruption. To cut the tap roots of priestcraft was one of the main aims and objects of the Reformation, and, for reasons I have already stated, I do not believe that the party which would re-establish it has by any means the strength that has been attributed to it. It is true that the Broad Church party, though ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... teocalli. There Father Olmedo celebrated Mass, and the Te Deum was chanted by the soldiers, side by side with the sacrificial stone; the abominable war-god's image, and all the attendant machinery of its savage priestcraft. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... and the earth beneath had been put into requisition for prodigies.[15] The soothsayers were always well pleased to declare that there had been some neglect of the gods. It is in the nature of things that the superstitious tendencies of mankind shall fall a prey to priestcraft. The quarrels between Cicero and Clodius were as full of life as ever. In this year, Clodius being AEdile, there had come on debates as to a law passed by Caesar as Consul, in opposition to Bibulus, for the distribution of lands among the citizens. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... dinner; they do not insist upon a persistent gnawing in honour of the feast. But these musical people! their god is their piano. They set up an idol in their salon, and command all the world to bow down to it. They found a priestcraft of pianists, and an Inquisition of fiddlers. When I came away they were all crowded round a violin, the women especially. They could not have fussed more if it had been a baby. They stroked it and admired its figure. It had rather a fashionable figure, ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... fawning dog," the sage satanic said, "Wags not his tail for me but for my bread. Brains rule to day as they have ruled for aye, And craft grown craftier in this modern day Still rides the fools, but in a craftier way; And priestcraft lingers and survives its use; What was a blessing once is now abuse: Grown fat and arrogant on power and pelf, The old-time shepherd has become a wolf And only feeds his flocks to feast himself. To clink of coin the pious juggler jumps, For still he thinks, as in the days of old, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the Kingdom of heaven into a doctrine of immortality and deification, prophecy into a learned exegesis and theological science, the bearers of the spirit into clerics, the brethren into laity held in tutelage, miracles and healings into nothing, or into priestcraft, the fervent prayers into a solemn ritual, renunciation of the world into a jealous dominion over the world, the "spirit" ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Catholics of Northumberland as a worthy and upright man. Yet Father Vaughan did not altogether lack those peculiarities which distinguish his order. There hung about him an air of mystery, which, in Protestant eyes, savoured of priestcraft. The natives (such they might be well termed) of Osbaldistone Hall looked up to him with much more fear, or at least more awe, than affection. His condemnation of their revels was evident, from their being discontinued ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the lurking suspicion that the reason the variant is more intelligible is that its inventor did not understand the original. As to real elucidation of other sort by the later texts, in the minutiae of the outer world, in details of priestcraft, one may trust early tradition tentatively, just as one does late commentators, but in respect of ideas tradition is as apt to mislead as to lead well. The cleft between the theology of the Rig Veda and that ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... contemporaries, and he has been consigned to infamy by posterity. As he approached the spirit land he was tortured with the dread of the scenes which he might encounter there. His crimes had condemned thousands to death and other thousands to live-long woe. He sought by priestcraft, and penances, and monastic vows, and garments of sackcloth, to efface the stains of a soul crimsoned with crime. He died, and his guilty spirit passed away to meet ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... unison with himself even when absent. Now a boundary is established before which liberty must halt; a venerable, hallowed line, towards which all the various conflicting inclinations of the will must finally converge. The common aim of despotism and of priestcraft is uniformity, and uniformity is a necessary expedient of human poverty and imperfection. Philip became a greater despot than his father because his mind was more contracted, or, in other words, he was forced to adhere the more scrupulously ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... value of his service. If this one brave man had not squarely and defiantly met the follies and madness, the priestcraft and fanaticism, of his day; if they had been allowed to continue to sway Courts and Juries; if the pulpit and the press had continued to throw combustibles through society, and, in every way, inflame the ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... Brahmans, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, telling of a strange young teacher who appeared among them, who taught marvelous truths and who aroused great opposition among the priests of the various religions of India and Persia, owing to his preaching against priestcraft and formalism, and also by his bitter opposition to all forms of caste distinctions and restrictions. And this, too, is in accord with the occult legends which teach that from about the age of twenty-one until the age of nearly thirty years Jesus pursued a ministry ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
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