"Monastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glance these petitions seem scarcely worthy of serious consideration; but a closer study of their contents shows us that we possess in them documents of the greatest value in the history of manners. They prove that the great Monastic Idea—which under the influence of Christianity grew to be of such vast moral and historical significance—first struck root in one of the centres of heathen religious practices; besides affording us a quite unexpected insight into the internal life ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... The monastic schools arose in the fifth century to supplant the Romano-Hellenic schools. Chief among the founders in the West was Benedict, who in 428 A. D. founded a monastery on Monte Cassino, near Naples. "He had educational ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... fine vellum, probably between the fourth and sixth centuries, and is believed to be the most ancient manuscript of the Greek Bible now extant. Many of the other manuscripts came into the royal collection at the time when the monastic institutions of Britain were destroyed; and some of them still retain upon their spare leaves the honest and hearty anathemas which the donors denounced against those who should alienate or remove the respective volumes from the places in which they had ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... slowly dawn'd the day,' [d] Rose on her couch, and gaz'd her soul away. Her eyes had bless'd the beacon's glimmering height, That faintly tipt the feathery surge with light; But now the morn with orient hues pourtray'd Each castled cliff, and brown monastic shade: All touch'd the talisman's resistless spring, And lo, what busy tribes were instant on the wing! Thus kindred objects kindred thoughts inspire, As summer-clouds flash forth electric fire. [f] And hence this spot gives back the joys ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... pre-eminently in the sublime philosophy of Nature. It figures also in the page of man's history: its early celebrity is recognised in the chronicles of olden France and England; and it promises note in the history of our own times; since to this monastic spot will the political balance of France, in all probability, exile the person of the ambitious Polignac, ex-minister of France. The reader will perhaps suspect the political concatenation of Lulworth Castle, the Hotel de Ville, and the Palais Royal in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... she had not completely closed behind her. He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food. There was a difference none the less, between his captivity and Charlotte's—the difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in his starting, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... any indecorum in a young girl of Cressy's years and antecedents being intrusted to the teachings of a young man scarcely her senior. Notwithstanding the attitude which Mr. Ford had been pleased to assume towards her, this implied compliment to his supposed monastic vocations affected him almost as uncomfortably as the "Star's" extravagant eulogium. He was obliged to recall certain foolish experiences of his own to enable him to rise superior to this presumption ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... securely founded, bearing the moss of four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of dynasties, and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly destructive potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic privileges of the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the altering mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to have struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with full authority, they have not always apt instruments. A politician, to do great things, looks for a POWER, what our workmen call a PURCHASE; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great POWER for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacks the cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already preaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against the monastic vows and celibacy of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... monuments which stud the soil of Europe. Those artists of genius who, like those of Greece, knew how to speak to the populace without being common, were for the most part humble workmen; they found their inspiration not in the formulas of the masters of monastic art, but in constant communion with the very soul of the nation. Therefore this renascence, in its most profound features, concerns less the archaeology or the architecture than the history of ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... at Thornleigh a little more than a week, when Mr. Darrell one morning proposed a drive to a place called Cumber Priory, which was one of the show-houses of the neighbourhood. It was a very old place, he said, and had been one of the earliest monastic settlements in that part of the country. Milly and her father and her cousin had been there a great many times, and the visit was proposed for the gratification of ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... apparent than real; for the other person is in plain view all the time, and the Soliloquy would have no point were it not for the peaceful activities of Friar Lawrence. This poem, while it deals ostensibly with the lives of only two monks, gives us a glimpse into the whole monastic system. When a number of men retired into a monastery and shut out the world forever, certain sins and ambitions were annihilated, while others were enormously magnified. All outside interests vanished; but sin remained, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... this artist were in the Certosa of Florence; none such exist there now. His earliest extant performances, in considerable number, are at Cortona, whither he was sent during his novitiate, and here apparently he spent all the opening years of his monastic life. His first works executed in fresco were probably those, now destroyed, which he painted in the convent of S. Domenico in this city; as a fresco-painter, he may have worked under, or as a follower ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... faithful in no uncertain manner, so that they know in what place the martyrs and the holy virgins who have departed this life are commemorated in the Sacrament of the Altar." By this we are given to understand that martyrdom, and also the monastic ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... were 176 schools for girls in which upwards of 2000 pupils were taught. There are three circles—Eastern, Central and Upper Burma. For the special supervision and encouragement of indigenous primary education in monastic and in lay schools, each circle of inspection is divided into sub-circles corresponding with one or more of the civil districts, and each sub-circle is placed under a deputy-inspector or a sub-inspector of schools. There are nine standards of instruction, and the classes in schools ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... prosperous. From the cursory view which I enjoyed of its interior, I of course cannot be expected to know much of its economy. I could not, however, fall to be struck with the order, neatness, and system which pervaded it. There was, however, an air of severe monastic discipline, though I am far from asserting that such actually existed. We were attended throughout by the sub-rector, the principal being absent. Of all the curiosities of this college, the most remarkable is the picture gallery, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... doom than excommunication, and a rigorous penitential seclusion during life within the walls of a monastery, were hurled against such as married, or used their conjugal privilege, or laid down the habit. If, however, the married penitents were very young at the time he or she entered on the monastic obligation, in case of recovery the bishop had power to permit the use of matrimony a certain number of years. This was called an indulgence or dispensation, the debitum conjugale being totally annihilated by the obligations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... magnificent sea of turrets and battlements below! How gladly should learned men have laid aside for a few hours Pindar's "Odes" and Aristotle's "Ethics," to escort the author of "Cecilia" from college to college! What neat little banquets would she have found set out in their monastic cells! With what eagerness would pictures, medals, and illuminated missals have been brought forth from the most mysterious cabinets for her amusement! How much she would have had to hear and to tell about Johnson, as she walked over Pembroke, and about Reynolds, in the antechapel of New college. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... years old, his father died; and an uncle, considering the widowed solitariness and helplessness of the mother, urged him to renounce the monastic life, and return to her, but the boy replied, "I did not quit the family in compliance with my father's wishes, but because I wished to be far from the dust and vulgar ways of life. This is why I choose monkhood." The uncle approved ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... she replied, but she, no more than the boy down below, could tell me the name of the strange-looking hill across the valley. This second Spytty or monastic hospital, which I had come to, looked in every respect an inferior place to the first. Whatever its former state might have been, nothing but dirt and wretchedness were now visible. Having reached the top of the hill I entered upon a wild moory region. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the mysterious sea. It perplexed his dazed, disturbed mind to think that if such an antagonistic element could exist within a dozen miles of the Mission, and he not know it, could not such an atmosphere have been around him, even in his monastic isolation, and he remain blind to it? Had he really lived in the world without knowing it? Had it been in his blood? Had it impelled him ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... with advantage, s. v. "Marescallus;" the "u," which perhaps was your correspondent's difficulty, being often written for "l," upon phonotypic principles. It was anciently the practice to apportion the revenues of royal and great monastic establishments to some specific branch of the expenditure; and as the profits of certain manors, &c., are often described as belonging to the "Infirmaria," the "Camera Abbatis," &c., so, in the instance referred to by "D.S." the lands at Cumpton and Little Ongar were ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... demand for them very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... knowledge of the Christian religion. But the cross was a religious emblem of the greatest antiquity, both in Syria and Egypt, and baptism was a pre-Christian rite. This and other observances, such as auricular confession and monastic institutions, were so mixed up with the worship of a great number of gods, at the head of which was the worship of the sun, and were associated with such horrid human sacrifices and pagan ceremonials, that ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Addolorata of the seventeenth century. He longed to be back in Chatsea. He was dismayed at the prospect of one day perhaps having to cope with this quality of devotion. He shuddered at the thought, and for the first time he wondered if he had not a vocation for the monastic life. But was it a vocation if one longed to escape the world? Must not a true vocation be a longing to draw nearer to God? Oh, this nauseating bouquet of feminine perfumes . . . it was impossible to pay ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... was practised chiefly by monastic artists, it retained the archaic and traditional elements. When trained carvers from secular life began to take the chisel, the spirit of the world entered in. For a time this was a marked improvement: later the pendulum swung too far, and decadence ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true religion in a state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us but of the heart." If he had ever thought of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed the real Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed, might not this be the time when his thoughts took that direction? If so, the impulse came indirectly, at ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Some think that the god was ideally landlord of all the village land and that every title represented simply the rental of the land from the nominal owner. We do indeed find the temples as owners of vast estates and, like monastic institutions in the Middle Ages, letting lands and houses. To the temples poor men went for temporary accommodation for sowing, for wages at harvest-time, and for ransom from the enemy. These they had a right by custom to receive without paying interest. Undoubtedly the temples became the first ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... farmer. Yet at one time it was one of the richest and most extensive monasteries in England. On our return to Shrewsbury, we passed through Much Wenlock, a very ancient town, which also has its ruined abbey. It is remarkable how thickly these monastic institutions were at one time scattered over the Kingdom, and when one considers what such elaborate establishments must have cost to build and to maintain, it is easy to understand why, in the ages of church supremacy, the common people ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... author of "The Fruit Gardener," to which he has prefixed an interesting Preface on the Fruit Gardens of the Ancients. In this Preface he also relates the origin of fruit gardens, by the hermits, and monastic orders. In his Introduction, he says, that "every kind of fruit tree seems to contend in spring, who shall best entertain the possessor with the beauty of their blossoms. Mankind are always happy with the prospect of plenty; in ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... brother of any religious order, but especially one of certain monastic orders of the ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... recent days of Meiji the precincts of the Shiba San-en-zan Zo[u]jo[u]ji, now known more particularly as the most accessible of the burial places of the Tokugawa Sho[u]gun, were an excellent example of the old monastic establishments. The main temple with its wide grounds was completely girdled by a succession of halls or monastic foundations, some of which were famed through the land for their theological teaching of the principles of the Jo[u]do[u] sect. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... same idea, and the idea once expressed, there was no desire to extend the circle of figures or to alter their wretched appearance. The same uncouth forms return with a killing monotony. Centuries do not change them. The uniformity of monastic life by no means tended to relax the inflexibility of invention. Religion, not art, was the sculptor's or the painter's object; his production was a creation of faith, not of beauty. Such is the character of almost all the carvings in wood and stone which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... letters followed; and at length it was arranged that Mr. Maximilian Wyndham should take up his residence at my monastic abode for one year. He was to keep a table, and an establishment of servants, at his own cost; was to have an apartment of some dozen or so of rooms; the unrestricted use of the library; with some other public privileges willingly conceded by the magistracy ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... When these things reached the ears of the Emperor, wavering between hope and fear, Julian became very anxious to lull the suspicion that had been awakened, and he who was at first truly a Christian then became one in pretence. Shaved to the very skin, he pretended to live the monastic life; and while in private he pursued philosophical studies, in public he read the sacred writings of the Christian Church. Moreover, he was appointed reader of the church in Nicomedia. Thus by these pretexts he escaped the Emperor's displeasure. Now he did all this ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... repeated apparition of the gentle sex (though by no means under its loveliest guise) had still an agreeable effect in modifying my ideas of an institution which I had supposed to be of a stern and monastic character. She asked whether I wished to see the hospital, and said that the porter, whose office it was to attend to visitors, was dead, and would be buried that very day, so that the whole establishment could not conveniently be shown me. She kindly invited me, however, to visit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... over special times like Sundays, holy days, and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons like priests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example of centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic rather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse it of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little government machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... explain such a case as that of the monastic opinion of Dagobert the Second, king of the Franks. We are told in the same narrative, seemingly without any great sense of incongruity, how he murdered his own relations and guests, and who not?—how he massacred 9000 Bulgars to ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... it—it will make me 'feel' my dependence on the Almighty, and it will prevent my affections from being made earthly altogether. I praise God in all things, and feel that to His grace alone it is owing that I am 'enabled' to praise Him in all things. You think my scheme 'monastic rather than Christian'. Can he be deemed monastic who is married, and employed in rearing his children?—who 'personally' preaches the truth to his friends and neighbours, and who endeavours to instruct tho' Absent by the Press? In what line of Life could I be more 'actively' employed? and ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... long ago, to visit a celebrated monastic college in South Italy, where they educated, not ordinary mortals, but only young men of noble birth; and here I took particular care in inspecting the library, judging that, though the scholars need not learn all that was there, yet that no department of knowledge ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... the market-gardening, but especially the villas, so representative of a sleepy smug materialism.... Oh, it is horrible; I cannot think of Sussex without a revulsion of feeling. Sussex is utterly opposed to the monastic spirit. Why, even the downs are easy, yes, easy as one of the upholsterer's armchairs of the villa residences. And the aspect of the county tallies exactly with the state of soul of its people. In that southern county all is soft and lascivious; there is no wildness, none of that scenical grandeur ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... sacrilege when he caused all the monasteries of England to be harried. But no harm was done to the monks or to their possessions. The holy houses were searched for the hoards which the rich men of England, fearing the new king, had laid up in the monastic treasuries. William looked on these hoards as part of the forfeited goods of rebels, and carried them off during the Lent of 1070. This done, he sat steadily down to the reform ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... lead a life almost monastic; for as the monks had nothing in the world to do but when they had said their prayers at stated hours to employ themselves in instructive studies, no more have these. They are divided into three tables: the first is called the Fellows' ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... monastic curates are immediately subject to their provincial superior, in the character of friars but depend on the diocesan bishop in their quality of parish priests; and in like manner obey their own provincial vicars, as well as those of the bishop. They are alternately eligible to the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... missionaries were monks as well as preachers. The Christians of those days considered the monastic life to be the highest. In the early days of the Church, when the world was full of vice and cruelty, it seemed hardly possible to live in the world without being dragged down to its wickedness. Men and women, therefore, who wished to keep themselves ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... themselves holy only when every affection and desire which nature had planted in their breasts had been plucked up by the roots." (Jesuitism, by the Reverend J.A. Wylie, Ll.D.) This statement is simply a shade less true of the other monastic orders. ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... musicians, among them some very rare names and faces. Mr. Elsner has continued this collection down to the present time; also the portraits of Liszt, Thalberg, Chopin, and Clara Wieck shine down from the old monastic walls. I had scarcely looked about me in this large company for a few minutes, when the door of the adjoining room opened, and a man of medium height (not to say little), somewhat stout, with a round, friendly countenance, grey hair, but very lively eyes, enveloped in a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... in order of date, the Paris house occupies a prominent position in the annals of the Ursulines, as their first monastery. As we have already more than once observed, the Sisters were not originally cloistered, bound by vows or monastic observances, or even irrevocably consecrated to their manner of life, but the time was come when by the adoption of these essential obligations, the Society, as St. Angela herself had called it, would receive its full ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... vast and venerable, With more of the monastic than has been Elsewhere preserved: the cloisters still were stable, The cells, too, and Refectory, I ween: An exquisite small chapel had been able, Still unimpaired, to decorate the scene; The rest had been reformed, replaced, or sunk, And spoke more of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... care to her. Such being her disposition, it was by no means matter of joy to her when she found that Madeline was laying out for herself little ways of life, tending in some slight degree to the monastic. Nothing was said about it, but she fancied that Madeline had doffed a ribbon or two in her usual evening attire. That she read during certain fixed hours in the morning was very manifest. As to that daily afternoon service at four ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... mediaeval antiquities came into fashion. Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating Byron's predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there, were on the walls. This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's chamber, in the monastic time. Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the ghostly monk, whom Byron introduces into Don Juan, is said to have his lurking-place. It is fitted up in the same style as Byron's, and used to be occupied by his valet ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Eucharist, in which cakes marked with the Tau (an Egyptian form of cross) were eaten, the people calling them the flesh of their God. These exactly resemble the sacred cakes of Egypt and other eastern nations. Like these nations too, the people of the new world had monastic orders, male and female, in which broken vows were punished with death. Like the Egyptians they embalmed their dead, they worshipped sun, moon, and planets, but over and above these adored a Deity "omnipresent, who ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... A zealous Correspondent, P.Q., whose contribution appears in the next page, describes this gateway as resembling St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, which Mr. Malcom thinks "one of the most perfect remains of monastic buildings in London." It consists of one capacious arch, with an arched mullioned window in the centre above it; and is flanked by two square towers. From this place issued the early numbers of the Gentleman's Magazine; and a wood-cut of the building appears to this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... these frocked monitors scattered here and there upon the scene—pallid, close-shaven, monkish figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers, the semi-monastic teachers ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... life and most of the comforts which belong to social existence. To the Anchorites succeeded the Caenobites, societies of monks who dwelt in a common habitation under fixed rules; and these were naturally followed by confederacies of such communities under one organization. The monastic vows were poverty, or the renunciation of property; celibacy, or abstinence from marriage; and obedience to the conventual superior. Sometimes in the early centuries great evils and abuses sprang up in connection with monastic life. For example, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... cost of a certain aloofness from the rough and tumble of workaday life. The Christianity of the Middle Ages was fertilized from the cloister, with the result that the spiritual ideals even of those Christians who remained "in the world" tended to be coloured by the monastic tradition. The Christian man of the world who took seriously the practice of his religion aimed at reproducing at second hand the Christianity of the monk. The salvation of the individual soul tended to be regarded as the supreme ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... was another son of this extraordinary woman, and he bought the Welbeck estate, towards the end of the sixteenth century, from two or three men of obscurity to whom it had passed, after Henry the Eighth had ordered the monastic establishment at the Abbey to be dissolved. His son became Baron Ogle and Viscount Mansfield, and subsequently Earl, Marquis and Duke of ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... abbesses presided over joint-houses of monks and nuns. This custom accompanied Celtic monastic missions to France and Spain, and even to Rome itself. At a later period, A.D. 1115, Robert, the founder of Fontevraud, committed the government of the whole order, men as well as women, to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... on the slope of the Caelian, facing the palace of the Caesars, on a street named the Clivus Scauri, which corresponds very nearly to the modern Via dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Fond as he was of monastic life, he extended hospitality to men of his own sentiments and habit of thought; and transformed the old lararium into a chapel of S. Andrew. The place, which was governed by the rule of S. Benedict, became known as the "Monastery of S. Andrew in the street of Scaurus." The ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... before him as a problem. Unlike as the two men are in character and methods, his position resembled that of Martin Luther on quitting the Church of Rome. For the Buddhist monastic rule requires its members to be homeless, celibate, vegetarian, and here, like Luther, Shinran joined issue with them. To his mind the attainment of man lay in the harmonious development of body and spirit, and in the fulfilment, ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... of the Roman Catholic Church. We are only in the very beginning of a great Roman Catholic revival. The diversified countryside of the coming time will show many a splendid cathedral, many an elaborate monastic palace, towering amidst the abounding colleges and technical schools. Along the moving platforms of the urban centre, and athwart the shining advertisements that will adorn them, will go the ceremonial procession, all glorious with banners and censer-bearers, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... these general assemblies were the supreme governing body in the Order. Thus unity was established; the organisation was close, but not monarchical; the Order was a great federation. This is the highest point reached in monastic development. ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... which was spreading throughout the Church as well as lay society, two illustrious monks, St. Bernard and St. Norbert, not only went preaching everywhere reformation of morals, but labored at and succeeded in establishing for monastic life a system of strict discipline and severe austerity. Lastly, it was the period when, in the laic world, was created and developed the most splendid fact of the middle ages, knighthood, that noble soaring of imaginations and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the Lake of Titicaca, and the causeway of the town of Potosi. Ladak, as appears from Vigne's measurement, by determining the boiling-point, is 9994 feet high. This is probably also the altitude of H'Lassa (Yul-sung), a monastic city, which Chinese writers describe as the 'realm of pleasure', and which is surrounded by vineyards. Must not these lie in ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... (that is, by the hauberk) that their demesne lands shall be exempt from pecuniary taxation—that the process of definite military infeudation had largely advanced. But it was not even yet forced on the clerical or monastic estates. When, in 1167, the abbot of Milton, in Dorset, was questioned as to the number of knights' fees for which he had to account, he replied that all the services due from his monastery were discharged out ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... preserved) on many curious questions of folk-lore. Personally, I am dead against the burning of books. A far worse, because a corrupt, proceeding, was the scandalously horrid fate that befell the monastic libraries at our disgustingly conducted, even if generally beneficent, Reformation. The greedy nobles and landed gentry, who grabbed the ancient foundations of the old religion, cared nothing for the books they found cumbering the walls, and either devoted them to vile domestic ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... would ever fall to my lot to be either walking or musing within the precincts of the Abbey of Jumieges;—or rather, of the ruins of what was once not less distinguished, as a school of learning, than admired for its wealth and celebrity as a monastic establishment. Yes, my friend, I have seen and visited the ruins of this Abbey; and I seem to live "mihi ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... did not balance the drawback of living in the thoroughfare of the house. Nor could one fail to sympathise with those who preferred the garret, a poor thing but their own, in which two studious souls could hob-nob, or even the austere whitewash, narrow skylight, and niggard dimensions of some monastic cell, which held just the one student, his table, and his books. The editor of the School Magazine, writing a month after our arrival, finds it "a queer new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss the accustomed ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... lightness, his coolly pleasant smile, looking at Mrs. Grey and not at his mother as he answered: "Thanks so much, but I'm monastic, too, you know. I don't go to dinners. I'll ride over some afternoon and ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... are S. Michael and S. Louis of Toulouse. Between S. John the Evangelist and S. James is a monastic figure which has evidently changed places with S. John at some moment of restoration. If the two figures are transposed, their attitudes become intelligible. S. John is inculcating a message inscribed in his open book, while the monk is displaying his humble answer on his own page. The use ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... his ancient quarrel with the Spanish sovereigns in support of their rival Joanna Beltraneja, or Joanna the Nun, as she was generally called in the Castilian court after she had taken the veil. John, in open contempt of the treaty of Alcantara, and indeed of all monastic rule, had not only removed his relative from the convent of Santa Clara, but had permitted her to assume a royal state, and subscribe herself "I the Queen." This empty insult he accompanied with more serious efforts to form such a foreign alliance ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... came new ideas which caused new departures, not only in religious and monastic architecture, but in civil architecture, as well. Christianity, in proclaiming a new virtue, love, created retreats for the unfortunate, asylums for their reception and hospitals for their care. Monkish orders, in their efforts to prevent the destruction of old manuscripts, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... French, like the metrical romances. The most famous of these are "The Owl and the Nightingale,"—a long debate between the two birds, one representing the gay side of life, the other the sterner side of law and morals,—and "Land of Cockaygne," i.e. "Luxury Land," a keen satire on monks and monastic religion.[57] ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... which Greek MSS. were produced in the medieval period was (with negligible exceptions) confined to Greece proper, "Turkey in Europe," the Levant, and South Italy. In the monastic centres, particularly Mount Athos, there were and are large stores of Greek books, the vast majority of which are theological or liturgical; and the theological authors most in vogue are those of the fourth and later centuries. Copies ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... allowed me every indulgence, with the hopes of my being persuaded to remain. The money which I retained for my own exigencies enabled me to make friends with the porter, and I obtained egress or ingress at any hour. I was a proficient on the guitar; and incongruous as it may appear with my monastic vows, I often hastened from the service at vespers to perform in a serenade to some fair senora, whose inamorato required the powers of my voice to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... general meaning in English of "according to rule" seems very natural; but the word which began to be used in English in the fourteenth century did not take the modern meaning until the end of the sixteenth century. Before this, it too was used as a word to describe monastic orders. The "regular" clergy were priests who were also monks, while the "secular" clergy were priests but not monks. The words regularity, regulation, and regulate did not come into use ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... were beginning to shed a monastic tint over the face of Rose Cormon, who now saw with something like despair her white skin assuming the yellow tones which proclaim maturity. A slight down on her upper lip, about the corners, began to spread and darken ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... spread a beautiful illusion over the sanctified retirement of a nun, that almost hid from her view the selfishness of its security. But the touches, which a melancholy fancy, slightly tinctured with superstition, gave to the monastic scene, began to fade, as her spirits revived, and brought once more to her heart an image, which had only transiently been banished thence. By this she was silently awakened to hope and comfort and sweet affections; visions of happiness gleamed faintly ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... canons, did Patrick receive. With the like purpose did he some time abide with the blessed Martin, Archbishop of Tours, who was the uncle of his mother, Conquessa. And as this holy luminary of the priesthood was a monk, he gave to his nephew, Patrick, the monastic habits and rules, the which he most devoutly assumed, and adorned by his life, and persevered therein. And bidding farewell, they departed the one from the other, forasmuch as Martin was enjoined by the angel to go ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... reassured a moment later by the appearance of the levatrice, who announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment, where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in. There in fact he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with his own monastic surroundings: a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan santolini decked out ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... appearance. His exterior revealed the underlying of a profound nature always calm and equable on the surface. His tall figure and its thinness did not detract from the general effect of his lines, which recalled those by which the genius of Spanish painters delights to represent the great monastic meditators, and those selected at a later period by Thorwaldsen for the Apostles. The long, almost rigid folds of the face, in harmony with those of his vestment, had the charm which the middle-ages bring into relief in the mystical statues placed beside the ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... and permission to let him transport them to America as slaves. I was happy at finding a place where I could lose my fears in desperation, and entered this cell, for it had the appearance of one, with the devotion of a monastic. Here I found a number of poor creatures, all in circumstances like myself, expecting the arrival of Mr Cripse, presenting a true epitome of English impatience. Each untractable soul at variance with fortune, wreaked ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... many others of the same type, that I began to think I must have made a mistake. The cowl-like habit turned out to be the coarse native blanket, used for so many purposes by rustic Indians, and which they wear in this monastic fashion in the, sometimes chill, early mornings, or when it is wet. Their walking in single file was not in order to assist them in the preservation of perpetual silence, but because jungle footpaths ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... adapted to each of these uses, but, in every case, convenience was the motive, the monks and church-builders altering the existing structure to meet a pressing necessity. In fact, there is excellent reason for believing that the round towers were not built by the monks at all, the monastic writers being very fond of recording, with great particularity, what they built and how they built it, and in no passage do they mention the construction of a round tower. Whenever allusion is made to these structures, ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... consecrate, present. take orders, take the tonsure, take the veil, take vows. Adj. ecclesiastical, ecclesiological[obs3]; clerical, sacerdotal, priestly, prelatical, pastoral, ministerial, capitular[obs3], theocratic; hierarchical, archiepiscopal; episcopal, episcopalian; canonical; monastic, monachal[obs3]; monkish; abbatial[obs3], abbatical[obs3]; Anglican[obs3]; pontifical, papal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... recognising the danger which threatens civilisation, have suggested the formation of a society for mutual encouragement in the higher life. Mr. Wells developed this idea in his 'Modern Utopia.' He contemplated a brotherhood, like the Japanese Samurai, living by a Rule, a kind of lay monastic order, who should endeavour to live in a perfectly rational and wholesome manner, so as to be the nucleus of whatever was best in the society of the time. The scheme is interesting to a Platonist, because ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... St. Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... present state of our knowledge, it is probable that if the course of events were to establish any monastic order, the superiors would adopt some regimen better calculated to ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... along with the mob of Arles' republicans, as utterly out of accord with the spirit of his rule. Indeed, on looking up at these sumptuous halls and stately galleries, one cannot but feel that the time was past in which the monastic orders, wealthy and luxurious and idle, could be endured. The church is no longer in use, and ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... these forms underwent in the East another transformation, called the Byzantine, in the development of Christian domical church architecture. In the North and West, meanwhile, under the growing institutions of the papacy and of the monastic orders and the emergence of a feudal civilization out of the chaos of the Dark Ages, the constant preoccupation of architecture was to evolve from the basilica type of church a vaulted structure, and to adorn it throughout with an appropriate dress of constructive ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Saint-Dizier had renounced all worldly splendors. The gravity of her domestics, all aged and dressed in black; the profound silence which reigned in her abode, where everything was spoken, if it could be called speaking, in an undertone; and the almost monastic regularity and order of this immense mansion, communicated to everything around the princess a sad and chilling character. A man of the world, who joined great courage to rare independence of spirit, speaking of the princess (to whom Adrienne ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... went to visit the Grotto of St. Benedict. He considered with great attention the bush covered with thorns, into which the great Patriarch of the monastic life had the courage to throw himself, in order to overcome a temptation of the flesh. In admiration of such extraordinary fervor, he touched this bush as a sacred relic; he kissed it, and made on it ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... sentence in the former case being afterwards commuted to six years. Those who know the Brutus-like character of John of Gaunt, and his real opinion of his son's proceedings, may accept, if they can, the representations of the monastic chroniclers that the commutation of Hereford's sentence was made at ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... it is merely re-asserting what many critics of Gothic architecture have already decided to be true. The cloisters of Gloucester are far richer, the space they cover at Wells (like Salisbury, not a monastic establishment) is greater, and in other details these may not be the finest. But, as a whole, their beautiful proportion and the general symmetry of their design make them worthy adjuncts to a building which is pre-eminent ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... and the Frenchman, in those woods, yesterday afternoon," I answered. "We came across them by accident, at the place where they'd just dug up that monastic silver—there it is, man!" I continued, pointing to the chests, which still stood where I had last seen them. "You've got it, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... in the distance and rain—a solemn royal ditty, piped by the tuneful Aldermen of Skinner's Alley, and neither unmusical nor somehow uncongenial with the darkness, and the melancholy object of the doctor's walk, the chant being rather monastic, wild, and dirge-like. It was a quarter past ten, and no other sound of life or human neighbourhood was stirring. If secrecy were an object, it was well secured by the sable sky, and the steady torrent which rolled ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in many parts of Christendom still. A 'religious' person did not then mean any one who felt and owned the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellow-men, but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, the member of a monastic Order, of a 'religion' as it was called. As little did a 'religious' house then mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man. What a light ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... unmarried. Here arose one peril more; and, 2dly, arose this most unusual aggravation of that peril—that Mrs Lee was deplorably ignorant of English life; indeed, of life universally. Strictly speaking, she was even yet a raw, untutored novice, turned suddenly loose from the twilight of a monastic seclusion. Under any circumstances, such a situation lay open to an amount of danger that was afflicting to contemplate. But one dreadful exasperation of these fatal auguries lay in the peculiar temper of Mrs. Lee, as connected with her infidel thinking. Her nature ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... raised doorstep into a large garret room with a tile floor, where a tall lean man in a monastic-looking dressing gown of some brown material received them. The only candle made all their shadows dance fantastically on the slanting white walls as they moved about. One side of the room had three big windows, with an occasional cracked pane mended with newspaper, ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... of the Ramaites are generally Brahmans, but no disciples are excluded because of their caste. R[a]m[a]nuja adopted the monastic system, which Cankara is said to have taken from the Buddhists and to have introduced into Brahmanic priestly life. Both family priests and cenobites are admitted into ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Dr. Arnold's advantages. Indeed, all the great foundation schools of London, bearing in their very codes of organization the impress of a double function—viz., the conservation of sound learning and of pure religion—wear something of a monastic or cloisteral character in their aspect and usages, which is peculiarly impressive, and even pathetic, amidst the uproars of a capital the most colossal and tumultuous ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... recruited from all ranks, and whether honest folks or murderers, thieves or swindlers, all are eagerly welcomed on joining the brotherhood. One or two male members of each family in Tibet take monastic orders, and by these means the monks obtain a great hold over each house- or tent-hold. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Tibet half the male ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... evident, however, that vegetables were never considered as being capable of forming solid nutriment, since they were almost exclusively used by monastic communities when under vows ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... interest will be the more strengthened thereon. All the world knows that a convent stood in this neighbourhood, and the present market was the garden, unde Convent Garden; would that all etymologists were as distinct. Of course the monastic institution was abolished in the time of Henry VIII., when he plundered convents and monasteries with as much gusto as boys abolish wasps-nests. After this it was given to Edmund Seymour, Duke of Somerset, brother-in-law to Henry ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... Bancroft, Dean of St. Paul's, was raised to [the see of Canterbury]. ... He was a man of solemn deportment, had a sullen gravity in his looks, and was considerably learned. He had put on a monastic strictness, and lived abstracted from company. ... He was a dry, cold man, reserved, and peevish; so that none loved him, and few esteemed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... feature of the country lying between the Vouga and the Cavado.[31] In many of these villages may still be seen churches built soon after the expulsion of the Moors, and long before the establishment of the Monarchy. Many of them originally belonged to some monastic body. Of these the larger part have been altered and spoiled during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, when, after the expulsion of the Spaniards, the country began again to grow rich from trade with the recovered ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... pharisaic demand for separateness to the extreme of asceticism. While they were found in nearly every town in Palestine, some of them even practising marriage, the largest group of them lived a celibate, monastic life near the shores of the Dead Sea. This community was recruited by the initiation of converts, who only after a novitiate of three years were admitted to full membership in the order. They were characterized by an extreme scrupulousness ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... which, "by awakening the piety of domestic affections with the nobler passions, would elevate and purify the mind;" and proceeds, with no little indignation, to relate how nearly it cost the author dear. The "Glasgow divines, with the monastic spirit of the darkest ages, published a paper, which I abridge for the contemplation of the reader, who may wonder to see such a composition written in the eighteenth century: 'On Wednesday, February 2, 1757, the Presbytery of Glasgow came to the following resolution: They, having ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... often examined that room myself, and I am sure that there is no chance for anything to be concealed. In fact, I had the floor taken up once, soon after I came here, knowing the room was that of the mysterious Sister, and thinking that there, if anywhere, the monastic crime would have taken place; still, we will go in, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the community round him, as though the monastic simplicity had returned (so vital is the Faith, so simple its primal energies), and as though he had been the true prior of some early and fervent house, he told them these things which I will faithfully translate on account of their beauty. They are ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... sought relief either from sickness or misery!—Had the other brothers followed his example of remaining, in all probability their Convent might have been spared, for the accumulation of wealth could not be laid to their charge; and as their monastic vows obliged them to remain within the Monastery, they were most unlikely to incur the suspicion of any political intrigues.—How indeed could men, whose whole existence was passed in solitude and penance, and who never conversed even among themselves, ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... betake him or herself to the business of propagating the race. That at least is the essence of his singularly offensive dictum that since the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and of members of Religious Orders deprives the State of a number of presumably excellent parents, "if monastic orders and institutions are to continue, they should be open only to the eugenically unfit."[32] If the religious call is not to be permitted to dispense a man or woman from entering the estate of matrimony, it may be assumed that nothing else, except an unfavourable report from the committee of ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... the fatigues and dangers of those fruitless expeditions to the East, they rather chose to enjoy in ease their opulent revenues in Europe: and being all men of birth, educated, according to the custom of that age, without any tincture of letters, they scorned the ignoble occupations of a monastic life, and passed their time wholly in the fashionable amusements of hunting, gallantry, and the pleasures of the table. Then rival order, that of St. John of Jerusalem, whose poverty had as yet preserved them from like corruptions, still distinguished themselves by their enterprises against the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... of the Middle Ages, the desire for reform of the Church was constant. It was strongest and most apparent among laymen, for a famous monastic writer of the fourteenth century testified that the laity led better lives than the clergy. To the bulk of ordinary Christians reform meant morality in the priesthood. It became intolerable to them to see the Sacrament administered ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of course the most important histories. To these should be added no small number of grammars and dictionaries of the native languages, and missionary histories, that have never been printed. [132] The monastic presses in the islands naturally were chiefly used for the production of works of religious edification, such as catechisms, narratives of missions, martyrdoms, lives of saints, religious histories, and hand-books to the native languages. Simpler manuals of devotion, rosaries, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... looking into the military, monastic, and baronial architecture of the mediaeval period on the Continent, and goes next year to Japan to begin the exhaustive researches which are to culminate in his next book, the "Lives of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... determined to make her as comfortable as possible. After his brother's departure he assisted in the re-arrangement of the garret room, to which he gave an artist's touch. He added a rug; the bed, simple in character but exquisite in taste, had something monastic about it; the walls, hung with a cheap glazed cotton selected with taste, of a color which harmonized with the furniture and was newly covered, gave the room an air of elegance and nicety. In the hallway he added a double door, with a "portiere" ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... reading in their own tongue); but I find no reference whatever to the bringing up of children. They could not have been so absurd as to omit all training for this gravest of responsibilities. Evidently, then, this was the school course of one of their monastic orders." ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... that these evils were most rife. The monasteries had also gone far away from their original ideals; but the tenth century had witnessed the establishment of a reformed Benedictine rule in the Congregation of Cluny, and, in any case, it was in monastic life alone that the conditions seemed suitable for working out any scheme of spiritual improvement. The Congregation of Cluny was based upon the idea of centralisation; unlike the Abbot of the ordinary Benedictine monastery, who was concerned with the affairs of a single ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... but little money; and, besides, the modesty of my life is out of keeping with such distinctions. I have devoted myself, monsieur, to the service of the weak, like the late Councillor Popinot,—a sublime man, as you justly remarked. If I had not already chosen a career which is in some sort monastic, and precludes all idea of marriage and public office, my taste, my second vocation, would lead me to the service of God, to the Church. I do not trumpet what I do, like the philanthropists; I do not ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... circular sun-dial bearing the motto "We stay not," and the date 1782, appears above the porch, and the church is entered by a fine old door of the Perpendicular period. A paddock on the west side of the graveyard is known as the nun's field, but I have no knowledge of any monastic institution having existed at Middleton. Aislaby, the next village to the west, is so close that one seems hardly to have left Middleton before one reaches the first cottage of the next hamlet. There is no church here, and the only conspicuous object as one passes westwards is the ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... "The monastic life is ill suited to the temper of my ward," the Signor Gradenigo drily observed, "and I fear to hazard the experiment; gold is a key to unlock the strongest cell; besides, we cannot, with due observance of propriety, place a child of the state ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and he knew him at his worst and best. The old home of the family, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy, his brothers and sister, spent their early years in charge of two guardian aunts, was not only a halting-place for pilgrims journeying to and from the great monastic shrines, but gave shelter to a number of persons of enfeebled minds belonging to the peasant class, with whom the devout and kindly Aunt Alexandra spent many hours daily in religious conversation ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... liked it for its opportunities for thorough study,—our teachers were earnest and thorough men,—and for the associates in study that it gave me. I could say, "For my companions' sake, peace be within thy walls." I disliked it for its monastic seclusion. Not that this was any fault of the institution, but for the first time in my life I boarded in commons; the domestic element dropped out of it, and I was persuaded, as I never had been before, of the beneficence of that ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... Arthurian legends, in their origin prior to Christianity, yield all their sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere. What is characteristic in them is the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover. That religion, monastic religion at any rate, has its sensuous side, a dangerously sensuous side, has been often seen: it is the experience of Rousseau as well as of the Christian mystics. The Christianity of the Middle Age made way among a people whose ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... and Man's Life, picture themselves to the mind of an Irish Poor-Slave; with what feelings and opinions he looks forward on the Future, round on the Present, back on the Past, it were extremely difficult to specify. Something Monastic there appears to be in their Constitution: we find them bound by the two Monastic Vows, of Poverty and Obedience; which Vows, especially the former, it is said, they observe with great strictness; nay, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... extensive, and who curled himself on her lap, giving unspeakable rest and joy to her weary, yearning spirit, as she pressed him to her breast. "Now, a story, a story," he entreated, and she was rich in tales from Scripture history and legends of the Saints, or she would sing her sweet monastic hymns and chants, as he nestled in ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Zeil by the Church of Our Lady, and that we always had to go a roundabout way by the /Hasengasse/ or the Catherine Gate. But what chiefly attracted the child's attention, were the many little towns within the town, the fortresses within the fortress; viz., the walled monastic enclosures, and several other precincts, remaining from earlier times, and more or less like castles,—as the Nuremberg Court, the Compostella, the Braunfels, the ancestral house of the family of Stallburg, and several strongholds, in later days transformed into dwellings ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... spiritual inferiority of woman was significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... lived on the opposite side of the lake, in a quiet household, of which he was the idol. His life had been one of almost monastic purity and repose; his tastes were accomplished, his character seemed soft and gentle; but beneath that calm exterior, flashes of passion—the nature of the poet, ardent and sensitive—would break forth at times. He had scarcely ever, since his ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tried to illustrate at the same time various aspects of social life in the Middle Ages and various classes of historical material. Thus Bodo illustrates peasant life, and an early phase of a typical medieval estate; Marco Polo, Venetian trade with the East; Madame Eglentyne, monastic life; the Menagier's wife, domestic life in a middle-class home, and medieval ideas about women; Thomas Betson, the wool trade, and the activities of the great English trading company of Merchants of the Staple; and Thomas Paycocke, the cloth industry ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... of heretics more relentless than in the Netherlands. Suspected persons were subjected to various torturing but ridiculous ordeals. After such trial, death by fire was the usual but, perhaps, not the most severe form of execution. In Flanders, monastic ingenuity had invented another most painful punishment for Waldenses and similar malefactors. A criminal whose guilt had been established by the hot iron, hot ploughshare, boiling kettle, or other logical proof, was stripped and bound ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations teemed with a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine front the wrath of innovation beat in vain. In every country of Europe the party of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... C. B. Drover, "A medieval monastic water-clock," Antiquarian Horology, 1954, vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 54-58, 63. Because this water clock uses wheels and strikes bells one must reject the evidence of literary reference, such as by Dante, from which the mention of wheels and bells have been ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... spoke, Mr. Bowles, the chemist, came to his shop door in a long black velvet gown and hood, monastic as it were, but yet with a touch of the diabolic. His hair was still quite black, and his face even paler than of old. The only spot of colour he carried was a red star cut in some precious stone of ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... pardon their bad taste, For so it seems to lovers swift or slow, Who fain would have a mutual flame confess'd, And see a sentimental passion glow, Even were St. Francis' paramour their guest, In his monastic concubine of snow;— In short, the maxim for the amorous tribe is Horatian, 'Medio tu ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... summit, no fewer than ten monastic establishments with their temples, villages and cultivation, were at once visible, in the valley of the Great Rungeet, and in those of its tributaries; namely, Changachelling, Raklang, Dholi, Molli, Catsuperri, Dhoobdi, Sunnook, Powhungri, Pemiongchi and Tassiding, all of considerable size, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... masters. I imagined it necessary for me, stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory and Fredegarius, down to the more ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of popery, and especially that form and development of it exhibited in the monastic orders, be ever written, this work will be of the greatest importance:—it will show the means by which dominion was obtained over the minds of the ignorant; how the most sacred mysteries were perverted; and frauds, which can hardly be termed pious, used to support institutions which can scarcely ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... dresses him in the habit of a monk, and carries him, assisted by her lover, to the entrance of a convent. When he awakes and sees himself thus transformed he imagines that God by a miraculous exercise of His grace had called him to the monastic life. He presents himself before the abbot and requests to be received among the brethren. The lady hastens to the convent in well-feigned despair, and is exhorted to be resigned and to congratulate ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... reefs that stretch far out to sea, with the sparkling waves of the Mediterranean playing over them. So, only from the sea can you discern the square mass of the convent built conformably to the minute rules laid down as to the shape, height, doors, and windows of monastic buildings. From the side of the town, the church completely hides the solid structure of the cloisters and their roofs, covered with broad slabs of stone impervious to sun or storm or ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... there was a learned man at work in one of our ancient abbey libraries, cataloguing the manuscripts and monastic charters of the ancient foundation. Their number runs into many thousands, and at the outset the Keeper[17] realised that if this task of providing an index and precis of the entire collection (which would be of incalculable value to the historical students who came after him) were to be accomplished ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... but are either based on actual and historical facts which have been but slightly modificd, or they are the offspring and expansion of some symbolic idea in which latter respect they differ entirely from the monastic legends, which often have only the fertile imagination of some studious monk for the basis ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... many libraries, yet the mischief effected by them has often been more visible than real, since they have tended rather to dispersion than destruction. The total loss to literature by the dispersion of the libraries of the monastic establishments in England, is probably not nearly so great as that which has accompanied the chronic mouldering away of the treasures preserved so obstinately by the lazy monks of the Levant, who were found by Mr Curzon at their public devotions laying down priceless volumes ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... group of people can come into affectionate relations with each other unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian peasant talks of labor he means labor on the soil, or, to use the phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread labor." Those monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many another have attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself has written many times his own convictions and attempts in this direction, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... his thanks are especially due not only for permission to make use of the series of articles, founded on the monastic chronicles, which appeared some years ago in the Evesham Journal, most of them under the title of "Evesham Episodes," but also for much ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... had much the same religious experience as the father of the German Reformation; for as Luther, before he understood the doctrine of a free salvation, attempted to earn a title to heaven by the austerities of monastic discipline, so Paul in early life was "taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers," [59:4] and "after the strictest sect of his religion lived a Pharisee." [59:5] His zeal led him to become a persecutor; ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... towers that stand out so conspicuously over the richly wooded country. When you get to the village and are close to the ruins of the great Benedictine abbey, you are not surprised that it was at one time numbered amongst the richest and most notable of the monastic foundations. The founder was St Philibert, but whatever the buildings which made their appearance in the seventh century may have been, is completely beyond our knowledge, for Jumieges was situated too close to the Seine to be overlooked by the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... pass the gates left Protestant England outside, and found himself, as it were, in a new country. Inside The Retreat, the paternal care of the Church took possession of him; surrounded him with monastic simplicity in his neat little bedroom; and dazzled him with devotional splendor when his religious duties called him into the chapel. The perfect taste—so seldom found in the modern arrangement and decoration of convents and churches in southern countries—showed ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins |
