"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gentlemen received baptism after him. This is the account of his reception. "Bemoin, because he was a man of large size and fine presence, about forty years old, with a long and well-arranged beard, appeared indeed not like a barbarous pagan, but as one of our own princes, to whom all honour and reverence were due. With equal majesty and gravity of demeanour he commenced and finished his oration, using such inducements to make men bewail his sad ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... are: Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Dancing, Acting. The mercy of God has luckily purified these once pagan inventions, and transformed them into saving instruments of grace. Yet it behooves us to examine with the utmost diligence the possible sources of evil latent in each and every one of those arts. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... turn our attention to the other non-Christian elements of the Islands, the case is no better. The Christianized Filipino fears and dreads the pagan mountaineers, the head-hunters who occupy so large a part of Luzon, the largest and most important island of the Archipelago. He grudges every centavo spent under our direction for the betterment of these truly admirable wild ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... kite; it has for its tail a whimsy. Haggerty, on a certain day, received twenty-five hundred dollars from the Hindu prince and five hundred more from the hotel management. The detective bore up under the strain with stoic complacency. "The Blind Madonna of the Pagan—Chance" always had her ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... letter published in Jan. 1780, he said:—'I insist upon it, that no government, not Roman Catholic, ought to tolerate men of the Roman Catholic persuasion. They ought not to be tolerated by any government, Protestant, Mahometan, or Pagan.' To this the Rev. Arthur O'Leary replied with great wit and force, in a pamphlet entitled, Remarks on the Rev. Mr. Wesley's Letters. Dublin, 1780. Wesley (Journal, iv. 365) mentions meeting O'Leary, and says:—'He seems not to be wanting either in sense or learning.' Johnson ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of real character and incident from the veritable streets of Auxerre. What is it? Certainly, notwithstanding its grace, and wealth of graceful accessories, a suffering, tortured figure. With all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one of those fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of an age later than his own, people of larger spiritual capacity and assuredly ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass, but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... If the Pagan religion still prevailed, the new goddess, in whose honour temples would be raised and to whom statues would be erected in all the capitals of the world, would he the goddess Worry. London would be the chief seat and centre of her sway. A gorgeous statue, painted and enriched ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... was no comfort to her in moments like these. She was a pagan at heart, and where she had laid her dead, there, to her mind, he would rest for ever, far from her. The lonely grave on the wild west coast was the shrine towards which her poor heart would yearn thereafter at all times, always. She had erected a handsome tombstone on the hallowed ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... unsatisfactory. We shall continue to have a number of monographs, more or less scholarly in treatment—one dealing with the Grail as a Food-providing talisman, and that alone; another with the Grail as a vehicle of spiritual sustenance. One that treats of the Lance as a Pagan weapon, and nothing more; another that regards it as a Christian relic, and nothing less. At one moment the object of the study will be the Fisher King, without any relation to the symbols he guards, or the land he rules; at the next it will be the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... tells us of glorious friendships in the ancient world. The great of old—of Greece and Rome—they who advanced to the very gate and threshold of TRUTH, and then despairingly turned back—they have honoured human nature by the intensity and permanency of their attachments. But what is a Pagan attachment in comparison with that which exists amongst believers, and unites in bonds that are indissoluble, the faithful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... thrust of its venomous stinger with lightning stabs up and down its enemy's armor, trusting to chance that a vulnerable spot might be found between the scales. She had watched this struggle with a breathless pleasure—for at times she could be pagan as of old—and when at last the little point slipped through, she felt no pity for the locust; rather, was she tempted to stroke the victor as it crawled from the suddenly relaxed grip of its stiffening foe, laved its wings, polished its legs, ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... quoted by Mr. Wake, in 'Anthropologia,' Oct. 1873, p. 75.) Mr. Winwood Reade made inquiries for me with respect to the negroes of Western Africa, and he informs me that "the women, at least among the more intelligent Pagan tribes, have no difficulty in getting the husbands whom they may desire, although it is considered unwomanly to ask a man to marry them. They are quite capable of falling in love, and of forming tender, passionate, and faithful attachments." ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... wishes to take rank with the seducing poets of this or of former generations. There is something very curious too, we think, in the way in which he, and Mr. Barry Cornwall also, have dealt with the Pagan mythology, of which they have made so much use in their poetry. Instead of presenting its imaginary persons under the trite and vulgar traits that belong to them in the ordinary systems, little more is borrowed from these than the general conception ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... a godless man, A pagan, heart and soul, Played nurse until the wound began To heal, and ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... without some allusion to a class of writings not usually included in the range of classical studies. The first of these works, the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, before mentioned, and the Greek Apocrypha, may properly be termed Hebrew-Grecian. Their spirit is wholly at variance with that of pagan literature, and it cannot be doubted that they exerted great influence when made known to the pagans of Alexandria. Many of the books termed the Apocrypha were originally written in Greek, and mostly before the Christian era. Many of them contain authentic ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... This name is applied to several pagan Malay tribes in northern and eastern Mindanao, the word meaning "man"—just as many other savage tubes in all parts of the world designate themselves as "men" ("the men," par excellence); but Santa Theresa's description of them does not accord with that of Dr. Barrows. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... old, The Shepherd pipes his sundered Flocks to Fold, Your Garments quail and ripple in the Chill, Your pagan Nose empurples with ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... An Appreciation My Mother Catharine of the "Crow's Nest" A Red Girl's Reasoning The Envoy Extraordinary A Pagan in St. Paul's Cathedral As It Was in the Beginning The Legend of Lillooet Falls Her Majesty's Guest Mother o' the Men The Nest Builder The Tenas ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... than the heretics and their theologians, not forgetting their Tinkers; though I confess some of the latter have occasionally surprised us—for example, Bunyan. The New Testament is crowded with allusions to heathen customs, and with words connected with pagan sorcery. Now, with respect to words, I would fain have you, who pretend to be a philologist, tell me ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... warriors who meet their death with a song and a gay smile; there are others who meet it with stern and sober resolve. But courage calls both her children. Christian Europe has been kinder and juster to Seneca than was pagan Rome. Rome while she copied, abused him. Neither as Spaniard nor as Roman can he claim the name of sage. The higher philosophy is denied to both these nations. But in brilliancy of touch, in delicious abandon of sparkling ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... deep peace possessed him. The process by which this had been achieved he could not explain, but the result was undeniable, and it was due, he knew, to an influence the source of which he frankly acknowledged to be external to himself. The words of the beaten and confounded pagan magic-workers came to him, "This is the finger of God." He could not deny it. Why should he wish to hide it? It became clear to him, in these few minutes of intense soul activity, that there was a demand being made upon him as a man of truth and honour, and as ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... dignified man stretching out his hand over his people, and to observe that one of his little fingers had been cut off: this was formerly done as an offering to a heathen god, a custom among his people before they became Christians. But while he bore this mark of Pagan origin, he clearly showed that to him was grace given to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... which niche he that built the fountain designed, no doubt, to set some image of his own design. But he never carried out his purpose, why or wherefore I neither knew nor cared, and in that niche some Magnifico that was kindly minded to the people had set up a stone image, a relic of the old beautiful pagan days, that had been unearthed in some garden of his elsewhere. It was the figure of a very comely youth that was clothed in a Grecian tunic, and because, when it was first dug up, it showed some traces of color on the tunic and the naked legs and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... again to the artificial lake in front of the house. For some reason it looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like a classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian facade of the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to his surprise, he found another figure there beside the statue, sitting almost equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced the wrinkled brow and patient face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as a hermit and apparently ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... the House of Commons. What said Statius, Juvenal—let alone Tully or Tacitus—on such and such a point? Their reign is over now, the good old Heathens: the worship of Jupiter and Juno is not more out of mode than the cultivation of Pagan poetry or ethics. The age of economists and calculators has succeeded, and Tooke's Pantheon is deserted and ridiculous. Now and then, perhaps, a Stanley kills a kid, a Gladstone bangs up a wreath, a Lytton ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... terrible with swords, but neither of them has ever seemed to me half so heroic or half so saintly as the boy Lancelot did that morning in Mr. Davies's parlour. He was tall of his years, with fair hair curling about his head as I have since seen hair curling in some of the old Pagan statue-work. ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in their supposed vexation at having to join in the Creator's praises. The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible noise, uproar, and confusion, more worthy of some pagan bacchanalia than a procession of Christian people. All the country-folk from five or six leagues around Aix pour into the town on that day to do honour to God. It is the only occasion of the kind, and the clergy, either knavish or ignorant, encourage all this shameful riot. The lower orders ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... parallels and imperfect analogies. A voice, like that which is said to have startled the mariner of old on the coasts of Ionia, and to have announced to him the cessation of oracles, comes to us from all the remains of pagan antiquity, warning us that the spirit of that ancient civilization has departed with its forms: and while it bids us look forward to a new destiny for the human race, it teaches us that the maxims and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... hard and fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture—especially cathedral architecture—and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... dullness of long hours out-doors, alone. The recreations of country life should be meetings for the celebration of great events of the year. Easter expresses ideas which are age-old among country people: it is both a pagan festival and a Christian anniversary. If Easter is developed in a celebration of song or procession, of sermon and of decoration, with full use of its symbolic value, it is sure to bring the whole countryside ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... that his widowed sister had married Medard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions of Lake Huron.[2] Radisson was now doubly bound to the Jesuits by gratitude and family ties. Never did pagan heart hear an evangel more gladly than the Mohawks heard the Jesuits. The priests were welcomed with acclaim, led to the Council Lodge, and presented with belts of wampum. Not a suspicion of foul play seems to have entered the Jesuits' mind. When the Iroquois proposed to incorporate ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... that this curious story has reached us in a fragmentary and expurgated form, and that if we had the whole narrative before us it would afford us an indication that Clonmacnois was the site of an earlier, Pagan, sanctuary. It will most probably be found to be an invariable rule that the early Christian establishments in Ireland occupy the sites of Pagan sanctuaries; the monastery having been founded to re-consecrate the holy place to the True Faith. ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... watching the coarse faces of the drunken men. The Tahitians, fitting so well into the beauty of their island, gold of skin and crowned with flowers, carrying themselves with dignity, were as far removed as could be imagined from the idea of pagan men. They contrasted sharply at that moment with those from "civilization," who in filthy rags of clothes and wild disorder of gestures and voices staggered about aimlessly gorging food and drinking. The watching pagans glanced ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham, the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don't you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d'Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d'Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... brink of her fringed lids, her brilliant eyes, large and finely drawn as theirs, seemed on the verge of breaking from her face and rolling down her cheeks like two great tears. She bent her neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as well as in the scriptural. And although her attitude was, doubtless, habitual and instinctive, one which she knew to be appropriate to such moments, and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all her strength to hold her ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... too, of the tempests which throw on the shores of Zeeland's little isles the bodies of strange mummied monsters, part man, part boat; and of still, clear dawnings when the fisherfolk of Domburg can discern, far down under the green water, pagan temples of marble, and gleaming statues more perfect than any fashioned by known sculptors, even the greatest masters, when Greek art was in its prime. He told of the great dyke building, and how, at high tide, the North Sea beats fiercely on Zeeland's locked door. He told of the inundations, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... cannot pretend to determine. Perhaps we may venture to assert, that it has been more or less owing to all these different causes. One thing is very certain, that the negroes of that country, a few only excepted, are to this day as great strangers to Christianity, and as much under the influence of Pagan darkness, idolatry and superstition, as they were at their first arrival ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... musicians who wrote for the Church before Purcell's time were Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons, and they composed not for the English, but for the Roman Church. When I say that Pelham Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but purely secular composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply—or, if you like, exply—that the Church of England has had no religious musicians worth mentioning. Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety of the men who grubbed through life ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... universal, this clasps us, as Abraham's bosom did Lazarus, within its infinite embraces, causing every fibre of our being to quicken under its heavenly truths. Ithuriel's golden spear was not more antagonistic to Satan's loathly transformation—than is Christian opposed to pagan art. The wide, the awful gulf, separating one from the other, will be felt instantly in its true force by first thinking ZEUS, and then thinking CHRIST. How pale, shadowy, and shapeless the vision of lust, revenge, and impotence, that rises at the thought of Zeus; but at ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... is recorded that the profession of medicine originated in idolatry with pagan priests, who besought the gods to 158:3 heal the sick and designated Apollo as "the god of medicine." He was supposed to have dic- tated the first prescription, according to the 158:6 "History of Four Thousand Years of Medicine." It is here noticeable ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... remarks, "The doctrine of Arminius can be traced back as far as the time of Alexandrinus, and seems to have been held by many of the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries." He attributes this to the corrupting influence of Pagan philosophy (Hist. Theo., Vol. II., p. 374). This is not a direct contradiction to Eadie, but it shows that truth compelled this sturdy Calvinist to admit that non-Calvinistic views were held in the earlier and best period of the Church. The question, however, is one that must be decided ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... may be quite a judge whether it is consistent with itself. When an oracle equivocates it carries with it its own condemnation. I almost think there is something in Scripture on this subject, comparing in this respect the pagan and the inspired prophecies. And this has struck me, too, that St. Paul gives this very account of a heretic, that he is 'condemned of himself,' bearing his own condemnation on his face. Moreover, I was once in the company of ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Mrs Pansey, ferociously; 'aren't we all miserable sinners? Dr Pendle's a human worm, just as you are—as I am. You may dress him in lawn sleeves and a mitre, and make pagan genuflections before his throne, but he is only ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... the fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the grave-yard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time face to face with the art of antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on to their arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, be he Sienese or Florentine, be he Orcagna, Lorenzetti, or Volterra, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... science, known only to the initiated few, were believed to be sufficiently powerful, through the agency of spells and charms, to control the actions of evil spirits.[6:2] The early Christians readily adopted the pagan custom of wearing amulets as remedies against disease, and as bodily safeguards, in spite of the emphatic condemnation ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... say that the moon is so drawn to reproduce some lunar deity: it would be more correct to say that the lunar deity was created through this human likeness. Sir Thomas Browne remarks, "The sun and moon are usually described with human faces: whether herein there be not a pagan imitation, and those visages at first implied Apollo and Diana, we may make some doubt." [11] Brand, in quoting Browne, adds, "Butler asks a shrewd question on this head, which I do not remember ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Merezhkovsky's novels all belong in the category of the Nietzschean type of superman, which explains their philosophical relationship and the sort of trilogy which these three novels form. Thus, Julian the Apostate, who tried in vain during his life to make history repeat itself, by transplanting pagan traditions into a plot which had become unfit to receive them, and who died in the effort to preserve a faith—does not this man, then, incarnate that implacable pursuit of the "integral personality" so extolled by Nietzsche? Leonardo da ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... he should pursue. Hugh promptly relieved him. Shaking his head vigorously, he pointed to the stone image, signifying that there were to be no more salutations bestowed upon it, all homage being due to himself and the lady. The fickle pagan, after a waning look of love for their renounced idol, proceeded to treat it with scorn by devoting himself entirely to the usurpers. He brought cocoanut shells filled with cool water, and ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the Church of England. Every member of the council of the province belonged to that denomination, and it was not until the year 1817 that any person who was not an adherent of the Church of England was appointed to the council. This exception was William Pagan, a member of the Church of Scotland, and his was a solitary instance because up to the year 1833, when the old council was abolished, all its other members were adherents of the Church of England. The same rule prevailed with respect ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... replaces the ancient church of Ste. Genevive was begun by Soufflot, under Louis XV., in imitation of St. Peter's, at Rome. Like all architects of his time, Soufflot sought merely to produce an effect of pagan or "classical" grandeur, peculiarly out of place in the shrine of the shepherdess of Nanterre. Secularized almost immediately on its completion, during the Revolution, the building was destined as the national monument to the great men of France, and the inscription, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... silence, he wrote the name of the book to give to the librarian, and if it were a Christian work, he stretched out his hand, making motions with his fingers as if turning over the leaves; but if it were by a pagan author, the monk who asked for it was required to scratch his ear as a dog does, to show his contempt, because, the regulations said, an unbeliever might well be compared to that animal[1]. Taking the book, he copied it ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... together the narrative of the preceding pages. Saunders was reluctant to draw any conclusions. At one time he thought that the fingered beast had been animated by the spirit of Sigismund Borlsover, a sinister eighteenth-century ancestor, who, according to legend, built and worshipped in the ugly pagan temple that overlooked the lake. At another time Saunders believed the spirit to belong to a man whom Eustace had once employed as a laboratory assistant, "a black-haired spiteful little brute," he said, "who died cursing his doctor because the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... where the Sangleys have their shops—that it might be sightly even in Espana, and in it the Sangleys have generously assisted. [86] For they had a common fund for current expenses, and they amass in it yearly about twenty thousand pesos. Each Sangley, pagan or Christian, pays, if he wear a cue, three reals of four to the peso, in two payments. For this fund there are Spanish collectors with a sufficient salary. What I regret is that, in all these cunning devices to obtain their money, and the exaction of these contributions, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... added. 'Unbeheld, undisturbed! I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting at ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Ferdinand," observes Fray Antonio Agapida, "was humbling himself before the cross and devoutly praying for the destruction of his enemies, that fierce pagan, El Zagal, depending merely on arm of flesh and sword of steel, pursued his diabolical outrages upon the Christians." No sooner was the invading army disbanded than he sallied forth from his stronghold, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... "Life of Apollonius" takes the view that the account of the miracles of Apollonius is derived from the narrative of Christ's miracles, and has been concocted by people anxious to degrade the character of the Saviour. The attempt to make him appear as a pagan Christ has been renewed in ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... his eyes to the square formed by the intersection of a number of alleys some distance beyond the caravansary. A sizable mob was collected in this enclosure; he estimated that there were at least a thousand pagan-Chinese assembled, in ring formation—a giant ring, dozens deep, and centered upon a small focussing ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... fuller of Home than even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome, but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis before ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... allotted work in the world of visionary men, to whom these dreams were passing in the form of incredible white vapors. Sitting thus, the lads fell to talking of this and the other, and Manuel found that Niafer was a pagan of the old faith: and this, said ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... religion could not start from a definition of that kind. It would have to keep in view, not the philosophical notion of God, but the conceptions of the gods as they appear in the religion of antiquity. Hence I came to define atheism in Pagan antiquity as the point of view which denies the existence of the ancient gods. It is in this sense that the word will be used in ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... himself as to his friends or enemies in the House of Commons. He had done this doubtful thing—but why should it ever be necessary for him to do another? Vague philosophic yearnings after virtue, moderation, patriotism, crossed his mind. The Pagan ideal sometimes smote and fired him, the Christian never. He could still read his Plato and his Cicero, whereas gulfs of unfathomable distaste rolled between him and the New Testament. Perhaps the author of all authors ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Franks, was, it is said, founded by Charlemagne at the time of the overthrow of the pagan Saxons, which has already been recorded in the Song of the Saxons. Here Charlemagne was led across the Rhine by deer, escaping with his army from certain slaughter at the hands of the savage horde who sought to ambush him. Other picturesque stories cluster ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... the summons comes from the choir within. 'Who is this King of Glory?' the question represents ignorance and possible hesitation, as if the pagan inhabitants of the recently conquered city knew nothing of the God of Israel, and recognised no authority in His name. Of course, the dramatic form of question and answer is intended to give additional force to the proclamation as ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... than five or six percent,) and in order to win, they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old gods must be destroyed. For a short spell the emperor Julian, a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan Gods from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds during a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established the church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the ancient temples were then closed. Then came the emperor ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... thinking about his life as a life. The temptation to such morose musing had come upon him in the last six months, and once yielded to, he felt the egotistical disease of it through his very blood and bones. If he were Catholic, he could confess and get rid of it. He was not Catholic, only pagan, the natural man. The Church had a wisdom of her own. All her rites and ceremonies found their root in something salutary for the human mind. Confession was salutary. You might not be absolved, but if you ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... appeal to written laws, with which the Pagan natives are necessarily unacquainted, has given rise in their palavers to (what I little expected to find in Africa) professional advocates, or expounders of the law, who are allowed to appear and to plead for plaintiff or defendant, much in the same manner as counsel in the law courts ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... suffered the people to demolish the images and all the monuments of papistry, without molestation or hinderance; so that the town was cleansed of the pollution of idolatry, and the worship of humble and contrite hearts established there, instead of the pagan pageantry ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn: So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; And hear old Triton blow his ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... but of ancient rites and incantations, and of a forgotten speech. Attempts have been made to interpret, for instance, the familiar 'Down, down, derry down,' as a Celtic invocation to assemble at the hill of sacrifice—a survival of pagan times when the altars smoked with human victims. It need only be said that these ingenious theorists have not yet proved their case; and that the origin of the refrain is a subject involved in still greater obscurity than ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... or what Virgil was really driving at when he composed the First Eclogue, and whether she had ever heard of Lycidas; and when she said that she had something better to do than stuff her head with quidnunxes and all such pagan rubbish, he remarked very politely that ignorance was evidently not all of the same sort. Which sent Aunt Charlotte bustling away in a huff to look after ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... This pagan proposition of being born in sin is pollution to the mind of a child, and causes misery, unrest and heartache incomputable. A few years ago we were congratulating ourselves that the devil at last was dead, and that the tears of pity had put out ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... years after James Batter's tragedy—Mr Cursecowl was an oldish man—he is gathered to his fathers now—and was considerably past his best, as his wife, douce, honest woman, used to observe. His dress was a little in the Pagan style, and rendered him kenspeckle to the eye of observation. Instead of a hat, he generally wore a long red Kilmarnock nightcap, with a cherry on the top of it, through foul weather and fair; and having a kind of trot in his walk, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... pushed toward heaven. Scattered among the rugged pines were thousands of slender aspen trees, swaying and quivering, their white trunks giving an artificial effect to the scene as if the gods had set a stage for some pagan drama. Ruffed grouse strutted about, challenging the world at large. Our horses' hoofs scattered a brood and sent them scuttling to cover under vines and blossoms. Roused from his noonday siesta, a startled deer bounded away. One doe had her fawn secreted ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... habitat will cost him nothing. He will still lie at the foot of his beloved hills, and the purple moorland will spread around him for all eternity, and the smell of the gorse and heather will fill his nostrils as he sleeps. He is a bit of a pagan, old McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter Catechism. I should not wonder if he were the original of the story of the minister who prayed for the "puir Deil." He planted a rowan tree by his porch when he was first inducted into the manse, and it has grown up with him and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and Arrowhead, the pagan murderer, drew over to the fire and crouched down beside it, his back to the bed, impassive and still. They brought him a bowl of broth and bread, which he drank slowly, and placed the empty bowl between his knees. He sat there through the night, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... we have the spruit at our door and mud for the picking up. It needs only a box- mould or two, and it will be funny if I can't turn out as many good bricks in a day as three lazy Kafirs. Old Pagan, the contractor, has said he will buy them, so now it only remains to get ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... taught by its orthodox professors. Yet other systems of it were devised, which had their origin in the causes attending the propagation of christianity; for it must have been a work of much time to eradicate the almost universal belief in the pagan deities, which had become so numerous as to fill every creek and corner of the universe with fabulous beings. Many learned men, indeed, were induced to side with the popular opinion on the subject, and did nothing ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... expressive,—how surprising! But Fred need not have been surprised; they never set up for Faith, Hope, and Charity. What he most wondered at was that they still looked so lovely, when they were clearly full of all pagan naughtiness. They might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... ourselves thus to review, without carping or sneering, the shapes of solemn imagination which have arisen among the inhabitants of Europe, we shall find, on the one hand, the mountains of Greece and Italy forming all the loveliest dreams, first of the Pagan, then of the Christian mythology; on the other, those of Scandinavia to be the first sources of whatever mental (as well as military) power was brought by the Normans into Southern Europe. Normandy itself is to all intents and purposes a hill country; composed, over large ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... shake off all the old shackles of priests and kings, and be governed in all their actions, by the principles of the Bible. A sort of Jewish theocracy was to be restored on earth, and he was to be the organ of the divine will, as was Joshua of old, when he led the Israelites against the pagan inhabitants of the promised land. Up to this time, no inconsistencies disgraced him. His prayers and his exhortations were in accordance with his actions, and the most scrutinizing malignity could attribute nothing to him but sincerity and ardor in the cause which ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... pagan village dwelt a man who had refused most positively to become a Christian. When urged to accept of Christianity he had most emphatically repeated the expression most common among them: "As my fathers lived ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... bonfires on the neighboring heights. When Gaul became Christian, neither monument nor festival perished; a saint took the place of the goddess, and the temple of Victory became the church of St. Victoire. There are still ruins of it to this day; the religious procession which succeeded the pagan festival ceased only at the first outburst of the Revolution; and the vague memory of a great national event still mingles in popular tradition with the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... exterior symbol, too, a circumstance of chief moment, was here chosen by the devoted combatants. The sign of the cross, which had been hitherto so much revered among Christians, and which, the more it was an object of reproach among the Pagan world, was the more passionately cherished by them, became the badge of union, and was affixed to their right shoulder, by all who enlisted themselves in ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... cannot say the first is best; when I do so, the last read rises up in judgment. To your Mother—to your Sister—to Mary dead—they are all weighty with thought and tender with sentiment. Your poetry is like no other:—those cursed Dryads and Pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name of poetry. Your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose; and I have made a sad blunder if I do not leave you with an impression that your present is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... "But no, it is not for me to be the Judith to deliver Bethulia from this Holofernes. The sword of the eternal is too heavy for my arm. Allow me, then, to avoid dishonor by death; let me take refuge in martyrdom. I do not ask you for liberty, as a guilty one would, nor for vengeance, as would a pagan. Let me die; that is all. I supplicate you, I implore you on my knees—let me die, and my last sigh shall be a blessing ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... needs of our immense field, and, as the opportunities multiply and the needs grow more clamant, the question grows in importance and gravity. The fact that only by stated consecutive work can a church be evolved and built up, and a pagan nation be moulded into a Christian people, cannot be gainsaid, and yet there is an essential need for something between, something more mobile and flexible than ordinary congregational work and methods. ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... amateurs of music. Up to the sixth century they remained pagan. Gregory the Great sent missionaries to them, and more than 10,000 were baptized in a single day. The Venerable Bede represents St. Benoit as establishing the music of the new church, substituting the plain song of Rome for the ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... small entrance is a large bright cross, the upright being a large stuffed white wolf-skin upon his war lance, and the cross-bar of bright scarlet flannel, containing the quiver of bow and arrows, which nearly all warriors still carry, even when armed with repeating rifles. As the cross is not a pagan but a Christian (which Long Horse was not either by profession or practice) emblem, it was probably placed there by the influence of some of his white friends. I entered, finding Long Horse buried Indian fashion, in full war dress, paint and feathers, in a rude ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... that surely came Of pagan blood and bone; For down upon her knees she went, To many a stock ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... unless a spiritual miracle was wrought; that Europe was "drifting slowly but steadily toward an awful catastrophe." Why? Because Germany was strong, envious, ambitious, conceited, arrogant, unscrupulous, and dissatisfied. It was in Germany that "the pagan gods of the Nibelungen are forging their deadly weapons," for Germans believe national superiority is due to military superiority. Dr. Sarolea named as a war year this very year[2] in which we now are ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the "Lethergogallagher," ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... perceive it in the great masters. According to the Apostle, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." "Their vigour is of the fire and their origin is celestial," says the pagan. The coelestis origo is unpurchasable. Nevertheless, even for the ordinary being who aspires himself to write, there is this practical benefit to be derived from an insight into the truth—that he will know in what the supreme gift does consist. He will not delude himself into fancying that it ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... year impends When, wearying of routine-resorts, The pleasure-hunter shall break loose, Ned, for our Pantheistic ports:— Marquesas and glenned isles that be Authentic Edens in a Pagan sea. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... seem somewhat in the way of 'Baetyli' of pagan antiquity, which were of round form; they were supposed to be animated, by means of magical incantations, with a portion of the Deity; they were consulted on occasions of great and pressing emergency as a kind of divine oracle, and were suspended either ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... not altogether disappointed. The religious history carved on the choir stalls at Ulm contained Greek philosophers as well as Hebrew prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood the discoverer of music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then I was startled, forgetting for the moment the religious revolutions of south Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as he affixed his thesis on the door at Wittenberg, the picture ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Gladiators which faced - That haggard mark of Imperial Rome, Whose Pagan echoes mock the chime Of our Christian time: It was void, and I ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christains nor the gait of Christain, pagan, nor man, have so 30 strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... told that the sentimental love of our day was unknown to the pagan world, he would not cite last the two lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, and the will of the powerful Roman general, in which he expressed the desire, wherever he might die, to be buried beside the woman whom he loved to his latest ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tones of a little song by Saint-Saens, so sweet, so sad, and familiar to them both, and concerning which he had once said to her at Villa Diedo that he could never refuse anything to one who prayed thus. Now it was the idea of fleeing far, far away and for ever, from this pagan and pharisaical Rome. Again it was a vision of peace and pure converse with the woman whom he would win over to the faith at last. It was an ardent desire to say to the Lord:—"The world is too sad, let me adore ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Sorrows looked down upon a supper party of men and women who, whatever their creed or faith or unbelief, had dedicated themselves to relieve a suffering humanity with a Christian chivalry—which did not prevent the blue-eyed boy from making most pagan puns, or the company in general from laughing as though ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... larger islands had two or more. The result was a condition very much like the feudal system; each king had petty chiefs, and these, in turn, their retainers, who were little better than slaves. Priests, who ranked equal to the petty chiefs, directed their pagan worship and ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... a sermon a good church-hour in length to gratify him, enriched with compliments from all authors, Christian and Pagan, informing him at the conclusion that, although he had been crowned in the Capitol, he must die, being born mortal, Ser Francesco rode homeward. The sermon seemed to have sunk deeply into him, and even into the horse under ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... my counsel, I will own to you, that originally the two last lines were much better, but I was forced to alter them out of decorum, not to be too pagan upon the occasion; in short, here they are as ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Church of Rome. But as long as it is so, nothing can be more plain than that the members of that Church can give no reasonable security to any government for their allegiance and peaceable behavior. Therefore, they ought not to be tolerated by any government, Protestant, Mohammedan, or Pagan. You say, 'Nay, but they take an oath of allegiance.' True, five hundred oaths; but the maxim, 'No faith is to be kept with heretics,' sweeps them all away as a spider's web. So that still no governors that ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... had been wondering what had become of him. His new work in the Exhibitions supplied a sort of answer, and the few who chanced to meet him reported dolefully that he was a changed man. Gone was the light-hearted and light-footed dancer of the Paris pavement. Silent the licentious wit of the neo-Pagan. This was a new being with brooding brow and pained eyes that lit up only when they beheld his dream. Never had Bohemia known ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... freed from labour under certain conditions amongst the pagan Arabs; for which see Sale (Prel. Disc. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... boon! This sea, that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers— For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus, rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... boyish about the triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... painter. By such men, the embers of learning and of science were nursed into a faint but steady flame, burning through the long, gloomy night of the dark ages, unseen by profane eyes, like the vestal fire in pagan temples.... ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... infallible. I did not accept his condemnation of the Greeks, although I bowed to it. In private I returned to examine my steel engravings of the statues, and I reflected that they were too beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought they were. The dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil budded in my mind, without any external suggestion, and by this reflection alone I was still further sundered from the faith in which I had been trained. I gathered very diligently all I could pick up about ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Prussia, there was then a barbaric pagan race, against whom the pope had published a crusade. Into this war the excommunicated Rhodolph plunged with all the impetuosity of his nature; he resolved to work out absolution, by converting, with all the potency of fire and sword, the barbarians to the Church. His penitence and zeal seem to ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... wholly beneficent and divine plan, I can't do it, and I won't. A thing like that would be enough to leave a trail of beastliness over the whole mass of revealed religion; in the end it would turn one to a veritable pagan. Is this the entrance to your bargain counter? Good bye, then. And, for heaven's sake, remember that sometimes the personal hurt of a thing may blind a man to the ultimate and underlying beneficence of the plan that knocked him over. Watch Opdyke, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... phase of progress, age of the world, or stage of civilisation, does it address itself, but to the common humanity which belongs to all, to the wants and sorrows and inward consciousness which belong to man as man, be he philosopher or fool, king or slave, Eastern or Western, 'pagan suckled in a creed outworn,' or Englishman with the new lights and material science ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the Ka'a-ba was a pagan temple; but when he took possession of Mecca he made the old temple the centre of worship ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... traditions made Sumatra the original home of the Filipino Indians. These traditions, as well as the mythology and genealogies mentioned by the ancient historians, were entirely lost, thanks to the zeal of the religious in rooting out every national pagan or idolatrous record. With respect to the ethnology of the Filipinas, see Professor Blumentritt's very interesting work, Versuch einer Etnographie der Philippinen (Gotha, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... that one man in particular found that somebody else {200} had taken the last berth in the ship he had meant to sail by, and so escaped the fate of the crew and passengers when it went down with all on board—no "special providence" saving them. It looks like a reflection of the pagan mythological tales about heroes rescued by the timely interference of gods and goddesses in battles where thousands of common mortals perish unheeded. It is the aristocratic idea of privilege carried up to religion. The newer view is more democratic, and it ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... yea, even New England, was false, disloyal. She had but half kept the faith. When the cry of pagan England had gone forth for light, it had been heard; the light had been given. But now in her day of illumination, when the Macedonian cry came to her, she closed her ears and listened not. On her skirts was the blood of the souls of men; and at the last day the wail ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... transmitted also such a number of contradictory reports, supported all of them by equal authority, that it became absolutely impossible to fix a preference among them. A few volumes, therefore, must contain all the polemical writings of pagan priests: And their whole theology must consist more of traditional stories and superstitious practices than of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... courtyard, and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were. Tellson's had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does) at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who danced in public on the slightest provocation. Yet, a French Tellson's could get on with these things ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... you, Sir, a blind leader o' the blind, a disciple o' Beelzebub, wi' y'r Babylonish idolatries, wi' y'r incense that fair stinks in the nostrils o' decent folk, wi' y'r images and mummery and crossin' o' y'rsel', wi' y'r pagan, popish practises, wi' y'r skirts and petticoats, I'll no hae ye on my premises, no, not an' ye leave y'r religion outside! An' you, Meester Hamilton, a respectable Protestant, I'm fair surprised to see ye in ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... me sigh, weep, wail, and cry no more; Or let me sigh, weep, wail, cry more and more! Yea, let me sigh, weep, wail, cry evermore, For she doth pity my complaints no more Than cruel pagan or the savage Moor; But still doth add unto my torments more, Which grievous are to me by so much more As she inflicts them and doth wish them more. O let thy mercy, merciless, be never more! So shall sweet death to me be welcome, more Than is to hungry ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... bearing, and in every lineament of his face. It was more difficult to imagine a young and charming woman housed in such a place, but his first glimpse of the bishop's daughter showed him that her Pagan beauty was emphasized rather than lessened ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... possible that you hold the doctrine of Free Will? And are you devoid of any tincture of philosophy, that you should harp on such exploded fallacies? Chance, the blind Madonna of the Pagan, rules this terrestrial bustle; and in Chance I place my sole reliance. Chance has brought us three together; when we next separate and go forth our several ways, Chance will continually drag before our careless eyes a thousand eloquent clues, not to this mystery only, ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... who are always on their side. Its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic, but moral. With it prosperity and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pagan and even Hebrew literature saw the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty, humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only implacable foes. While it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or country and made mankind unitary, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... he says, referring to the Hyades, 'runs low, and 'tis time to close the five parts of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations, making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves.... Night, which Pagan theology could make the daughter of chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order; although no lower than that mass can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the admirer of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... it only hibernates under the chilling influence of rationalism, and that it would start into active life if that influence were ever seriously relaxed. The truth seems to be that to this day the peasant remains a pagan and savage at heart; his civilization is merely a thin veneer which the hard knocks of life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through sin to a conception of the necessity of atonement, we feel, that, while we looked to be entertained with the airiest of fictions, we were dealing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... where a piano was, and where there were fewer people. Out of this room there was a still smaller one with several palms in it, and out of the palms arising a great bronze reproduction of the Hermes of Praxiteles. Lady Seagraves playfully called this little room her Pagan parlour. Here people who knew the house well found their way when they wanted quiet conversation. There was nobody in it when Miss Langley and the Dictator arrived. Helena sat down on a sofa with a sigh of relief, and Ericson ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... get themselves or their friends into power; when gayly dressed crowds thronged the streets on their way to the amphitheatre to see the gladiatorial fight; when there was feasting and revelry in every house; when merchants were exulting in the midst of thriving trade; when the pagan temples were hung with garlands and filled with gifts; when the slaves were at work in the mills, the kitchens, and the baths; when the gladiators were fighting the wild beasts of the arena—then it was that a swift destruction ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... towards the clock; their backs to the lagoon. The lion, which is of bronze with white agates for his eyes, has known many vicissitudes. Where he came from originally, no one knows, but it is extremely probable that he began as a pagan and was pressed into the service of the Evangelist much later. Napoleon took him to Paris, together with the bronze horses, and while there he was broken. He came back in 1815 and was restored, and twenty years ago he was restored again. S. Theodore was also strengthened ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... For Christ begins His portraiture of a citizen of the kingdom with the consciousness of want and sin. All the rest of the morality of the Sermon is founded on this. It is the root of all that is heavenly and divine in character. So this teaching is dead against the modern pagan doctrine of self-reliance, and really embodies the very principle for the supposed omission of which some folk like this Sermon; namely, that our proud self-confidence must be broken down before God can do any good with us, or we can ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Christian image-worship—Christianity, in a natural succession, and by fortuitous circumstances, took possession of the executive, and placed on the seat of power a Christian Byzantine emperor in lieu of a pagan. Basilicas, dedicated to Jupiter, Mercury, Adonis, Venus and the deities of High Olympus, were re-dedicated to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and the other saints (or gods) of the Christian ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... he wrote the most keenly humorous of his shorter sketches, his "The Celestial Railroad," and in it represented the dismal cavern where Bunyan located the two great enemies of true religion, the Pope and the Pagan, as now occupied by a German giant, the Transcendentalist, who "makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... thinkers, as binding on all for always; yet there were individuals inclined to find a reason for exceptions in the practical application of this standard. The phase of the question that immediately presented itself to the early Christians was, whether it were allowable for a man to deny to a pagan enemy that he was a Christian, or that one whom he held dear was a Christian, when the speaking of the truth would cost him his life, or cost the life of one whom ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... Barbara with this custom," the Vidame continued, "I fear is a bit of a makeshift. Were three plates of grain the rule, something of a case would be made out in her favour. But the rule, so far as one can be found, is for only two. The custom must be of Pagan origin, and therefore dates from far back of the time when Saint Barbara lived in her three-windowed tower at Heliopolis. Probably her name was tagged to it because of old these votive and prophetic grain-fields were sown ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... countries where marriage is between one and one. I will not speak of the Pagan nations, but come to those which own the Christian rule. We all know what that enjoins; there is ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of the government, and controlled the Empire, a problem of enormous difficulty presented itself for solution. The whole elaborate educational system of the Romans was founded on the older literature and the older creeds. All education, law, and culture were pagan. How could the Christians be educated; and how, unless they were educated, could they appeal to the minds of educated men? So began a long struggle, which continued for many centuries, and swayed this way and that. Was Christianity to be founded barely on the Gospel precepts and on a way of ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... this, if it be so, That Daria He defends, But the poor Carpophorus, no. And as I am much more likely His sad fate to undergo, Than to be like her protected, I to change my faith am loth. So part pagan and part christian I 'll remain—a ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... (Commissioner in Lunacy in Scotland) has given a most interesting account of similar Scotch customs associated with their treatment of their insane, practised from time immemorial, and therefore illustrating the proceedings of a remote antiquity, pagan as well as Christian. But I must content myself with a very brief reference to his descriptions. Writing of the island of Maree in 1862, he states that about seven years before a furious madman was brought there; "a rope was passed ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... outlook; he did want his wife to be a woman who would teach her children to say their prayers at her knees. It was with something like dismay that he gathered from Karen that her conception of life was as untouched by any consciousness of creed as that of a noble young pagan. He was angry at himself for feeling it and when he found himself applying his rules and measures to her; for what had it been from the first but her spiritual strength and loveliness that had drawn ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... that the word Norman means man of the north, that it is a Scandinavian, and not a French word, that it originated in the invasions of the followers of Rollo and and other Norwegians, and that just as part of England was overrun by Pagan buccaneers called Danes, part of France was occupied by similar Northmen, we see the likelihood of certain Norse words finding their way into the French language, where they would be superadded to its original Celtic and ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... the oath was against the commandment of God, what dishonour had come to the name of God though he had not patronised the swearers of it, but hindered them from fulfilling their oath? If a Christian swear to kill a pagan, and hereafter repent of his oath, and not perform it, can there any dishonour redound thereby to the name of Christ? The Doctor, forsooth, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... faith the different religions of the earth. [3] Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power and immortality, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... evident that there was somewhat a little pagan about her; that she had some faith more or less distinct in a fate, and in a guardian genius; that her fancy, or her pride, had played with her religion. She had a taste for gems, ciphers, talismans, omens, coincidences, and birth-days. She ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... —The destinies ordain.—"In the mythology, also, of the Iliad, purely Pagan as it is, we discover one important truth unconsciously involved, which was almost entirely lost from view amidst the nearly equal scepticism and credulity of subsequent ages. Zeus or Jupiter is popularly to be taken ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... a natural human philosophy—perhaps as the only natural human philosophy—underlies all the beautiful soft-coloured panorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been the habitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Caesarean salon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the civilised attitude of mind; the attitude of mind most dominant and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... with me for telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the newborn infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness—typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man every where, and of that benignity in powers invisible, which even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might bear different interpretations. But immediately, lest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... speedy, success of the national arms is now sufficiently ascertained, sure as I am of the righteousness of our cause and its consequent claim on the blessing of God, (for I would not show a faith inferiour to that of the pagan historian with his Facile evenit quod Dis cordi est,) it seems to me a suitable occasion to withdraw our minds a moment from the confusing din of battle to objects of peaceful and permanent interest. Let us not neglect the monuments of preterite history because what shall be history ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... in Rev. 9, all are agreed in applying to the Saracens and Turks. The dragon of Rev. 12, is the acknowledged symbol of Pagan Rome. The leopard beast of Rev. 13 can be shown to be identical with the eleventh horn of the fourth beast of Dan. 7, and hence to symbolize the papacy. The scarlet beast and woman of Rev. 17, as evidently apply also to Rome under papal rule, the symbols having especial reference ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... barber, no doubt, bled his patients and customers on the public streets of Persian towns, for the benefit of their healths, when we pinned our pagan faith on Druidical incantations and mystic rites and ceremonies; his Mussulman descendants were doing the same thing when we at length arrived at the same stage of enlightenment, and the Persian wielder ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... caught them in the fact of suffocating me with cold water; and by the Lord, I will be revenged, or may I never live to finish my Cleopatra. For the love of God! open the door, and I will make that conceited pagan, that pretender to taste, that false devotee of the ancients, who poisons people with sillykicabies and devil's dung—I say, I will make him a monument of my wrath, and an example to all the cheats and impostors of the faculty; and as for that thick-headed insolent pedant, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... is never more itself than when suffering beneath the blows of heaven. Moreover, its natural tendency is to explain away every dogma of religious truth, from the lowest to the highest. In that old pagan world this natural process is to be seen. Everywhere that human genius opened up a way for itself, and had a career, the last remnants of primeval truth were well-nigh banished. Look, too, at the educated intellect of the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... brilliant eyes. A delicate brown hand, ringed on each finger, waved away the smoke of a cigarette it held, and Victoria saw a small face, which was like the face of a perfectly beautiful doll. Never had she imagined anything so utterly pagan; yet the creature was childlike, even innocent in its expression, as a baby tigress might ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... realisation of human brotherhood. I repeat, through the medium of this Empire man is brought near to man, and nation to nation, and race to race. It was very difficult in the ancient Roman Empire to become civis Romanus, because this Empire was founded upon the Pagan philosophy of lords and servants. It is, on the contrary, very easy in the British Empire of to-day to become a British citizen, because the British Empire is founded upon the Christian philosophy of democratic equality and brotherhood. All is not accomplished, but I say it is an experiment, ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... visible sign through which the appeal came. I have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell |
