"Paganism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals; and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were again to enter upon a war of invasion. Greece once more was to tremble under the sword. Even Egypt and Persia and Jerusalem itself, the battle grounds of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Trojans, the bloody fields of paganism and early Christianity, were all to be awakened by ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... Eton and Oxford. Although as a scholarly poet he had a considerable reputation, his literary fame rests chiefly on his fine historical works, of which fifteen volumes appeared, including the "History of the Jews," the "History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire," and the "History of Latin Christianity to the Pontificate of Nicholas V." The appearance of the "History of the Jews" in 1830 caused no small consternation among the orthodox, but among the Jews themselves it was exceptionally well ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... claims our attention is the religion of ancient Egypt. But I can show only the main features and characteristics of this form of paganism, avoiding the complications of their system and their perplexing names as much as possible. I wish to present what is ascertained and intelligible rather than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... revelation and inspiration of God, until it has conquered for itself the support of the majority of mankind. According to this principle, as Christianity is still in a minority as compared with paganism, we ought all to become followers of Boodh. Such a view cannot bear a moment's serious examination. Every prophet, sage, martyr, and heroic champion of truth has spent his life and won the admiration and grateful love of the world by opposing the majority ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... civilization, are secondary and valueless in the final analysis, if there is no corresponding moral development and social power. The evolution of the family, based upon monogamy, is one of the chief glories of Christianity over against the libertinism and polygamous practices of paganism. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... as pavements inlaid with turquoise and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had been pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism; but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted the inevitable night. The historical moral was the same whether these marble outlines were merely "the isles" seen afar off like sunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, or were felt indeed ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... conviviality is gone, as much as the age of chivalry. Petits soupers are impossible in this part of the world. Let us manfully confess one reason: they cost too much. And we have not the wit, nor the wicked women, nor the same jolly paganism. Juno Lucina reigns here in the stead of Venus; and Bacchus is two ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... of the four marshals of France, grand-master of the palace, and constable, was among the most notable personages of the sixteenth century. Sprung from a family claiming descent from the first Frank that followed the example of Clovis in renouncing paganism, and bearing on its escutcheon the motto, "God defend the first Christian," he likewise arrogated the foremost rank in the nobility as the first baron of the kingdom. From his youth he was accustomed to ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... of the clergy was everywhere more or less repugnant to the general feeling of Christendom. The rise and progress of asceticism in the Church had their source in human nature, and its growth was quickened by a reaction from the immorality of paganism. The general effect on the position of the clergy was to compel them to keep progress with the prevailing movement. Men consecrated to the service of Jehovah must rise superior to the common ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... iconoclastic restorer; yet they bloom and chant and ever bloom. The Bacchanal, which bears a faint family resemblance to the Bacchus and Ariadne of the London National Gallery, fairly exults in its joy of life, in its frank paganism. What rich reverberating tones, what powers of evocation! The Garden of the Loves is a vision of childhood at its sweetest; the surface of the canvas seems alive with festooned babies. The more voluptuous Venus or Danae do not so stir your pulse as this immortal choir of cupids. The ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... whose character was as jagged as his name. This pagan proposed to the Polish nobles that he should marry Hedwige, and thus unite the grand duchy of Lithuania with the kingdom of Poland; promising in that event to renounce paganism, and embrace Christianity. The beautiful and accomplished Hedwige was horror-struck at the proposal, and declared that never would she marry any one ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... have been as old as Paganism, wherein, whilst all voluntary acts are attributed to the individual, all involuntary ones are ascribed to the Deity. Even sneezing was so considered: hence the phrase common in the lower circles in England, "Bless us," and in a higher ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... the condition of Macedonia, the heathen gloom and utter hopelessness of her people, the vision that came to Paul, and his going to preach to them. Then, passing to England under the Druids, he described the dark paganism, the blood-stained altars, the brutal priesthood of the age; and told of the cry that went forth for light,—a cry that touched the heart of the Roman Gregory into sending missionaries to show them the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... A false Armenian did this squadron guide, That in his youth from Christ's true faith and light To the blind lore of Paganism did slide, That Clement late, now Emireno, hight; Yet to his king he faithful was, and tried True in all causes, his in wrong and right: A cunning leader and a soldier bold, For strength and courage, young; for ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... had been with him the night before last, had liked it much better than anything he had done, Harding had said that he must not cover it with draperies, that he must keep it for himself, a naked girl playing with a baby, a piece of paganism. The girl's head was not modelled when Harding had seen it. It was the conventional Virgin's head, but Harding had said that he must send for his model and put his model's head upon it. He had taken ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... Terence the very character who expresses the noble sentiment, "I am a man, and deem nothing that is human alien from me," giving instructions that if the child that is to be born to him should be a girl, it is to be put to death. The public opinion of an enlightened and cultured paganism countenanced such deeds without reproach; it was Christianity, or rather He who said, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me," that put ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, 3 months before the arrival of the missionaries and the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. Then these two will become ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pockets Of a superfluous watch, or geld a jewel Of an odd stone or so; twinge three or four buttons From off my lady's gown: These are the arts, Or seven liberal deadly sciences, Of pagery, or rather paganism, As the tides run; to which, if he apply him, He may, perhaps, take a degree at Tyburn, A year the earlier come to read a lecture Upon Aquinas, at Saint Thomas-a-Watering's And so go forth a laureate in hemp-circle." The New ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... countries of India under European sway, where Buddhism or Paganism and Protestantism exist together, the author does not hesitate to say that the latter is gradually overcoming the former, "whose light is becoming more and more dim." This is a very remarkable concession, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... its chief seats was at Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches. It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still worshipped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the goddess of Philo. So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... disturbed this king's measures, so that for the space of more than seventy years after, religion was on the decline, and the idolatry of the Druids prevailed; they were an order of Heathen priests, who performed their rites in groves of oak trees; this was a species of Paganism of great antiquity, being that kind of idolatry to which the Jews were often revolting, of which mention is made in the lives of Ahab, Manasseh, &c. in the books of the kings. These Druids likewise possessed a considerable share of civil power, being the ordinary arbitrators ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the political expression of Christianity must needs be democracy. We are democrats because we are Christians, because we believe in the essential dignity of man. On the contrary, the political outcome of paganism must needs be despotism and aristocracy. We believe in despotism and aristocracy because we believe in the natural inequality of man, because we believe in force and pride and self-assertion, in the power of the strong to oppress the weak. Nietzsche is against the oppressed and for ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... of the early church testified to the fulfilment of the Saviour's words. The powers of earth and hell arrayed themselves against Christ in the person of His followers. Paganism foresaw that should the gospel triumph, her temples and altars would be swept away; therefore she summoned her forces to destroy Christianity. The fires of persecution were kindled. Christians were stripped of their possessions, and driven from their homes. They "endured ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... after a bloody and calamitous civil war, in which his enemies were completely overpowered, the barbarian forced a number of the vanquished to embark in their canoes and put to sea; and during the revolution that issued in the subversion of paganism in Otaheite, the rebel chiefs threatened to treat the English missionaries and their families in a similar way. In short, the atrocious practice is, agreeably to the Scotch law phrase, "use and wont," in the South Sea Islands." — John Dunmore Lang, View of the ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Remains of paganism are to be found in some of the sayings. A curse still existing says, "May Perun (i. e., the lightning) strike thee." The god Perun, the Thunderer, resembles Thor, and like him carries a hammer. He has been transformed into ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... fate is now awfully appropriate. Marie had visited "the great Sea Water" with her father. Nature's titanic and fanciful frescoing and cameo cutting had strongly wrought upon her impressionable mind, and the old legends and superstitions of paganism had been by no means effaced by the very slight veneer of Christianity which she ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... concern to him if his endeavours should have been ineffectual. If good men in every age and nation have been often unjustly calumniated and disgraced, and if, in such circumstances, even the darkness of paganism has been able contentedly to repose itself on the consciousness of innocence, shall one who is cheered by the Christian's hope, who is assured also, that a day will shortly come in which whatever is secret ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... have the highest regard, have found this defect in some parts of my work, on the Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, &c.; and are of opinion, that I have gone too great lengths in the encomiums which I bestow on the illustrious men of paganism. I indeed own, that the expressions on those occasions are sometimes too strong and too unguarded: however, I imagined that I had supplied a proper corrective to this, by the hints which I have interspersed in those four volumes; and, therefore, that it would be only losing time to repeat them; not ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Hazaras of the central districts, the Kizilbashes of Kabul and the Turis of the Kurram border, nor is there between them that bitterness of sectarian animosity which is so marked a feature in India. The Kafirs of the mountainous region of Kafiristan alone are non-Mahommedan. They are sunk in a paganism which seems to embrace some faint reflexion of Greek mythology, Zoroastrian principles and the tenets of Buddhism, originally gathered, no doubt, from the varied elements of their mixed extraction. Those contiguous Afghan tribes, who ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for the blind hosts of Catholicism and a prayer upon my lips for their deliverance from the trenches of paganism, I dedicate this book to the world as coming from a heart which poured out its youth's vitality upon the barren fields of superstition, and wasted its vigor in serving only the god of myths. With a feeling of brotherly love for the ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... suburb, and in making, wearing, and altering the additional gowns which their joint earnings—for she still worked intermittently at her trade—allowed her to enjoy. After the first infatuation was a little cooled, Sandy discovered in her a paganism so unblushing that his own Scotch and Puritan instincts reacted in a sort of superstitious fear. It seemed impossible that God Almighty should long allow Himself to be flouted as Louise flouted Him. He found also that the sense of truth ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to strengthen the Christians in their faith. His methods were different. Privileges were granted to the pagans which were denied to the Church; the Galileans, as Julian called the Christians, were ridiculed, and paganism was praised as the only religion ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... translated and published, in the first volume of the Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, an ancient poem attributed to St. Columba, and which, at all events, was certainly composed at a period when some remains of Paganism existed in Ireland. In this production the poet makes St. Columba say, "My order is at Cennanus (Kells)," etc.; and in his note to this allusion Dr. O'Donovan states that at Kells "St. Columbkille erected a monastery in the sixth century."—(Miscellany of Archaeological Society, vol. i. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... of Ambrose, he undertook to abolish the custom of feasts in the basilicas and on the tombs of the martyrs. This was a survival of paganism, of which the festivals included gluttonous eating and orgies. At every solemnity, and they were frequent, the pagans ate in the courts and under the porticoes around the temples. In Africa, above all, these public repasts gave an opportunity for repugnant scenes of stuffing and drunkenness. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... artistic person often has a more irritating house than his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and there was none in paganism. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the devout and beautiful fables of the "dispensation of paganism," there is nothing finer than the fable of blind Tiresias and his staff. By some sad calamity this old prophet had lost the sight of his eyes, and to compensate their servant for that great loss the gods endowed him with a staff with eyes. As Aaron's rod budded before the testimony and bloomed ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... for the first time met Greek intellect. Shem and Japheth embraced fraternally. "But even while the teachings of Hellas were pushing their way into subjugated Palestine, seducing Jewish philosophy to apostasy, and seeking, by main force, to introduce paganism, the Greek philosophers themselves stood awed by the majesty and power of the Jewish prophets. Swords and words entered the lists as champions of Judaism. The vernacular Aramaean, having suffered the Greek ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of children would fare in an English court, the scheme of which should carefully and sedulously exclude all religious or Christian instruction, and profess to establish morals on principles no higher than those of enlightened Paganism. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Christianity is the divine trust and assurance that God, according to His own merciful promise in the Gospel, is, for the sake of Christ and His merits, my pardoning and loving Father. It is the religion of justification, restoration, and salvation, not by human efforts and works, but by divine grace only. Paganism believes in man and his capacity for self-redemption; Christianity believes in the God-man and in salvation by His name and none other. From Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and all other religions of the world Christianity ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... paganism to the early ages of Christianity, we can but rarely quote instances of fire lighted up for other purposes, in a public form, than for the ceremonies of religion; illuminations were made at the baptism of princes, as a symbol of that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... which tended to unity by modifying, the Synod of Chalcedon without breaking with Rome. And he prided himself upon speaking Latin. Yet there are those to-day who would hand over his Church of the Holy Wisdom to Greek propagandists. He dealt the final blow at Paganism and denounced the Manicheans—of whom we shall hear much later—and enacted severe laws ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... Schiller's presupposition,—a singular blend of Christianity and paganism, such as at once gives difficulty to the imagination. A prince reigning under a Christian order of things, in a city of churches and convents, yet willing to murder his child on account of a dream interpreted to him by an Arab soothsayer, is not a very plausible invention. And the same ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... wife of Ahab, king of Israel. Jezebel stands for the union of Paganism and Judaism. But Jezebel here represents a professed church of Christ. In Jezebel, therefore, you have a professed church of Christ in which there is a combination of Paganism and Judaism. This symbolic Jezebel teaches the servants of Christ to commit fornication—that is, not only identification ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to proclaim the charlatanry ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... queen to the throne and long stood there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life——" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is well mirrored in his novels—for he was a man who felt at home in mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... however, another had sought to obviate the difficulty of having four records which seem at some points to disagree, by making a combination of the gospels, to which he gave the title "Diatessaron." Tatian, the author of this work, was converted from paganism about 152 A.D., and prepared his unified gospel, probably for the use of the Syrian churches, sometime after 172. His work is one of the treasures of the early Christian literature recovered for us within the last quarter-century. It seems to have won great popularity in ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... There must surely be a sense of superiority in knowing oneself a century or two in front of one's fellow-creatures that counterbalances the sense of solitude. Queen Mab had no such consolation. She was an anachronism hundreds of years on the wrong side; in fact, a relic of Paganism. ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... population is—as it was of old, and as it always has been through all outward changes—pagan. I put it crudely for the sake of putting it shortly, for this is not the place to trouble the readers of a few paragraphs of "Gossip" with a dissertation in support of the assertion. The innate paganism of these people, born of the beauty of the climate and of all external Nature, and of the sensuous proclivity to live and breathe and have their being in the present and the visible which results therefrom, first forcibly shaped their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... forgiven Fred for having taunted him, long ago, with going over to Philistinism; especially, as he inwardly assured himself, that the difference between their cases was that he had had the frankness openly to renounce Paganism, while his companion would not acknowledge his apostasy even to himself. In Fenton's creed, self-deception was put down as the greatest of crimes, and he had fallen into the way of half unconsciously regarding his inner frankness as a sort of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... the Romish Church, though generally more insipid and less varied than those of Paganism, deserve audience from us on this ground, if on no other, that they have once been sincerely believed by good men, and have had no ineffective agency in the foundation of the existent European mind. The ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... is) with a total absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut like a knife. Facit indignatio versum, he truly says of his own work; with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even Swift only approaches at his worst moments. ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Catholic worship, was very ill received by his colleagues, but every where else it is read with avidity and applause; for, exclusive of its merit as a composition, the subject is of general interest, and there are few who do not wish to have the present puerile imitations of Paganism replaced by Christianity. The Assembly listened to this tolerating oration with impatience, passed to the order of the day, and called loudly for Decades, with celebrations in honour of "the liberty of the world, posterity, stoicism, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... outside the theological arena; looking at theological questions from the point of view of a layman, or rather, as M. Cherbuliez has happily expressed it, of a Pagan. His mind was of decidedly antique structure. He had the virtues of paganism: its sanity, its calmness, and its probity; but of the tenderness of Christianity, and its quenchless aspirations after an indefinable ideal, of that feeling which has incarnated itself in Gothic cathedrals, masses and oratorios, he exhibited but ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... much as my sister, but what she liked best about me was my voice. She always declared that my voice was modulated for prayers, and my delight in the convent appeared to her quite natural. She loved me with a gentle pious affection, and Madame Guerard loved me with bursts of paganism. These two women, whose memory is still dear to me, shared me between them, and made the best of my good qualities and my faults. I certainly owe to both of them this study of myself and the vision I have ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... grace, 'tis superstition To stand so strictly on dispensive faith; And, should we lose the opportunity That God hath given to venge our Christians' death, And scourge their foul blasphemous paganism, As fell to Saul, to Balaam, and the rest, That would not kill and curse at God's command, So surely will the vengeance of the Highest, And jealous anger of his fearful arm, Be pour'd with rigour on our sinful heads, If we ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... one from the world of the other. And then you must essay to embody the visions of Patmos with a child's colour-box and brushes, before you can compare the achievements—the amazing achievements—of the monkish ideal with the achievements of classic paganism. ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... so much the more is it esteemed and exalted above all others, being wholly unsuited to the timid and irresolute. By this art we obtain a knowledge of different countries, regions, and realms. By it we attract and bring to our own land all kinds of riches; by it the idolatry of paganism is overthrown and Christianity proclaimed throughout all the regions of the earth. This is the art which won my love in my early years, and induced me to expose myself almost all my life to the impetuous ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... doctrine which tells us that we should do unto others as we would they should do unto us—the very pith and marrow and inside meaning of Christ's teaching, by adapting which we have become human, by neglecting which we revert to paganism. When we look back upon the world without this law, we see nothing good in it, in spite of individual greatness and national honor. But Cicero had found it.—"That brotherhood between men, that agreement as to what may ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... strange that the words should come to her just then. She could not think why they came. But, repeating them to herself, she felt how very far off she was from Paganism. Yet she had within her warm love surely and living hope. Could such things, as they were within her, ever do violence to the Kingdom of Heaven? She looked between her horse's perpetually moving ears at the hollow ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of Greek writers, and the most celebrated theologian of Paganism, relates several apparitions both of gods and heroes, and also of the dead. In the Odyssey,[77] he represents Ulysses going to consult the sorcerer Tiresias; and this diviner having prepared a ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... of the Pagans was much exaggerated by the above writers and were it even true to its full extent, their severity was far more excusable than that of the Christians in later times, for the efforts of the Christian sect in the times of Paganism were unceasingly directed towards the destruction of the whole fabric of polytheism, on which was based the entire, social and political order of the Empire; and they thus brought on themselves perhaps merited persecution, by their own intolerance; whereas, when they got ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... above all the earth, now delights me more than ever;—though at this moment there is rain falling that would not discredit Oxford Street. The depth, sincerity and splendor that there once was in the semi-paganism of the old Catholics comes out in St. Peter's and its dependencies, almost as grandly as does Greek and Roman Art in the Forum and the Vatican Galleries. I wish you were here: but, at all events, hope to see you and your Wife once ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of Humanists ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... future mention. The Franks in St. Leo's time, and for thirty-five years after his death, were still pagan. The Salian branch occupied the north of Gaul, and the Ripuarians were spread along the Rhine, about Cologne. Their paganism had prevented them from being touched by the infection of the Arian heresy, common to all the other tribes, so that the Arian religion was the mark of the Teutonic settler throughout the West, and the Catholic that of ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... the Transition from Paganism to Christianity, with illustrations from the other Arts of Expression. Lectures and Conferences. Mr. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... see how any other can be drawn," she continued; "and I know from what I have read and heard that unbelievers usually seek to give that impression. But it's not a fair one. The absurdities of paganism, monkish legends, and even the plausible errors of the Romish Church, will not endure the light of intelligent education; but the more I know the more I see the beauty and perfection of the Christian religion and the reasonableness of prayer, and ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Papistical Church they be no idols, Master Tremayne!" interposed Blanche eagerly. "Therein lieth the difference betwixt Popery and Paganism." ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... the year 1680. The last objects I saw behind me were the walls, domes, and turrets of this monastery glistening in the afternoon sunlight. They rose clear and distinct on the horizon, an outwork of Christianity against the paganism of Eastern Asia. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... was not only an asylum, but a haunt of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... her mother is a superb example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand, in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play, Michael and his Lost Angel, we miss what was surely an obligatory scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to break down in theory ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... mountainous region are a race apart. Their religion is a mixture of paganism and Buddhism, and, though reputed to be kind and honest, they are an ignorant, uncouth, uncultured people. They dwell en famille in large square houses without windows, in isolated kampongs on the projecting ridges of the mountains. The door of each house is on the side nearest the Bromo ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... highest to the lowest. The peasants flock from every quarter, shops are shut, churches are opened; and the Divine Tragedy enacted in Syria eighteen hundred years ago, is now celebrated in land then undiscovered, and by the descendants of nations sunk in Paganism for centuries after that period. But amongst the lower classes, the worship is emphatically the worship of Her who Herself predicted, "From henceforth all nations shall call me blessed." Before her shrines, and at all hours, thousands are kneeling. With faces expressive of the most intense ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of burden, the Ish Sabal, and to the craftsmen, corresponding with the first and second degrees of more modern Masonry, but little secret knowledge was confided. Like the aspirants in the lesser Mysteries of paganism, their instructions were simply to purify and prepare them for a more solemn ordeal, and for the knowledge of the sublimest truths. These were to be found only in the Master's degree, which it was intended should be in imitation of the greater ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... brother" outside themselves, "a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring and lovable," whom they conceive to be always within call? In making this assumption, is not Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism in the world around him—not all of it, or even most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls "the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the man who is not much ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... and the inhabitants of Teesee, after a long consultation, agreed to conform to his good pleasure, humiliating as it was to them. Accordingly, one and all publicly offered up eleven prayers, which were considered a sufficient testimony of their having renounced paganism, and embraced ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their worshippers. That is all . . . Wordsworth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... for direction by omens of the rosary, opening the Koran and reading the first verse sighted, etc., etc. At Al-Medinah it is called Khirah and I have suggested (Pilgrimage, ii. 287) that it is a relic of the Azlam or Kidah (divining arrows) of paganism. But the superstition is not local: we have the Sortes Virgilianae (Virgil being a magician) as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... plastic art. Michelangelo's Cupid is therefore as original as his Bacchus. Much as critics have written, and with justice, upon the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance, they have failed to point out that the Paganism of the Cinque Cento rarely involved a servile imitation of the antique or a sympathetic intelligence of its spirit. Least of all do we find either of these qualities in Michelangelo. He drew inspiration from his ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... agreement amongst them. Presbyter John, in Africa, lord of those Abyssinians, or Ethiopians, is by his profession a Christian, but so different from us, with such new absurdities and ceremonies, such liberty, such a mixture of idolatry and paganism, [6359]that they keep little more than a bare title of Christianity. They suffer polygamy, circumcision, stupend fastings, divorce as they will themselves, &c., and as the papists call on the Virgin Mary, so do they on Thomas Didymus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Greece." This lament for the beautiful old mythology, is but the lament of a poet for the ancient founts of poetry; and few, now-a-days, can be literal enough to suppose it seriously intended to set up Paganism, to the disparagement of Christianity. But the fact is, that Schiller's mind was so essentially religious, that we feel more angry, when he whom we would gladly hail as our light and guide, only darkens us or misleads, than we should, with a less ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... to tell. Not all these fears are sordid; there is a kind and gracious reluctance to shatter ideals. It is hard at times to combine beauty and duty. The way of the truth-teller is not made easier by charges of iconoclasm. "To know all is to forgive all"; that is not paganism but Christianity. So also, "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone." "To err is human: to forgive divine." Humanity, wisdom, tolerance, are wrapped up in these sayings. Yet when we think, as think at times we must, of the romantic faith that once was ours, contrasted with the realities ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... prole pia, Benedicat Virgo Maria, Per omnia secula seculorum, Kyrie eleyson, Christe eleyson, came under the category of enchantments (ensalmos) known by the terms bolong and mantala of the primitive mangkukulam, manghihikup, mananangisama, etc. etc., of Philippine paganism. All of these Latin phrases acquired so great a prestige that they were looked upon as a form of irresistible invocation for conquering the divine will, and a certain ridiculous sect came to be known ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... the multitude of men, women and children, breast deep in the sanctifying Ganges. Thousands have come on foot from far-away villages of this boundless land of paganism; and from all goes up a continuous murmur of prayer and adoration, like a moaning wind emerging from a distant forest. Eye and ear alike are flooded with an indescribable rush of sensations, and the heart is oppressed with the august ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... the reason was because there was in it more genuine faith than in any book; and we branched off into florid eloquence touching paganism, Christianity, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... quite different when common action is confined to merely social work. But "social service," stripped of all its Christian principles and reduced to pure philanthropy, is not Christianity; it is mere naturalism or neo-paganism. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... others for particular devotion by special indulgences and by special miracles? I soon convinced myself that popular Catholicism, as it exists in southern Europe and as it has existed through a long course of centuries, is as literally polytheistic and idolatrous as any form of paganism, though it has many beauties, and though much of its very mingled influence has been for good. In the teaching of my early youth, this transformation of Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, the mystery of iniquity, the work ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... great spiritual force. He could not stand on the same level with Simon Peter, the fisherman, whose honour it was so to hold the key of the Kingdom as to open the door of it to the Gentiles; nor did he ever attain influence comparable to that of Paul, who shook the citadel of paganism to its foundations, and planted amid its fallen defences the seed of the Kingdom, even the word of God. Joseph must be regarded as a common soldier, rather than as a general in Christ's army; but when the officers ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... associations and the education in practical Republicanism and American sentiments which they peculiarly need. Nobody questions their constitutional and legal right to do this, and to do it by denouncing the public schools. Sectarians have a lawful right to say that these schools are "a relict of paganism—that they are Godless," and that "the secular school system is a social cancer." But when having thus succeeded in dividing the schools, they make that a ground for abolishing school taxation, dividing the school fund, or otherwise destroying the system, it is time that ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... and selected neither being nor ideas, but self. St. Augustine's genius was primarily religious, and the "Confessions," in which he records the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with God, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent himself, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to God, whether I doubt or believe, whether I know or ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... been for Paul, the whole ghostly theory would have been a failure, and had it not been for Luther the name of Christ would be forgotten now. When the acetic monk, barefooted, ragged, with prayer-haunted eyes, went to Rome, Rome had reverted to her ancient paganism, statues took the place of sacraments, and the cardinals drove about ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... fathers and schoolmen were labouring to deduce a science of meteorology from our sacred books, there oozed up in European society a mass of traditions and observances which had been lurking since the days of paganism; and, although here and there appeared a churchman to oppose them, the theologians and ecclesiastics ere long began to adopt them and to clothe them with the authority ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... (Celtic Fairy Tales, p. 265). There we have the Obstacles to Pursuit mainly in the form of forest, mountain, and river, which the late Mr. Alfred Nutt pointed out to be the natural boundaries of the Nether-World in Teutonic Paganism. It is, therefore, possible that our story has been "contaminated" or influenced by the notion ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... began to search, diligently, through all the forms of anthropomorphism, for that one which should display the most artistic beauty and formal grace. It was impossible to hesitate long. There is no paganism of obscure antiquity that can compare, in poetic beauty, with the scarce-forgotten rites of the Hellenic Pantheon. Fired by an unlooked-for enthusiasm in his chosen task of apostasy, he finally took for his protective ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... information than that which is to be gathered from the ruins of the numerous amphitheatres, which are to be found at every centre of Roman occupation. The circus disappeared on the establishment of the Christian religion, for the bishops condemned it as a profane and sanguinary vestige of Paganism, and, no doubt, this led to the cessation of combats between man and beast. They continued, however, to pit wild or savage animals against one another, and to train dogs to fight with lions, tigers, bears, and bulls; ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... Paradise dawn; its sense of the dignity of man as man; the religious reverence with which it speaks of all human ties, human strength and beauty—ay, even of merely animal human appetites, as God-given and Godlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire, when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller's Gods of Greece; for on this subject he was more eloquent than on any. He had gradually, in fact, as we have seen, dropped all faith in anything but Nature; the slightest fact about a bone or a weed was more important to him ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... us have Christianity and civilization to leaven the mass of heathenism and paganism among the Indian tribes; let us have a wise and paternal Government faithfully carrying out the provisions of our treaties, and doing its utmost to help and elevate the Indian population, who have been cast upon our care, and we will have peace, progress, ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... with the heathen priesthood. Had it been possible that any combination of men should crush it, it must have perished at the outset; but it only grew stronger in the midst of its fierce and powerful enemies. It went through ten bloody persecutions, "conquering and to conquer," until it overthrew paganism, and became the established religion of the Roman empire. Then it was not strengthened by its alliance with the state, but only corrupted and shorn of its true power. And so it has been ever since. The gospel has always shown itself ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... desired him to be taught, the son remained as ignorant as before. Among the other misfortunes of this ominous marriage, Roland's wife had possessed all the superstitions of a Roman Catholic Spaniard; and with these the boy had unconsciously intermingled doctrines far more dreary, imbibed from the dark paganism ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the fourth century, but it tells the experience of lofty souls in all centuries. The particular period chosen is one of the deepest interest,—that of the conflict of expiring Paganism with growing Christianity, under Julian the Apostate. Julian's character, as drawn in the story, may be considered as a true historical study. The "grand conservative of the fourth century," as Mrs. Lee calls him, is painted as a violent and arbitrary man, but always sincere and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... theses to the church door in Wittenberg. The Church took alarm and attempted to crush him, and soon the greatest contest since the conflict between paganism and Christianity was on. Within half a century all northern lands had been lost to the ancient Church (see map, p. 296); the first successful challenge of its ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... that the Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism. They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious reformation possible or, at all events, effective. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... in part by the organized religions, this great undergrowth of superstition is as apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual disease is the sad fact that confronts every lover of his fellow-men. This paganism is more ancient and universal than any one of the religions founded on writing or teachers of name and fame. Even the applied science and the wonderful inventions imported from the West, so far from eradicating it, only serve ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Thor and Woden, had become the divinities of the land, and the Saxons, in whom Christianity had but recently supplanted the superstitions of paganism, were fast returning to the worship of the pagan gods. Edmund and his companions were shocked at the change. On reaching home they found that the ravages of the Danes had here been particularly severe, doubtless in revenge for the heavy loss which ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... the earth and air as by what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas. Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole man—intellect, habits, and affections—from the life of the world to a new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... 864 the Bulgarian King, Boris, adopted Christianity—some say converted by his sister, who had been a prisoner of the Greeks and was baptized by them. His adherence to Christianity was announced in a treaty with the Greek Emperor, Michael III. Some of King Boris's subjects kept their affection for paganism and objected to the conversion of their king. Following the customs of the time they were all massacred, and Bulgaria became ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... roots into the historic soil which, in the matter of creeds, is known by the name of paganism or idolatry. At first sight what do we find in the opinions of that ancient world? No trace of the divine unity. Adoration is dispersed over a thousand different beings. Not only are the heavenly bodies adored and the powers of nature, but men, animals, and inanimate objects. The feeling ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... of piety to be attained by spectacular efforts at self-mortification flies in the face of the doctrine that we are rid of sin and sanctified by divine grace alone. Monkish holiness is a slander of the Redeemer's all-sufficient sacrifice for sin and of the work of the Holy Spirit. It started in paganism, and wants to ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... uncritical as Edward Davies's; with his neo- Druidism, his Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the mysteries; and above all, his ape of the sanctuary, 'signifying the mercurial principle, that strange and unexplained disgrace of paganism,' Mr. Nash comes to our assistance, and is most refreshingly rational. To confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only. Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,—to whom, he says, 'great sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, and treachery,' ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... explains much of his psychology, all of his art. A man after nearly two thousand years of Christianity may say to himself: "Lo! I am a pagan." But all the horses from Dan to Beersheba cannot drag him back to paganism, cannot make him resist the "pull" of his hereditary faith. The very quality Hearn most deplored in himself gives his work an exotic savour; he is a Christian of Greek and Roman Catholic training, a half Greek, half Celt, whole gipsy, masquerading as an Oriental. The mask is an agreeable one, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... heretofore, in the account of the crypt of St. Cecilia, became a common adornment of the sepulchral walls. The use of the nimbus, or glory round the head, was not introduced into Christian Art before the end of the fourth century. It was borrowed from Paganism, and was adopted, with many other ideas and forms of representation, from the same source, after Romanism had taken the place of Paganism as the religion of the Western Empire. The faith of the catacombs of the first three ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... in the study of the antique. Winckelmann questioned the works of the Greek chisel with an intelligence full of love, and initiated his countrymen into poetry by a feeling for sculpture! What an enthusiasm he displayed for classical beauty! what a worship of the form! what a fervor of paganism is found in its eloquent pages when he also comments on the admirable group of the Laocoon, or the still purer masterpiece of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... applaud, the bent of that devotion which could erect so proud and beautiful a fane in the midst of moral surroundings so ignoble and unlovely,—a spiritual remembrance perhaps older and truer than paganism, ennobling the pagan mind with the idea of an architectural Sabbath, so to speak, such as a heathen may purely enjoy and a Christian ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... idea and applied it to itself. It has always claimed to be absolutely and alone true as a religious system. Every other religion is an invader of its domain. It was this attitude which gave a definition to heresy. Under paganism "speculation was untrammeled. The notion of there being any necessary guilt in erroneous opinion was unknown."[532] When once this notion found acceptance it produced a great number of deductions and corollaries and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... administer to all adult converts from paganism, Judaism, or Mahometanism, who make a credible profession, and to all infants, whose sureties engage for their Christian education, the rite of baptism, signifying the remission of past sin, original or actual, and pledging the communication of whatever grace is needful to remedy ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... "Cast thy rosary to the ground; bind on thy shoulder the thread of paganism; throw stones at the glass of piety; and quaff from a ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... make the same use of it that the Roman Catholics say they do of the pictures and images of their saints, which is, only to remind them of those; for the adoration they disclaim. Nay, I will go further, as the transition from Popery to Paganism is short and easy, I will classically end poetically advise you to invoke, and sacrifice to them every day, and all the day. It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain; and, I doubt, the best of us here have more ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the realm of Congo which was polygamy; and to the aged monarch the privation of his wives appeared so intolerable, that he renounced the Christian faith, and relapsed into all the impurities of paganism and polygamy. The heir apparent, however, saw nothing so very dreadful in the sacrifice of his wives, and braving the displeasure of his father, remained attached to the Portuguese. The holy fathers managed their business on this occasion with that skill, for ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... gold for a title of nobility, was worthy of that emperor: "I can enrich thee," he said, "but only thy own virtue can enoble thee" All true grandeur, excellence, and dignity, are the offspring of virtue. Even the most renowned oracles of paganism proclaim this, and the very persecutors of holiness are often constrained to pay homage to their victim. No wonder, then, that whenever we are privileged to find one of those rare mortals, whom virtue has unmistakably marked as her own, we lovingly ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... all sacred things, the silence of the mass; and the undying paganism in the hearts of the two that stood there had ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... is a lucky thing for the Christian world. We Westerners—we of America and Europe—would go all to pieces otherwise. You see we Occidentals have not eons of fatalistic paganism to fall back on as have the sons of the East. They endure without our religion. But we—what would happen to us if Christianity did not unite, purify, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... narratives in history than that of the facility and enthusiasm with which the Anglo-Saxons, a people conservative then as now to the degree of extreme obstinacy, accepted Christianity and the new learning which followed in the train of the new religion. After a few lapses into paganism in some localities, we find these people, who lately had swept Christian Britain with fire and sword, themselves became most zealous followers of Christ. Under the influence of the Roman missionaries who, under St. Augustine, had begun their ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tho the undeniably noble effect of the whole is somewhat marred to English eyes by the unusual appearance of the unadorned brick walls and vaulting. The pulpit, by Delvaux (1745), partly in oak, partly in marble, represents Truth revealing the Christian Faith to astonished Paganism, figured as an old and outworn man. It is a model of all that should be avoided in plastic or religious art. The screen which separates the choir from the transepts is equally unfortunate. The apsidal end of the Choir, however, with its fine modern ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and moreover (in this country at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few people, even nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just the same root as Paganism, and that it shares by far the most part of its doctrines and rites with the latter. Till quite lately it was thought (in Britain) that only secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in sungods; and while it was true that learned professors ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... anecdotes; faith and ignorance had raised them above the anecdote, and they had become epics, whether by intensity of religious belief—as in the case of the monk of Fiesole—or by being given sublime artistic form—for paganism was not yet dead in the world to witness Leonardo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. To these painters Biblical subjects were a mere pretext for representing man in all his attributes; and when the same ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... more the bold insolence of the musical Bacchantes, who, indeed, in the eyes of the sober, formed the most immoral nuisance attendant on the sports of the time, and whose hardy license and peculiar sisterhood might tempt the antiquary to search for their origin amongst the relics of ancient Paganism. And now, to increase the girl's distress, some half-score of dissolute apprentices and journeymen suddenly broke into the ring of the Maenads, and were accosting her with yet more alarming insults, when Marmaduke, pushing ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... renounce at once any attempt at chronological order. Slavic popular poetry has yet no history. Not that a considerable portion of it is not very ancient. Many mysterious sounds, even from the gray ages of paganism, reach us, like the chimes of distant bells, unconnected and half lost in the air; while, of many other songs and legends, the colouring reminds us strongly of their Asiatic home. But the wonderful tales they convey, have mostly been only confined to tradition; especially there, where ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"- -it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the [45] accounts which pagan philosophy ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... surnamed the Great, had some competitors at first for the throne.—Among the rest was Maxen'tius, who was at that time in possession of Rome, and a stedfast assertor of Paganism. 15. It was in Constantine's march against that usurper, we are told, that he was converted to Christianity, by a very extraordinary appearance. 16. One evening, the army being on its march towards Rome, Constantine was intent on various considerations upon the fate of sublunary things, and the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Paganism of the others, we must remember how far southwards and inland the same great stock extends—indefinitely towards the interior, and as far as the back of the Ashanti country, in ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... never forgot any of her answers. About the carol-singers she was a little irritable. They had woken her it seemed from a very delightful sleep, and she considered the whole affair "savoured of Paganism." And then Peter found suddenly that he didn't wish to talk about the carol-singers at all because the things that he felt about them were, in some curious way, not the things that he ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... is a mixture of Paganism and Christianity. In common with all the other orient tribes, they believe in good and evil principles, and in metempsychosis. They swear in the name of the devil. They bury their dead horizontally, in a coffin made of a part of a canoe, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... they thus proselyted were downright honest, well meaning people, such as understood plain sense better than any artificial pomp of reasoning: whereas if our divines should now set about the gaining converts from paganism by their metaphysical subtleties, they would find that most of the persons they applied themselves to were either so ignorant as not at all to apprehend them, or so impudent as to scoff and deride them; or finally, so well skilled at the same weapons, that they would be ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... never yet explored, appears to be crowned by the walls of a convent, built, no doubt, out of some of the fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is another convent among the baths. The Catholics have taken a peculiar pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether temples or palaces. There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the destruction of old Rome. I often think so when I see the elaborate pains that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no purpose ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the great empires all had some connection, more or less, with the temple of Jerusalem. Melancthon even observes it in his Sketch of Universal History, as worthy of notice—that Pompey died, as it were, within sight of that very temple which he had polluted. Let us not suppose that Paganism, or Pagan nations, were therefore excluded from the concern and tender interest of Heaven. They also had their place allowed. And we may be sure that, amongst them, the Roman emperor, as the great accountant for the happiness of more men, and men more cultivated, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... simple building, whatever it was, in which the first bishop, Mellitus, began his ministry. He founded the church in 604, and he had troubled times. The sons of his patron, King Sebert, relapsed into paganism, indeed they had never forsaken it, though so long as their father lived they had abstained from heathen rites. One day, entering the church, they saw the bishop celebrating the Sacrament, and said, "Give us some of that white bread which you gave our father." Mellitus ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... 'set' in London put it on—but he'll drop that in time,—when he is a little older and wiser. He has been in to see me once or twice since he took up his residence here for the summer. He tries to discuss religion with me—or rather, I should say. irreligion. His own special 'cult' is the easy paganism of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... man cried out to him to yield; his love for Dea and his love for Rome, and that pride of manhood in him that calls for power over other men. Born and bred in luxury-loving paganism, in the worship of might and the deification of the imperium, the Christian had to choose between the world and the Master. The battle was fierce and cruel. Gone now was the consciousness of strength, the dignity of the patrician! ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... its sin, its selfishness, appall my heart. And I have struggled for years with the sickening dread of the time when I should be forced to leave the pleasant luxury of my official position to put my life into contact with the modern paganism of this century. The awful condition of the girls in some great business places, the brutal selfishness of the insolent society fashion and wealth that ignores all the sorrow of the city, the fearful curse of the drink and gambling hell, the wail of the unemployed, ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... however, in his commentary on this passage of Matthew, the reference is to the Jews even at the time when it was yet lawful to keep the legal observances, in so far as he whom they converted to Judaism "from paganism, was merely misled; but when he saw the wickedness of his teachers, he returned to his vomit, and becoming a pagan deserved greater punishment for his treachery." Hence it is manifest that it is not blameworthy ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... dogma was developed that Satan would exercise his powers to help his votaries—had led to the reestablishment of a system of torture, in order to baffle and overcome Satan, far more cruel than any which prevailed under paganism. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... new, strange as it may now seem to us, were so confused in those days, and books were so rare, and the Latin poets held in such invincible reverence, that Dante, in one and the same poem, speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower mythology; nay, invokes Apollo himself at the door of paradise. There was, perhaps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the past in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of Providence; ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... has rendered to mankind has been instrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative. Hebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it a matter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganism had left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewish system has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda and intolerance; a tendency which would not have proved nefarious had this religion always remained true to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... why criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not be something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary mediaevalism or paganism, intrinsically ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... the Revival we owe to men who, by their very desire for truth, were forced into opposition to the tremendous power of the Church, which always insisted that people should 'just trust,' and take the mixture of cosmogony and Greek philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by this same Church as the last word on science, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... See Procopius de Bell. Persic. l. i. c. 19. Note: Compare, on the epoch of the final extirpation of the rites of Paganism from the Isle of Philae, (Elephantine,) which subsisted till the edict of Theodosius, in the sixth century, a dissertation of M. Letronne, on certain Greek inscriptions. The dissertation contains some very interesting observations on the conduct and policy of Diocletian ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... tolerates the unspeakable wickedness of the world,—if He calmly looks down upon the frightful holocaust of iniquity that steams up before His eyes from the cities and towns and hamlets of the world,—if He tolerates the abomination of paganism, and the still worse, because conscious, wickedness of the Christian world, why should we be fretful and impatient? And if Christ was so gentle and so tender towards these foul, ill-smelling, leprous, and ungrateful ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... to the year 1000, so long as the people made their own saints and legends, their daily life was not to them uninteresting. Their nightly Sabbaths were only a slight relic of paganism. They held in fear and honour the Moon, so powerful over the good things of earth. Her chief worshippers, the old women, burn small candles to Dianom—the Diana of yore, whose other names were Luna and Hecate. The ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... History of the world is the revolution by which the noblest portions of humanity have passed from the ancient religions, comprised under the vague name of Paganism, to a religion founded on the Divine Unity, the Trinity, and the Incarnation of the Son of God. It has taken nearly a thousand years to accomplish this conversion. The new religion had itself taken at least three hundred years in its formation. But the origin of the revolution ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... responsibility for "great non-Christian populations [in India] whose religious ideas and institutions are being rapidly transformed by English law and morality."[5] In a third passage he even prophesies rashly: "The end of simple paganism is ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... definite strain of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility that shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with neo-paganism, Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage to 'wizards' and speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness about it to ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... people, to recall the bondage of Zion. It was amazing to hear these bloodthirsty savages consecrated by their leader to the meek service of Christ. An enthusiast may deceive himself, and I did not question his sincerity. I knew his heart, black with all the lusts of paganism. I knew that his purpose was to deluge the land with blood. But I knew also that in his eyes his mission was divine, and that he felt behind him all ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... slavery wrong. It is a rightful and natural relation, as between an inferior and superior race. The black race is far better off here in America, in slavery, than they would be in Africa, in freedom and in paganism; and if there is something of hardship in their lot, it is only because there is hardship in the lot of ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... little pains to connect with the former more interesting moral impersonated in the titular hero and heroine of the drama. But I am half inclined to believe, that Shakespeare's main object, or shall I rather say his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the not less rude, but more intellectually vigorous, and more featurely, warriors of Christian chivalry,—and to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... in its emphasis upon individual responsibility and duty; above all, in its advocacy of a common humanity and its belief in the relation of each human soul to God, Roman Stoicism, as revealed in the writings of a Seneca, an Epictetus, and a Marcus Aurelius, not only showed how high Paganism at its best could reach, but proved in a measure a preparation for Christianity, with whose practical truths ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... territory are probably more than a million in number, and belong to several different stocks of somewhat varying characteristics. The most common type is of medium size, well formed, coal-black in color and rather good-looking. They are intelligent and easily taught, but are extremely indolent. Their paganism takes the form of gross superstition, as seen in their constant use of gree-gree charms and in their sassa-wood ordeal. Like all the races of Africa, they are polygamists; and as the women manage the farms and do nearly all the work, a man's wealth and importance ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson
... stages of man's intellectual and moral development. No one conception of the nature of the gods could possibly afford the clue to all parts of that motley complex of rites and ceremonies which the later paganism had received by inheritance, from a series of ancestors in every state of culture from pure savagery upwards. The record of the religious thought of mankind, as it is embodied in religious institutions, resembles the geological record of the history of the earth's crust; the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... might be spared to them for three years, and as this was refused, for two years, a year, a month. But the only concession they could obtain was that they should not be obliged to destroy their goddess with their own hands. The ancient paganism, it will be seen, fell easily and without ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies |
