"Desecration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about Sabbath desecration. "I confess," observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... watched the successful progress of the play with an anxiety almost as keen as that of the author. To Helen it seemed as though the giving of these lines to the public—these lines which he had so often read to her, and altered to her liking—was a desecration. It seemed as though she were losing him indeed—as though he now belonged to these strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted scene before her, she saw the birch-trees ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... scions, in anger array'd, Once defy'd a proud monarch and built a new nation; 'Gainst their brothers of Britain unsheath'd the sharp blade That hath ne'er met defeat nor endur'd desecration; So must we in this hour Show our valour and pow'r, And dispel the black perils that over us low'r: Whilst the sons of Britannia, no longer our foes, Will rejoice in our triumphs and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... a year, the time was historically distant when a policeman had refused to allow the automobile of a Member of Parliament to enter Palace Yard, on the ground that there was no precedent for such a desecration. The new motor-buses, however, did not run at night. Human daring had limits, and it was reported that at least one motor-driver, succumbing to the awful nervous strain of guiding these fast expresses through the traffic ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... should marry. The question was no longer whether this was possible, but only which was the better match and how the matter would be regarded at court. There were, it is true, some rigid individuals unable to rise to the height of such a question, who saw in the project a desecration of the sacrament of marriage, but there were not many such and they remained silent, while the majority were interested in Helene's good fortune and in the question which match would be the more advantageous. Whether it was right or wrong to remarry while one had a husband living they did ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... year he appeared with an army in Rome. He found the pope ill and in bed before the high altar of S. John Lateran. He surrounded the church and entered it with his men, who were guilty of violence and desecration. But the pope, to save bloodshed, surrendered himself to the exarch, shouting as he emerged from the church, "Anathema to all who say that Martin has changed a jot or tittle of the Faith Anathema to all who do not remain in his orthodox Faith even to the ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown past that. Surely her body was sacred from ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... that the task to be undertaken was one of grievous peril and trial; that disease and heat, hunger and thirst, must be dared, as well as the sword of the infidel. But he spoke of the grand nature of the work, of the humiliation to Christians, of the desecration of the shrines, and of the glory which awaited those who joined the Crusade, whether they lived or whether they died ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... wrinkled countenances of the remaining caciques was stamped a look of dismay and hatred which boded no good. It was plain to Kirby that in battering up the man detailed to kill him, he had committed a desecration of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... husband disturbed." The sergeant pushed her roughly aside, and with the end of his pike prised up the lid of the coffin, while Mrs. Martin and the other three mourners screamed lustily and wrung their hands in the greatest grief at this desecration of ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... day for Tippecanoe. Philip Alston barely glanced at the white face lying against the pillow. He was disturbed and even shocked to see it there. He felt this stranger's presence in her chamber to be a desecration. And then the sight of suffering always made him uncomfortable. He wondered how she could endure it. The repulsion which the average man feels for any affliction of mind, body, or estate was so intensified in him that he could not, with all his intelligence, understand that the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... they took to be news, and immediately dispatched one of their number home to make the report. When this one made his report to Onea-gah-re-tah-wa, he at once dispatched runners to the other nations of the league to inform them of what had happened to their father, the Seneca nation, and the desecration of their fort. The three that were left after the one was dispatched home, went onto a settlement of the same nation at Gill Creek, above Niagara Falls, where they found the people the same as at Gau-straw-yea. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... strong measures. He once more speaks strongly and hotly to the nobles, for they had led the van in Sabbath desecration. They liked the freshest fruit and the daintiest dishes for their Sabbath feast, and they had, therefore, encouraged the market-people to go on with their Sabbath trade. Then, as now, there were plenty of people who, for their own self-pleasing, ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... don't want to die just yet. But isn't it the loveliest place! I come here often when the men are not blasting. It seems almost a desecration to blast these rocks when we think how long nature took ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... formerly, to hold all meetings for the transaction of public business in the sanctuary. None, not even the most piously fastidious parson or deacon, ever thought of being shocked at what in these degenerate times would seem like a gross desecration of the house of God. There were fewer Pharisees in Belfield a hundred years ago than now. To the Puritans, and to all their descendants, until of late, their places of worship were not churches, but meeting-houses merely; and by the stout-hearted men who used to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... masons and workmen employed, both inside and outside St. Mark's, on the restoration and repairs. Fragments of the beautiful mosaic were scattered about in heaps, which it seemed almost desecration to tread upon. I swept them carefully together, and called the attention of the workmen to the neglect of such precious bits of antique workmanship. I believe these restorations are greatly exciting the anger of lovers of art in England, by the imputed Vandalism of the committee ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of desecration, of pollution, you see"—he explained as if ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... ecclesiastical vestments had been already sold, the tapestries removed to the Houses of Parliament, the college plate melted down, and Henry VII.'s Chapel despoiled of its brass and iron, when, in 1643, the Abbey was subjected to actual desecration. The Royalist stories of soldiers smoking and singing round the communion table, and playing boisterous games about the church and chapels, have not been proved. But Sir Robert Harley, who had taken down the Eleanor crosses at Cheapside and Charing Cross, destroyed ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... they shall so plead with you that you will report to the Senate unanimously in favor of the sixteenth amendment, which we ask in order that the women of these United States who shall come after us may be saved the desecration of their homes which we have suffered, and our country may be relieved from the disgrace of refusing representation to that half of its people that men call the better half, because it includes their wives and daughters ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the Commonwealth, while the interior of the sacred fabric underwent every sort of desecration and mutilation,—while stones were torn from the pavement, and monumental brasses from tombs,—while carved stalls were burnt, and statues plucked from their niches,—a similar fate attended the portico. Shops ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... religion of beauty was the symbolic expression of instincts wholly chaste; her body was to her a temple which preserved a sacred flame, and she could not conceive existence if once the shrine had suffered desecration. We are apt to attribute to women indiscriminately at least the outlines of this consciousness; for the vast majority it confuses itself with the prescriptions of a traditional dogma, if not with the mere prejudice of social usage. For Emily no external dogma existed, and the tenor of her life ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... fresh-laid turf, and dug up the earth, so as to expose the coffins that lay beneath. No other injury or outrage could have so deeply wounded the feelings, or aroused the indignation, of the emigrants, as this desecration of the homes of the dead and they earnestly desired to form some alliance with another tribe, which might enable them to punish and to prevent such gross and wanton indignities. In the meantime, in the hope of avoiding a recurrence of so distressing a calamity, the colonists ploughed ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... operations against Babylon. On the ground over which he now flew mighty armies had fought, kingdoms had been lost and won, four or five thousand years ago. The passage of so modern a thing as an aeroplane seemed almost a desecration of the spirit of antiquity, an insult to ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... were but obeying their innate tuneful impulse. When we had finished the first waltz, I left her in the company of one of her Milwaukee friends and started out in quest of some acceptable male partner whose touch of her I should not feel to be a positive desecration. I had reached about the middle of the hall when an affectionate slap on my shoulder ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 'You know Nickerson's Glengyle, sir; perhaps you will do me the favour to drink a glass with me while we chat.' Here I could tell you a lot about Nickerson's." "Don't," begged the Critic, who is abstemious. "I will only say, then, that Nickerson's, once an all-night refuge, closes now at three—desecration has made it the yellow marble office of a teetotaler in the banking line—and the Glengyle, that blessed essence of the barley, heather, peat, and mist of Old Scotland, has been taken over by an exporting company, limited. Sometimes I think I detect a little of it ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... but still I am not better satisfied than the child that has eaten its cake and wants to have it too. And I suppose there are many who would call me wretched, and say that my life, with my sorrowful marriage—which was no marriage, but a desecration of that holy state, and a sin—and my hopeless love, is a broken life. Certainly I feel it so. And yet I don't know. With his nature it seems to me that some wrong-doing was inevitable. Do you think my suffering ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... combing it oftener—imparted to his brothers the subject for his new novel, which should have made the hair of the others bristle with terror; for the principal episode in this agreeable fiction was the desecration of a dead body in a cemetery by moonlight. There was a sort of hesitation in the audience, a slight movement of recoil, and Sillery, with a dash of raillery in his glance, asked ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... turned round with it to Meetuck in the hope of obtaining some information. But Meetuck was gone. While the sailors were breaking into the grave, Meetuck had stood aloof with a displeased expression of countenance, as if he were angry at the rude desecration of a countryman's tomb; but the moment his eye fell on the shred of cloth an expression of mingled surprise and curiosity crossed his countenance, and without uttering a word he slipped noiselessly into the ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Trinity, conversant with its history from its beginning, believe that the portrait of the old bishop, now hanging on the walls of Convocation Hall, should be covered with a dark veil, emblematic of the sorrow which he would feel were he to return to earth and see what to him would be the desecration of an institution which he built as a great remonstrance against the spoliation of the church ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... one hand, for doing nothing were obvious enough. No one, of course, suggested the possibility of preventing Mr. Churchill coming to Belfast; but could even the Ulster Hall itself, the Loyalist sanctuary, be preserved from the threatened desecration? It was the property of the Corporation, and the Unionist political organisation had no exclusive title to its use. The meeting could only be frustrated by force in some form, or by a combination of force and stratagem. The Standing Committee, all men ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... the brutes might have had the decency to have waited until his master was laid in the grave. He felt helpless, powerless. He could not doubt that Bullard was playing with him. And in view of the promise to his master he could do nothing to prevent the crime, the desecration as he felt it to be. He could do nothing but look on in silence while they searched, until they found—But stay! he might as well despoil the spoilers when ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... dirty desecration of the shrines to which we make our summer pilgrimage, and bear with the sacrilege meekly, perhaps laugh at the wicked generation of pill-venders, that seeks for places to put up its sign. But does not this tolerance indicate the note of vulgarity in us, as Father ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Hypatia. 'But I will not see the altar polluted by blood. It is the desecration which it has undergone already which has provoked the god to withdraw ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... threshold, but from the corridor he could see the interior of the room and all that went on there during the next few moments. A candle burned on the bureau, exposing the feminine neatness and delicacy of the furnishings. The presence of the three men was a desecration; what they were about to do, ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... gravely, "your quotation, besides bein' a kind o' desecration, is not applicable; 'cause the Ogilvys did not run away. They fowt on that occasion like born imps, an' they would ha' certainly won the day, if they hadn't been, every man jack of 'em, cut to pieces ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... the young man to see what effect this coarse and irreverent allusion to his father would have. A slight tinge of shame was in his face; but I saw that he had not sufficient moral courage to resent the shameful desecration of a parent's name. How should he, when he was himself the first ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... to tradition, the altar had been promptly pulled down and its ornaments stowed away to be safe from possible desecration. The altar rail was left, however, and Weldon sat leaning against it, his eyes vaguely turned upwards to the organ in the farther end of the church. From the open floor between, the buzz of many voices and the smoke of many pipes rose to the roof; from ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... misusage, misemployment^, misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine to crack a nut; catch at a straw. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... first Sunday in the next month came on, Philip was more like his old self. He had gathered strength enough to go around two Sunday afternoons and note for himself the desecration of the day as it went on recklessly. As he saw it all, it seemed to him that the church in Milton was practically doing nothing to stop the evil. All the ministers complained of the difficulty of getting an evening congregation. Yet hundreds ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full consent) on the land of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... abandoned in every former campaign and hurried to ruin by Prussia, could no longer be reckoned on for aid. The whole of Germany, once in favor of Prussia, now sided with the foe. Honor at length decided. Prussia could no longer endure the scorn of the insolent Frenchman, his desecration of the memory of the great Frederick, or, with an army impatient for action, tamely submit to the insults of both friend and foe. The presence of the Russian czar, Alexander, at Berlin, his visit to the tomb of Frederick the Great, rendered still more popular by an engraving, had a powerful effect ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... the school—having eaten some part of the flesh of an emu, threw away the skin. The skin fell to the ground, and this being observed by his parents, they showed by their gestures every token of horror. They looked upon their child as one utterly lost. His desecration of the bird was regarded as a sin for which there was no atonement."[30] The Roumanians of Transylvania believe that "every fresh-baked loaf of wheaten bread is sacred, and should a piece inadvertently fall to the ground, it is hastily picked up, carefully wiped and kissed, and if soiled, thrown ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... to lie down here silently, uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... out their affairs and plan the future campaign. Trade revived at the end of May and held pretty well into July, then dropped as the country season got into swing. Ernestine was for turning the Cake Shop into a glorified ice-cream stand for the summer, but Milly would not hear of this desecration of her Vision; they were both tired and had earned a vacation. So while Ernestine took Virginia to one of the lake resorts, Milly rested in the big, cool, empty house and played around Chicago with ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the sea is crowned by one of those churches specially devoted to sailors and their pilgrimages which are so often met with in such positions. The chapel of Our Lady of Safety, now restored after a season of ruin and desecration, forms a striking and picturesque object in the general landscape. And from the chapel itself and from the hill-side paths which lead up to it, we get the noblest views of the great abbey, in all the stern simplicity of ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Evora is rich in coins and other relics, and Evora has, besides its great aqueduct, the massive pillars of a temple to Diana, which, sad to say, was once put to ignoble use as a slaughter-house. The ruins of Troia have escaped desecration, if they have not obtained the care and study which they merit. Lying on a low tongue of land which projects into the bay of Setubal, the city of Troia is buried, not in Pompeian lava, but in deep mounds of sand, accumulated there by the winds and waves. A tremendous storm in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... been fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... "For now," says Job, "I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could have touched it at all without desecration. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the neighbourhood to her of men whom he regarded as verminous impostors. Yet he recognised her right to think for herself, and she, on the other hand, regarded his scepticism as rather ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... coup in Philadelphia. An outrage had been worked upon them, upon the public, upon the majesty of the law. To hear their ravings one might have supposed them the evangelists of Justice righteously denouncing a desecration of the sacred altar; or, that we had deprived them of an inalienable right they had possessed to our property. It would have been humorous if the conditions ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... which still stand. There are a few red-brick walls, some frames of wood from which the plaster has been blown, some gardens gone wild, fruit trees unpruned and more or less ragged from fire, and an air of desecration and desertion. In some of the ruins there are signs of use. The lower windows are filled with sandbags, the lower stories are strengthened with girders and baulks. From the main road in the valley, a country track or road, muddy even for the Somme, leads up the hill, through ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... friend. (He must weed out her friends!) The trend of the work done in this room now his quick mind had seized upon—titles of books, papers, it was enough. Notices stuck in the Venetian Mirror (the desecration!) for meetings of this and that society, and all of them, so he judged, just excuses for putting unwanted fingers into unwanted, dangerous pies. He thought of it like that—he could not help it; he saw too far into motive and internal action; was too impatient of the little storms, the paltry, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... surprised!" replied Cornelia, with a depth of meaning which her hearers failed to fathom. They imagined that she was humbly appreciative of her own good fortune in visiting a neighbourhood as yet preserved from the desecration of the American tourists, whereas she was mentally reviewing the sleepy shops where the assistants took a solid five minutes to procure twopence change, the broken-down flies which crawled to and from the station; the tortoise-like round of ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... there are exterior circumstances that make these occupations a desecration of the Lord's day, and as such evidently they cannot be tolerated. They must not be boisterous to the extent of disturbing the neighbor's rest and quiet, or detracting from the reverence due the Sabbath; they ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... soldiers entered the Holy City with their standards, each of which bore the image of the emperor. To the Jewish mind these images were idolatrous, and their presence in Jerusalem was looked upon as a gross insult and desecration. The foremost men of the city poured down to Caesarea, where Pilate was staying, and besought him to remove them. He refused, and for five days the discussion went on. At length he was so irritated that he ordered them to be surrounded ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... slummy and unwashed-looking about the black blight. These insects are as foul as a stagnant pond. Though they have wings, they seem incapable of flight. They are microbes of a larger growth—a disease and a desecration. On the other hand, there is one good point about them: they are very stupid. Instead of spreading themselves out along the entire extent of the bean and so lessening their peril, they mass themselves in hordes in the very tops of the plants as ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... Filippino Lippi, and Savonarola. He hobbled about on crutches for a while, a pensioner of the Medici family, and dying at the age of seventy-eight was buried in Ognissanti, but without a tombstone for fear of desecration by the enemies of ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... very ruins are precious, to be guarded with jealous care. How sacred the spot where lie the parents that tended us, the bosom that shielded our infancy, the hands that carried our weakness everywhither. Men will always deem the desecration of the body or the grave blasphemous. The physical house, standing, is the temple of God; falling, it must forever be sacred ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... catastrophe in truth loomed imminent. Judge Pike was rapidly approaching on his way to the house, Bible in hand—far better in hand than was his temper, for it is an enraging thing to wait five hours in ambush for a man who does not come. In the darkness a desecration occurred, and Norbert perfected to the last detail whatever had been left incomplete of his own destruction. He began lumberingly to rise, talking at the same time, urging upon Ariel the charms of the roadside; wild flowers were in blossom, he said, ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... taken away from their site and appropriated as a boundary fence for some adjoining fields. After the Restoration, and when his religious views had become sobered and settled, he is said, in an eager desire to atone for the desecration of which he had been guilty, to have purchased the crosses from the person who was then in possession of them, and to have been at the cost of re-erecting them on their present site, from which no sacrilegious hand will, I trust, ever again remove them. It is further ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... be unrestricted discussion. There is no objection to using the schoolhouse for the purpose, but ordinarily it is not adapted to the purposes of an assembly-room. The meeting-house may serve the purpose, but to many persons it seems a desecration of a sacred building, and except in the case of a single community church there is too much of the denominational flavor about it to make it an unrestricted forum. Ideally there should be a community house erected at a convenient ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Mrs. McGee was much affected by this sentimental reflection, and her husband, in a manner, lent himself to the desecration of his exclusive domain by accepting a claim along the shore—tendered by the conscientious Waynes in compensation for restricting the approach to the promontory—and thus participated in the fortunes of the Bar. Mrs. McGee amused herself by watching from her eyrie, with a ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... travelers upon the Nile. His blacking was really a superior article, and well worth the price charged for it, but he was "humbugging" the public by this queer way of arresting attention. It turned out just as he anticipated, that English travelers in that part of Egypt were indignant at this desecration, and they wrote back to the London Times (every Englishman writes or threatens to "write to the Times," if anything goes wrong,) denouncing the "Goth" who had thus disfigured these ancient pyramids by writing on them in monstrous letters: "Buy Warren's Blacking, 30 ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... no contemporary authority known to us. In Gildas, the nearest, writing in the next century, we find little more than a monotonous threnody over the awful visitation of the English Conquest, the wholesale and utter destruction of cities, the desecration of churches, the massacre of clergy and people. Nennius (as, for the sake of convenience, modern writers mostly agree to call the unknown author of the 'Historia Britonum') gives us legends of British incompetence and Saxon treachery which doubtless represent the substantial features of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... of fact Rome has never been so much Rome, never expressed its full meaning so completely, as nowadays. This change and desecration, this inroad of modernness, merely completes its eternity. Goethe has an epigram of a Chinese he met here; but a Chinese of the eighteenth century completed Rome less than an American of the nineteenth. Not only all roads in space, but all roads ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... N. misuse, misusage, misemployment[obs3], misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c. 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c. 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c. 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... conduct, just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we carry away from following such a history is something far higher and more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... strongly marked, where the traditions of Christianity were still held sacred in the hearts of many and where the customs of worldliness had not yet noticeably invaded. All the articles she had read in the religious press about the worldliness of the modern Sabbath, the terrible desecration of the day that had been dear and sacred to her all her life as being the time when she came closest to her Lord; all the struggle between the church and the world to keep the old laws rigidly; and all the sneers she had seen in the secular ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... in 1539, Henry VIII. ordered inquiries to be made into the condition and property of the abbey. Altho he recognized the monarch as supreme head of the church, he respected the Glastonbury traditions and met the "visitors" in a spirit of passive resistance. With the object of preserving them from desecration, the abbot had concealed some of the communion vessels, and for this offense the venerable man was tried and condemned to death. His head, white with the touch of eighty years, was fixt upon the abbey gate, and the rest of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... inclination to fall at the Saint's feet and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he was adjusting her arm. All this was impudence and desecration, and he repented that he ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the magnificent condition of this German province—the leagues of copra plantation, extending from the shore up into the mountainous hinterland, thousands of close-crowded acres of heavy green palms." This was in May, 1908. Vailima was at that time the residence of the German Governor (a desecration since happily removed); but the LONDONS were able to explore the gardens and peep in at the rooms whose planning STEVENSON had so enjoyed. Later of course they climbed to the lonely mountain grave of "the little great man"—a phrase oddly reminiscent of one in an unpublished letter of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... equipage and apparel, for which this singular people, notwithstanding their avarice, have usually shown a predilection. [13] Stories were circulated of their contempt for the Catholic worship, their desecration of its most holy symbols, and of their crucifixion, or other sacrifice, of Christian children, at the celebration of their own passover. [14] With these foolish calumnies, the more probable charge of usury and extortion was industriously preferred against them, till at length, towards ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... little while later, when a benefactor approached him with an offering of 300 francs. His prayer was answered. He took only the sum which he had prayed for." It was in the unceasing war that he waged against the desecration of the Lord's day that his people beheld frequently their saintly pastor's power over the elements. ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... resentment, "I have lost my tobacco in the marine disaster, but luckily I have my pipe. I admit the scenery is beautiful here, if we could only see it; but darkness is all around, although the moon is rising. It can therefore be no desecration for me to smoke a pipeful of tobacco, and I am sure the tobacco you keep will be the very best that can be bought. Won't you ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... It would be desecration for any to attend, who was not perfectly virtuous. Hence it was regarded as an opportune time for the young men to satisfy themselves as to who were the ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... good can come of our work but as it arises simply out of our own true natures, and the necessities of the time around us, though in many respects an evil one. We live in an age of base conceit and baser servility—an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons who made its intellectual or art life possible to it:—an age without honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... great city and the strife of faction there," answered his companion, lapsing into the familiar "thou" as he spoke with increased earnestness. "In thy hermit's life thou hast had no knowledge of the robbery, the desecration, the pollution which our Holy Mother Church has undergone from these pestilent heretics, who have thought to denude her of her beauty and her glory, whilst striving to retain such things as jump with their crabbed humours, and may be pared down to please their poisoned ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... executioners are about to set fire to the pyre where these generous young lovers are to end their days, when a young knight steps forward loudly proclaiming none of the Christians are to blame for the disappearance of the image, since Allah himself removed it from the temple because he considered it desecration to have such an image within its walls. This young knight turns out to be the warrior maid Clorinda, who not only convinces Aladine that the young people are guiltless, but bribes him to release them, in exchange for her services ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... three children were uninjured. I found them, cowering and terrified, in an inner chamber. But the infidels had searched every room in their quarters, scattering the contents of chests on the floors. And at sight of this vile desecration the iron of revenge even then entered ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... men, open-eyed and conscious, but perfectly unable to move so much as an eyebrow. Such as had fallen with their eyes in the direction of the nacelle, could see what was going on; the others could only judge of this incredible desecration by what they could hear. The sound of foreign voices, speaking an unbelievers' tongue in the very shadow of the Ka'aba, must have been supremely horrible to ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... matter of cold unromantic fact, and one which very ardent, impossible lovers regard almost in the light of a desecration. As the prosaic side of life has to be faced, it is very necessary that money matters should find a ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... specified "that these should be open upon Sunday" shows that he is a man of his time. This clause in the gift created much excitement. Ministers denounced him from the pulpit and assemblies of the church passed resolutions declaring against the desecration of the Lord's Day. But the people rose, en masse, against this narrow-minded contention and the Council of the city accepted the gift with acclamation. The sound common sense of my partner was well expressed when he said in reply to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... covenant."[704] The good promised to those who keep the sabbath, whether viewed as positive privilege, or as a disposition and fitness to obey Divine injunctions, is most extensive; while the evil threatened for the desecration of it is appalling indeed. What less than the highest privileges of the saints on earth is offered in the promise, "And it shall come to pass, if ye diligently hearken unto me, saith the Lord, to bring in no burden through the gates of this city on the sabbath-day, but hallow ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... recent great change on Salisbury Plain. It is hateful to them; the sight of the camp and troops marching and drilling, of men in khaki scattered about everywhere over a hundred square leagues of plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting booming of guns. It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land has been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them. I was pretty free from these ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... of Dedication is annually celebrated by all Jews everywhere, to commemorate the purifying of the Temple and the restoration of its worship after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, of which an account may be found in 1 Maccabees iv. 52-59. It is very probable that some of our Christmas festivities are only adaptations of the observances of this Jewish feast in symbolism of Christian ideas. During the eight days of the festival they light up ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... express this feeling," responded he. "I had supposed it must be so. It seems to me the libretti of operas are generally singularly ill conceived, both morally and artistically. Music is in itself so pure and heavenly, that it seems a desecration to make it the expression of vile incidents and vapid words. But is the feeling of which you speak sufficiently strong to induce you to retire from the brilliant career now opening before you, and ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... regard those men and women, who in the weakest perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying idle hands on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural parents. Pegasus harnessed to the Thracian herdsman's plough was no more of a desecration. I fancy the poor dog seems to feel the monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame for his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is PLAY; and I have seen a little "colley" running along, barking, and endeavoring to leap and gambol in the shafts, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... often let a friend go like this. These things are too fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly over the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... 636; sufferings of the patriots in, during the siege, i. 637; a portion of the inhabitants of, sent away by General Gage—number of residents and troops in, during the siege (note), i. 638; question as to the bombardment of, submitted by Washington to the committee of Congress, i. 736; desecration of churches in, by British troops during the siege, i. 745; oppressive measures of General Howe toward the people of, i. 746; secret expedition fitted out by General Howe in the harbor of, ii. 29; anxiety of Washington ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Panama, election of United States senators by the people, repeal of the war taxes, statehood for the territories, independence for the Filipinos, aid to American shipping, irrigation of the arid lands in the West, public ownership of railways and telegraphs, desecration of the Sabbath, equality of men and women, exclusion of the Asiatics, the ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... President, resolved to suspend temporarily "civil disobedience" to the laws, and the fraternisation between Mahomedans and Hindus cooled down, when important Mahomedan associations began to protest against the desecration of mosques by the admission of Hindu "idolaters" to deliver fiery orations to mixed congregations within the sacred precincts. But before the reaction could take real effect, it was arrested by rumours of terrible ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... or to teach immoral license, like Swinburne; the painter may crowd his canvas with degrading ideas and vulgar representations, and the artificer may be ingenious in the production of forms of ugliness and degrading grotesqueness. Such desecration of great endowments is alike displeasing to God and ruinous to the man. Of such it may be said: "He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?" (Isa. ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... made such methods possible. He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own country,—professors, parsons, pacifists ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Yet, even after the French had passed the frontier, Alexander still protested that his personal sentiments towards the emperor were unaltered; "but,'' he added, "God Himself cannot undo the past.'' It was the occupation of Moscow and the desecration of the Kremlin, the sacred centre of Holy Russia, that changed his sentiment for Napoleon into passionate hatred. In vain the French emperor, within eight days of his entry into Moscow, wrote to the tsar a letter, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that Karl could not overlook, in Marshal Soult's raid, was the desecration of the genealogical tree. This huge painting with its shields of the Bismarck descent was slashed from end to end, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... untraced ship to its grave beyond the ocean, and cleared the reputation of a harmless people from an undeserved reproach. He has given to the unburied bones of the crews probably the only safeguard against desecration by wandering wild beasts and heedless Esquimaux Which that frozen land allowed. He has brought home for reverent sepulture, in a kindlier soil, the one body which bore transport. Over the rest he has set up monuments to emphasize the undying memory of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... became for him a kind of Sound-Temple as it were, protected from desecration by the hills and desolate spaces that surrounded it. From dawn to darkness its halls and corridors echoed with the singing violin, Skale's booming voice, Miriam's gentle tones, and his own plaintive yet excited note, while outside the old grey walls the air was ever alive with the sighing ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And then, besides—ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the awful exacerbation of my nerves. But of course I could not. In spite of Mary's superstitious protest, my wife put a penny on one eye and half-a-crown on the other. Mary seemed to regard this as a desecration, or at best as unlucky. Then they bound up the jaw of that body with one of my handkerchiefs. I thought I had never seen anything more wantonly absurd. Their trouble in straightening the arms—the legs ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... a month, later, Mrs. Graham refers to the gay and fashionable circles to which they were introduced in Quebec, and mentions her visiting the beautiful falls of Montmorency; but mourns over the low state of religion, and the prevailing desecration of the ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... quaint little place pleased me. Not so another Roman citizen, or English travelling gent., who losing, perhaps, seven-and-sixpence, wrote a furious letter to the "Times," complaining of such horrors existing under the British flag, desecration of the English name, and so forth. Next week the lieutenant-governor, by "order," put an end to Roulette at Heligoland; but play on a diminutive scale has since, I have been given to ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... words that would be uttered their true meaning; and, in fact, her sincere devotion was like a simple flower blooming by the edge of a glacier. She felt that the human love she brought there and sought to gratify was pure and unselfish, and that in no sense could it be a desecration of the place and hour. To a nature like hers, her half-pitying love for one so unfortunate as Vinton Arnold was almost as sacred as her faith, and therefore she had no scruple in ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... fingers trembled as he pulled them away, as though to avoid further desecration of that ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... clothes, which are most of them very good and carefully packed away, so that I am sure there is not a moth-hole in any one of them. I have several times thought, Asaph, that I might give you some of his clothes; but it did seem to me a desecration to have the clothes of such a man, who was so particular and nice, filled and saturated with horrible tobacco-smoke, which he detested. But now you are getting to be so awful shabby, I do not see how I can stand it ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... resolutely put Andrew Cameron out of her mind. It was desecration to think of him and Sylvia together. When she laid her weary head on her pillow that night she was so happy that even the thought of the vacant shelf in the room below, where the grape jug had always been, gave her only ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... had almost turned pale at the idea. What if Mr. Slope should become Dean of Barchester? To be sure there was no adequate ground, indeed no ground at all, for presuming that such a desecration could even be contemplated. But nevertheless it was on the cards. Dr. Proudie had interest with the government, and the man carried as it were Dr. Proudie in his pocket. How should they all conduct themselves if Mr. Slope were to become Dean of Barchester? The bare idea for a moment ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the mighty Hector himself, and fell by his hands. Hector stripped the armour from his dead foe, and would have dragged the body into the city had not Menelaus and Ajax the Greater rushed forward, and after a long and fierce struggle succeeded in rescuing it from desecration. ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... will the love of gain suggest to these gold-worshippers? The whole earth should enter into a protest against such an act of sacrilege—such a shameless desecration of one of the noblest ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... what the "Imitation of Christ" is to emotional Christians—all these are pressed into the service of inflaming impressionable minds. The last instance is perhaps the worst. I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses of preaching ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... pen, the young clerk felt a sudden and strong scruple in his mind. The thought of writing an instrument of slavery for one of his fellow-creatures oppressed him. God's voice against the desecration of His image spoke in the soul. He yielded to the will of his employer, but, while writing the instrument, he was constrained to declare, both to the buyer and the seller, that he believed slave-keeping inconsistent with the Christian ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... a little money; that they should have scoffed at all that was noble and generous, both in religion and in earthly things; all that was nothing to them. And now they would insult the great God Himself by believing that all He cared for was a little mass in a convent chapel. What desecration! What debasement! When I went to M. le Cure, he smiled at my vehemence. There was pain in his smile, and it might be indignation; but he was not ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... Miss Wallis, who played the Part, to declare that 'the Veteran' (Miss G.) had wished to play the Part as it was acted: and furthermore comes Mr. Halliday, who somehow manages and adapts at D. L., to assert that the Veteran not only wished to enact the Desecration, but did enact it for many nights when Miss Wallis was indisposed. Then comes Isabel forward again—but I really forget what she said. I never saw her but once—in the Duchess of Malfi—very well: better, I dare say, than anybody ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... dwellings had actually been built between the buttresses of the church, for their comparative diminutiveness, quaint style, and close incorporation with the pile, caused us to think them, at first, a part of the edifice itself. This desecration of the Gothic is of very frequent occurrence on the continent of Europe, taking its rise in the straitened limits of fortified towns, the cupidity of churchmen, and the general indifference to knowledge, and, consequently, to taste, which depressed the ages that immediately followed the construction ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... thwarting, and from the same source, so nettled me, that I greatly fear, all my respect for the foreign office and those who live thereby, would not have saved them from something most unlike a blessing, had not Monsieur Schnetz saved diplomacy from such desecration by saying, that if I could content myself with a plain suit, such as civilians wore, he would do his ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... to be hoped that nothing further will be heard of these various proposals to intern the KAISER at St. Helena. One would have thought that there had been quite sufficient desecration already ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... thick black mark. Then another from straight cropped hair to patent leather belt. Mrs. Borrachsohn belonged to the school of mothers who believed in winter underwear until the first of June, and Isaac felt nothing. But Eva Gonorowsky saw and shuddered, hiding her eyes from the symbol and the desecration. Patrick glowered at her, filled his brush again, bent quickly down, and branded the bare and mottled legs of his enemy ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... was a desperate desecration, comparable only, in his vague analogies, to the Mecca pilgrimage and profanation of a Holy Tomb. But its very ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... tore the envelope very gently, as though the tearing almost were an act of desecration—and extracted the letter from within. He began to read ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... herself together without a sense of outrage. She had expected to feel shame, vicariously for Rash; she had not expected to be asked to take part in a horrible bit of play-acting. This dressing-up; this mock hospitality; this desecration of the things which "dear Mrs. Allerton" had used; this mingling of ignorance and pretentiousness, inspired a rage prompting her to fling the back of her hand at the ridiculous creature's face. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... day to day the terrible unrolling of events—public faith shamelessly broken, the freedom of a small people trodden in the dust, the wanton invasion of Belgium and then of France by hordes who leave behind them at every stage of their progress a dismal trail of savagery, of devastation, and of desecration worthy of the blackest annals in the history of barbarism. [Cheers.] That was four weeks ago. The war has now lasted for sixty days, and every one of those days has added to the picture its share of sombre and repulsive traits. We now see clearly written down in letters of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... concluded to abandon the "Round Church," which stood on the triangle between Liberty, Wood and Sixth streets, and began to dig for a foundation for Trinity, where it now stands, there was great desecration of graves. One day a thrill of excitement and stream of talk ran through the neighborhood, about a Mrs. Cooper, whose body had been buried three years, and was found in a wonderful state of preservation, when the coffin ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... in an envelope and put it within the leaves of her Bible. That seemed the most appropriate place for it. She could not leave it amongst the portraits of her other war heroes, for fear her room-mates might refer to it. To discuss him now with Betty or Sylvia would be a desecration. His death was a wound that would not bear handling. For some days afterwards she was unusually quiet. The girls thought she was fretting about her brother, and tried to cheer her up, for Larry's bulletins were excellent, and he seemed to be making ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... immorality of the age was proved by their ascribing this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after years, for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavored to hasten their reconciliation with the irritated and at that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... pain especially which He suffered when spontaneously ascending that same stair in order to undergo the mockery of judgment by His erring creatures, to have mercy on afflicted Rome, on His people, on His Church—His well-beloved and stainless spouse, to save her temples from desecration and her children from the sword. "Pardon," he concluded, "pardon my people, who are also Thy people. If Thou desirest a victim, O God! take Thy unworthy servant! Have I not lived long enough? Mercy! O God! have mercy, I beseech Thee! But whatever ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... silence between them knew only her own sorrow and the bitterness of the desecration that had been wrought in her own love. Then, dimly, through her tears, she heard Franklin's voice, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... allies, and on more even terms than they had ever dreamed of, they could now do battle with the enemy that held their race in subjugation and with Russia, whose avowed object through generations had been the capture of Constantinople, the possession and perhaps desecration of the holy places of their religion and the dismembering of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... pushed on. About midday on the fourth day we halted at the Mission of the White Dog, a spot which some more than heathen missionary had named Islington in a moment of virtuous cockneyism. What could have tempted him to commit this act of desecration it ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... jealous pang, totally unreasonable and totally irresistible, Edward Rider, only a moment before so fantastically extreme in Nettie's defence—in the defence of Nettie's very "image" from all vulgar contact and desecration—strode past Nettie now without word or sign of recognition. She did not see him, as he observed with a throbbing heart; she was talking to young Mr Wentworth with all the haste and eagerness which Dr Rider had found so captivating. She never suspected who it was that ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... decree and the removal of the cross on top of the church were the only steps necessary to its desecration. The consecrated character of the temple is gone. To the carnal eye the structure remains unchanged, within and without, except for the loss of a crucifix; but it is quite possible that a priestly nose would be able to scent the absence of the Spirit. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... doctor, "that the final flight of soul from body is infinitely the more precious from my point of view. But how is one to be in a position to intercept that? When beloved spirits pass it would be cold-blooded desecration; and public opinion has still to be educated up to psychical vivisection! I have myself tried in vain to initiate such education. I have applied for perfectly private admission to hospital deathbeds, even ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... marked the places where the great maps had hung. The soul of the room was gone from it with the portrait of the late Mrs. Tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad work of her restless fingers, were no longer there. The furniture had been pushed aside to make room for the deed of desecration; the floor was littered with newspapers and straw; an empty packing-case lay on its side, abandoned, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair |
