"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... better worship at pagan shrine; Or, prophet of Islam, e'en at thine; To seek Nirvana in Buddhist lore, Or pray to Isis on Afric's shore; Better the dark, mysterious rites Of Ceres on Elusian heights; Better the Gueber's fierce ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... condition very much like the feudal system; each king had petty chiefs, and these, in turn, their retainers, who were little better than slaves. Priests, who ranked equal to the petty chiefs, directed their pagan worship and occasionally ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... many of the virtues of the Mohammedan religion, such as honesty, cleanliness, temperance, and devoutness, and denounced with scathing sarcasm, not Christ, but professing Christians whose conduct towards himself was beneath the dignity of the pagan. But this in no way detracts from his admiration of the genuine follower of Christ. He says that "religious ideas have more influence than certain narrow-minded philosophers are willing to believe; they ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... does not allege this—by doing good to his neighbours likewise; for he rescues twelve companions of his own naughtiness from the infernal regions. The mixture of pagan and Christian eschatology, if not borrowed, is exceedingly well and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... —a pagan and a worshipper of Pan, loving the woods and waters, and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for worship made stately and to order on certain recurring ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... soldier and sufferer in the time of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximinian. He perished in the tenth and last persecution of the Christian Church by the Romans. The judge, who condemned him to death, was Aquilinus. After being importuned to renounce the Christian religion, and to embrace the Pagan creed, as the only condition of his being rescued from an immediate and cruel death, St. Florian firmly resisted all entreaties; and shewed a calmness, and even joyfulness of spirits, in proportion to the stripes inflicted upon him previous to ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... ever fell from her lips, nor did music of sympathy mellow her voice. Her life had been unrelieved by a single deed of charity. She was, in old Mr. Morell's language, 'a negative saint.' Mr. Penrose went further, and called her 'a Calvinistic pagan.' But none ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... should be told that the sentimental love of our day was unknown to the pagan world, he would not cite last the two lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, and the will of the powerful Roman general, in which he expressed the desire, wherever he might die, to be buried beside the woman whom he loved to his latest hour. His wish was fulfilled, and the love-life ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to waste time on the loikes iv yez?" snorted Mr. Quilty. "Hivin! Fine comp'ny ye'd be f'r the holy men and blessid saints an' martyrs an' pure, snow-white angels! Why, ye idolatrous, stick-burnin', kow-towin', joss-worshippin' pagan son iv a mat-sailed junk and a chopstick, they'd slam the pearly gates forninst yer face and stick their holy fingers to their blessid noses at yez. Hivin! Ye'll never smell ut, nor scuffle yer filthy shoes on th' goolden streets. Purgathry! Faix, yer ticket reads straight ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... half. And I only own—such is my challengeful character—that perhaps He do eat pagan infants when He's in the desert. But not Christian ones at home. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 5%-10%, unaffiliated 4% overseas departments: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, pagan ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the assistance of the charitable, to sail for Africa, and take with them many of the implements of civilized life. They arrived in safety at Sierre Leone, and were allowed once more to mingle with their friends, and enjoy God's gift of freedom, in a Pagan land—having fortunately escaped from a cruel and life-long bondage, in the ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... a juvenile production of the poet, has been communicated by his niece, Miss Pagan of Dumfries. The heroine of the song, Eliza Neilson, eldest daughter of the Reverend Mr Neilson of Kirkbean, still lives, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Ithome. Cymodocee becomes very beautiful, and receives, but rejects, the addresses of Hierocles, proconsul of Achaia, and a favourite of Galerius. One day, worshipping in the forest at a solitary Altar of the Nymphs, she meets a young stranger whom (she is of course still a pagan) she mistakes for Endymion, but who talks Christianity to her, and reveals himself as Eudore, son of Lasthenes. As it turns out, her father knows this person, who has the renown of a ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... bearing lights and torches, and beheld, lying in their daughter's arms, a monster, fearsome and dreadful beyond human belief. All the neighbours ran quickly to behold the grisly sight, and amongst them a good priest, well acquainted with pagan rites. When he had come anear, and had said some verses of the Gospel of Saint John, the fiend vanished with a terrible noise, bearing away the roof of the chamber, and leaving the bed in flames. In three days' time the girl gave ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... watching the dying glow of the sunset. Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... eternal distinction of good and evil; these were in general the great objects of his philosophical enquiries, and he has placed them in a more convincing point of view than they ever were before exhibited to the pagan world. The variety and force of the arguments which he advances, the splendour of his diction, and the zeal with which he endeavours to excite the love and admiration of virtue, all conspire to place his character, as a philosophical ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... pagan temple in Rome became a Christian Church. Had Constantine been circumcised, instead of baptized, all the pagan temples would have become synagogues, and every priest a rabbi. They do say it was a Christian woman who influenced Constantine in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... it is hot weather." In these cases it appears probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as more or less divine. This appears from the custom sometimes observed of dipping a cross in the Fountain of Barenton to procure rain, for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the old pagan way of throwing water on the stone. At various places in France it is, or used till lately to be, the practice to dip the image of a saint in water as a means of procuring rain. Thus, beside the old priory of Commagny, there is a spring of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... with just a touch of the untamed somewhere, about the swing and carriage of him, about the strong jaw, and wide thick-lipped mouth; just that something independent, which, in great variety, clings to the natives of these still remote, half-pagan valleys by the moor. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... opportunities of being better informed; and, that, if the minds of people had not been open to conviction, the Christian religion could not have been propagated in the world, and we should now be in a state of Pagan darkness and barbarity: he endeavoured to prove, by some texts of Scripture and many quotations from the Fathers, that the Pope was the successor of St. Peter, and vicar of Jesus Christ; that the church of Rome ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... visited last night in my sleep by one whom I presently recognised as the famous Adept and Mystic of the first century of our era, Apollonius of Tyana, called the " Pagan Christ." He was clad in a grey linen robe with a hood, like that of a monk, and had a smooth, beardless face, and seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age. He made himself known to me by asking if I had heard of his lion.* He commenced ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Staines the overlordship of Wessex extended across the river and reached within twenty miles of the Ouse at Bedford. These districts were the remnants of the united state of the first King of the English—Egbert, whose realm embraced not only the midland and semi-pagan Mercia, but who claimed the fealty of East Anglia and Northumbria and for a few years made the Firth of Forth the north coast of England. To the south-west the country that Alfred was called upon to govern reached to the valley of the Plym, and so "West Wales" or Cornwall ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... imply the interval of a solar year. Why he should choose to express that interval by fifty, rather than by fifty-two, weeks, may be surmised in two ways: first, because the latter phrase would be unpoetical and unmanageable; and, secondly, because he might fancy that the week of the Pagan Theseus would be more appropriately represented by a lunar quarter than ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... privilege and a solemn responsibility to deal with souls to whom the appeal of the Christian religion had never before been made, as were most of my hearers. One cannot call them "heathen." One never thinks of these Alaskan natives as heathen. "Savage" and "heathen" and "pagan" all meant, of course, in their origin, just country people, and point to some old-time, tremendous superciliousness of the city-bred, long since disappeared, except, perhaps, from such places as Whitechapel and the Bowery. A savage is simply a ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... Christian merchant named Cosmas, who had journeyed to India, and was accordingly known as COSMAS INDICOPLEUSTES, wrote, about 540 A.D., a work entitled "Christian Topography," to confound what he thought to be the erroneous views of Pagan authorities about the configuration of the world. What especially roused his ire was the conception of the spherical form of the earth, and of the Antipodes, or men who could stand upside down. He drew a picture of a round ball, with four men standing upon it, with their feet ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... little river better than the melancholy Thames, along whose banks saturnine immoralities flourish like bulrushes! Behold the white architecture, the pillars, the balustraded steps, the domes in the blue air, the monumented swards! Paris, like all pagan cities, is full of statues. A little later we roll past gardens, gaiety is in the air.... And then the streets of Passy begin to appear, mean streets, like London streets. I like them not; but the railway station is compensation; the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... feelings of fear—ay, something stronger—with awe. The Pagan worshipper of Brahma or Vishnu was no longer alone in his superstitious imaginings. His young Christian companions were almost equally victims to a belief in the supernatural. They comprehended well ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... children, a boy and girl, whom they called Meyookesik and Sagastao, he noticed that the girl was just as much loved and petted as the boy, and even as kindly treated. This was a state of affairs entirely unknown in the wigwams of the pagan Indians. There the boys are petted and spoiled and early taught to be proud and haughty, and to consider that all girls and women, even their own sisters and mother, are much inferior to them, and only worthy ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... which to view this question is individual sovereignty, individual happiness. It is often said that the interests of society are paramount, and first to be considered. This was the Roman idea, the Pagan idea, that the individual was made for the State. The central idea of barbarism has ever been the family, the tribe, the nation—never the individual. But the great doctrine of Christianity is the right of individual conscience ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... which is for ever assembled, though invisible to mortal eyes, pronounced the like sentence on those famous conquerors, on those heroes of the pagan world, who, like Nebuchadnezzar, considered themselves as the sole authors of their exalted fortune; as independent on authority of every kind, and as not holding of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Manbos and Bisyas no reference is made to the Bisyas of eastern Mindano, the great majority of whom are undoubtedly of Manbo or other pagan origin. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Latinity. They wished the Lessons to be written In Ciceronian style and the hymns to be modelled on the Odes of Horace. Ferreri's attempt at reforming the Breviary dealt with the hymns, some of which he re-wrote in very noble language, but he was so steeped in pagan mythology that he even introduced heathen expressions and allusions, His work was a failure. The traditional school represented by Raoul of Tongres, Burchard, Caraffa, and John De Arze loved the past with so great a love that they refused to ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... illustrative of the people. Did you ever see or hear or read of such open-handed, honest-hearted hospitality as theirs; such refinement of manners; such sincerity in speech and act? Contrast this with their fairly pagan creed as to the slaves; their intolerance of the Northern people; their clannish reverence ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... matters to a practical issue, have we who profess the faith of Christ learnt to set, either upon others or upon ourselves, the value which Christ put upon all men? Far as we have travelled from ancient Greece and Rome, are we not still, in our thoughts about men, often pagan rather than Christian? Our very speech bewrayeth us, and shows how little even yet we have learnt to think Christ's thoughts after Him. He declared, in words which have already been quoted, that "a man's life ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... in this new and unorthodox way. So bold a departure from traditional usage proves the independence and originality of the young painter. These two little pictures thus become historically the first-fruits of the neo-pagan spirit which was gradually supplanting the older ecclesiastical thought, and Giorgione, once having cast conventionalism aside, readily turns to classical mythology to find subjects for the free play of fancy. The "Adrastus and Hypsipyle" thus follows ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... young Olaf exclaimed, struck with a brilliant idea. "Ho, Sigvat," he said, turning to his saga-man, "what was that lowland under the cliff where thou didst say the pagan Upsal king was hanged in his own golden chains by ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... There is something comparatively boyish about the triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... even to this day thousands of the scattered race are ready to seize again the plough and the spade, if they are given a chance, and not a few have done so even under the most disheartening conditions. The fact is, the pagan Mercury proved a more merciful god to the Jews than the Christian Jesus, as he was taught and practised by the mediaeval Church. He gloated over the sufferings of those who were of his own flesh and blood. No wonder they sought refuge under the wings ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... he is fully as upright as anyone in the sum total of his commercial transactions. The point Gard uncovered was that here were full-fledged race traits and habitudes which stood counter to Christian ideals, were pagan in type, were due to a lower stratum of moral ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... "please note" manner. The guest goes away, but, not much to anybody's surprise, is very soon asked to return and celebrate the wedding of the Count and Mlle. Ivinska, who are both Lutherans. He goes, and finds a great semi-pagan feast of the local peasantry (which does not much please him) and one or two bad omens, including an appearance of the mad old Countess with evil words, which please him still less. But the feast ends at last and the newly married couple retire, there being, of course, no "going away." ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... sooner had he touched the ground than, leaping up nimbler than a roebuck, he scampered over the plain with such speed that the wind could not overtake him. The basin he left on the ground; with which Don Quixote was satisfied, observing that the pagan had acted discreetly, and in imitation of the beaver, which, when closely pursued by the hunters, tears off with his teeth that which it knows by instinct to be the object of pursuit. He ordered Sancho to take up the helmet; who, holding it in his hand, said, "Before Heaven, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... that the word Norman means man of the north, that it is a Scandinavian, and not a French word, that it originated in the invasions of the followers of Rollo and and other Norwegians, and that just as part of England was overrun by Pagan buccaneers called Danes, part of France was occupied by similar Northmen, we see the likelihood of certain Norse words finding their way into the French language, where they would be superadded to its original Celtic ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... the tortures of Catholic missioners who die Martyrs to the Faith in China, Corea, and other Pagan countries. ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... tradition, was found stamped in golden letters the name of Jesus Christ? Whether he were a slave or not must remain uncertain. It is a more probable deduction from his own language that he—the 'untimely birth,'[66]—the 'one born out of due time' and 'the last' of the faithful, had been rescued from a pagan life, such as Antioch on the Orontes, the home of panders and dancing girls, and ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... 1742. The site of the present building was occupied by a still older one down to 1552, and to this the hall, which is vaulted and supported on four slender pillars of granite, belongs architecturally. It was very quaintly decorated with pictures, statues, reliefs, &&, both of Christian and Pagan traditions.] ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... al Meiser, properly signifies a particular game performed with arrows, and much in use with the pagan Arabs. But by lots we are here to understand all games whatsoever, which are subject to chance or hazard, as dice ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... city he composed his History. We know not when he was born, or when he died, except that from one or two incidental passages in his work it is plain that he lived nearly to the end of the fourth century: and it is even uncertain whether he was a Christian or a Pagan; though the general belief is, that he adhered to the religion of the ancient Romans, without, however, permitting it to lead him even to speak ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... hands, he expected nothing but death; but instead he was carefully and tenderly nursed back to health. Waking from his delirium, he found at his bedside Lygia—Lygia, whom he had most injured, watching alone, while the others had gone to rest. Gradually in his pagan head the idea began to hatch with difficulty that at the side of naked beauty, confident and proud of Greek and Roman symmetry, there is another in the world, new, immensely pure, in which a soul resides. As the days ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... however, of which I find a note, this monarch was not a Hebrew but a Gentile, and a very wicked one. He once invited eleven famous doctors of the holy nation to supper. They were received in the most magnificent style, and were then invited, under pain of death, either to eat pork, to accept a pagan mistress, or to drink wine consecrated to idols. After long consultation, the doctors, in great tribulation, agreed to save their heads by accepting the last alternative, since the first and second were forbidden by Moses, and the last only by the Rabbins. The King assented, ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... not give in to any pagan thing, but to recognise one of her own sort, that is a thing can ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... looked for the home of the spirits, but knew nothing of the Christian's heaven. There are still, in his nation, 700 pagans who sacrifice the white dog to the spirits, and are ever travelling towards the land of the setting sun. He hopes the pagan children will be taught about Jesus. He is so touched by the care taken of these little ones and by the work of the Christian lady who saves them. The Chief says he is very thankful I brought him here to-day. The circle on the grass reminds him of how the Indian ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... think of Easter as a Christian festival, but it is really in name and origin a pagan one. The word "Easter" is the modern form of "Eastra," the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring (in primitive Germanic, "Austro"). The Germans, like ourselves, keep its true pagan name, "Ostern." The ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... courtier of the Renaissance should be represented in the guise of a Roman warrior, is an anomaly, irreconcilable as that of pagan gods and the personification of Christian attributes here placed vis-a-vis. Perhaps the grief-stricken wife, who was, as it appears, of a highly romantic and adventuresome turn, wished thus to commemorate the heroic qualities of her husband; she might also have wished to dissociate ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... that we might obtain some slight modifications, if we continued the war, but would those modifications be worth the loss of a few more hundred thousands of human lives, of a few more months of this hideous, pagan slaughter and ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kind of impression the forming hand may stamp on them; and, lastly, as they do not receive the same classical education with boys, their feeble minds are not obliged at once to receive and separate the precepts of Christianity, and the documents of pagan philosophy. The necessity of doing this perhaps somewhat weakens the serious impressions of young men, at least till the understanding is formed; and confuses their ideas of piety, by mixing them with so much heterogeneous matter. They only casually read, or hear read, the Scriptures of truth, ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... Apostles themselves thus command obedience to the State, even to a pagan Government, such as the Roman was at the time they wrote, it will scarcely be denied by any Christian that obedience is due to the Church, and to the ecclesiastical government, altogether apart from any question of infallibility. In fact, though both the civil government and ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... For when the illustrious boy had perlustrated three lustres, already attaining his sixteenth year, he was, with many of his-fellow-countrymen, seized by the pirates who were ravaging the borders, and was made captive and carried into Ireland, and was there sold as a slave to a certain pagan prince named Milcho, who reigned in the Northern parts of the island, even at the same age when Joseph is recorded to have been sold in Egypt. . ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... worth while to be abroad among the heather and the fir-trees at dawn, for the virgin world, the pagan, freed from cerements and found in the twilight to be a god, was all my own, mine to enjoy. I think I know why primitive man, when he lived in lands where Nature was wild and the nights were long, was a resolute pagan. No light, no warmth of its torch, had he to set the fire ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... called on to the witnesses' stand, when, for the first time, Gaut exhibited evident feigns of uneasiness, and whispered something in the ear of his counsel, who thereupon rose and went into a labored argument against the admissibility of the evidence of an Indian, who was a pagan, and knew nothing about the God whose invocation constituted the sacred effect of the oath he had taken. But, on the questioning of the court, Moose-killer declared his full belief in the white Christian's God and Bible, and this ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... who was a godless man, A pagan, heart and soul, Played nurse until the wound began To heal, and Giles ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... it, that the noble and ardent discoverers who have tried to git friendly with them Great Forces and introduce 'em to the world have been called ignorant and pagan, when if these scoffers knowed it there is no paganism or ignorance to be compared to ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... transform all the devils into angels of light; for he believes all religion consists in looseness, and that sin and vice is the whole duty of man. He puts off the old man, but puts it on again upon the new one, and makes his pagan vices serve to preserve his Christian virtues from wearing out, for if he should use his piety and devotion always it would hold out but a little while. He is loth that iniquity and vice should be thrown away as long as there may be good use for it; for if that which is wickedly ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Don't make me harden my heart before it has had time to soften naturally. Give my poor pagan sympathies ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... from Ward C as Margaret MacLean entered. It was lusty enough to have come from the throats of healthy children, and it would have sounded happily to the most impartial ears; to the nurse in charge it was a very pagan of gladness. ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... it; he had given them a free and vivacious character. Old Gerhardt would have shuddered at the devilish pride which was breathed forth now in certain lines of his Song of the Christian Traveler, or the pagan delight which made this peaceful stream of his Song of Summer ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Cecilia and her guardian angel who once appeared in bodily form to her husband holding two rose garlands gathered in Paradise, or of St. Dorothea, who sent an angel messenger with a basket of heavenly fruits and flowers to convert the pagan Theophilus. ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... other in their supposed vexation at having to join in the Creator's praises. The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible noise, uproar, and confusion, more worthy of some pagan bacchanalia than a procession of Christian people. All the country-folk from five or six leagues around Aix pour into the town on that day to do honour to God. It is the only occasion of the kind, and the clergy, either knavish or ignorant, encourage ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... game that I've been seein' ivry time th' pagan fistival iv Thanksgivin' comes ar-round, sure it ain't th' game I played. I seen th' Dorgan la-ad comin' up th' sthreet yestherdah in his futball clothes,—a pair iv matthresses on his legs, a pillow behind, a mask over his nose, an' a bushel measure iv hair on his head. ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... nation is not yet a hundred years old, but it had behind it in the beginning, the chronicles of forty or sixty centuries, written mostly in tears and blood. At the end of an eight years' revolutionary war, our new governmental columns were reared, not, like some pagan temples, on human skulls, but on the imbruted bodies and extinguished souls of five hundred thousand chattel slaves. We had our Declaration of Independence, our war of Revolution, and a new Constitution ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to abolish the noisy bacchanalian festivals of the pagan times, but it has changed the names. That which it has given to these "days of liberty" announces the ending of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow; carn-ival means, literally, "farewell to flesh!" It is a forty days' ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... it is no good jest either," said his uncle, "for what, in the devil's name, could lead the senseless boy to meddle with the body of a cursed misbelieving Jewish Moorish pagan?" ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... days will I give to Thy service, if Thou wilt spare her to me," in his heart he said to his God. "If Thou dost not, I will be an infidel and a pagan—the vilest and most audacious of sinners. Better to serve Lucifer than the God who could so ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... feelings led him to adopt, at the firm persuasion that he alone had hit upon the true plan for reforming, not only the political, but the religious abuses of the age; and, moreover, that none but he could carry that plan out. Under this hallucination, which the fumes of pagan principles of statesmanship and rationalist principles of Christianity, fermenting together, had hatched in his brain, he returned, after a few years' stay at Paris, to Brescia; not failing to visit, at his passage ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power and immortality, it was universally confessed, that they deserved, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... rot here in this dull land, as by our uncle's wish we have done these many years, yes, ever since we were home from the Scottish war, and count the kine and plough the fields like peasants, while our peers are charging on the pagan, and the banners wave, and the blood runs red upon the holy ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... crowds, swirling and sifting through the brobdingnagian camp of iron and steel, one saw the camp-followers and the pagan women—there would be work to-day and dancing to-night. For the Puritan's dry voice is but the crackling of a leaf underfoot in the rush and roar of the coming of the ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... young readers will come to know it if they are spared to see many years) that civilisation alone will never improve the heart. Let history speak and it will tell you that deeds of darkest hue have been perpetrated in so-called civilised, though pagan lands. Civilisation is like the polish that beautifies inferior furniture, which water will wash off if it be but hot enough. Christianity resembles dye, which permeates every fibre of the fabric, and which nothing ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... propriety to the entire habitable globe; for the arbitrary rites and opinions of every pagan nation bear so close a resemblance to each other, that such a coincidence can only have been produced by their having had a common origin. Barbarism itself has not been able to efface the strong primeval impression. Vestiges of the ancient general system may be traced in the recently discovered ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... public entry, the second of December was appointed to be the day of thanksgiving for the peace. The Chapter of Saint Paul's resolved that, on that day, their noble Cathedral, which had been long slowly rising on the ruins of a succession of pagan and Christian temples, should be opened for public worship. William announced his intention of being one of the congregation. But it was represented to him that, if he persisted in that intention, three hundred thousand people would assemble ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the distances are dreamy and wide, with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and teachers of the faith to supply ids place. The fruit of his labours on the coast of Fishery. He makes use of children to cure the sick. The zeal of the children against idols and idolaters. The punishment of a pagan, who had despised the admonitions of Father Xavier. The original and character of the Brachmans. He treats with the Brachmans. The conference of Xavier with a famous Brachman. He works divers miracles. He declares himself against the Brachmans. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... the Pagan shall never profane The shrine where Jehovah disdained not to reign; And scattered and scorned as thy people may be, Our worship, oh Father! ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... 'pioneers,' who clear the way for the advancing troops; which is generally effected by the panic among the boys, occasioned by the savage aspect of the pioneers,—their faces being hideously painted, and their dress consisting of gleanings from every costume, Christian, Pagan, and Turkish, known among men. As the body passes through the different streets, the martial men receive sundry testimonials of regard and approval in the shape of boquets and wreaths from the fair 'Peruvians,' who of course bestow them on those who, in their opinion, have best ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the artlessness of childhood. In a footnote here, in a marginal gloss there, such references as appear point to torture and cruelty, to distress and tears. In the early legends of the Christians, in the pagan ballads of the olden time, what there is of child life but illustrates the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Weston, and the events since she left Maumsey had naturally increased the mischief. She had become sleepless and neurasthenic. And Winnington watched day by day the eclipse of her radiant youth, with a dumb wrath almost as Pagan as that which a similar impression ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... little childish joy allowed me by circumstance. There was no fiery hell, no red-hot pincers, no eternal frizzling and sizzling of the flesh, like unto that of the fish in Mr. Samuel's fish-shop. Paragot had transformed me by a word into a happy young pagan. My eyes swam as I swallowed my last ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... Christian country which would not have been the gainer, if the Mussulmans of Spain had risen victorious from the last game which they played with the adversaries of their religion in a duel that had endured for more than seven hundred years. Many a Pagan country, too, which had never heard either of Jesus or of Mahomet, was interested in the event of the War of Granada. Montezuma and Atahuallpa, who never had so much as dreamed of Europe, had their fate determined by the decision of the long struggle between the rival religions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... grave by twelve stalwart men in black, with broad round bonnets on their heads, the one-half relieving the other—a privilege of the company of shore-porters. Their exequies are thus freed from the artificial, grotesque, and pagan horror given by obscene mutes, frightful hearse, horses, and feathers. As soon as, in the beautiful phrase of the Old Testament, John Anderson was thus gathered to his fathers, Robert went to pay a ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Common among most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology 'Whole Earth' wing of the ecology movement, space activists, many members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground. All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, {{music}}, and {{oriental food}}. The opposite tendency ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... the divine animals, or to commit incest, which was a divine prerogative, was analogous to "the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost," which in the New Testament is proclaimed an unpardonable offence, and in pagan legend was punished by the divine wrath, thunder, lightning, rain, floods, or petrifaction being the avenging instruments. Oedipus put out his own eyes to forestall the traditional ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... will tell you that a fortnight ago I was chained to my arm-chair, swearing under my breath like a pagan, and cursing the follies of my youth!—Forgive me, my father; I mean that I had the gout, and I forgot that I am not the only sufferer, and that it racks the old age of the philosopher quite as much as that ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither fought now knew, Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... to a land they, had never seen before, up would go their flag, and they would say, This land is mine and my king's! They would not of course do this in any of the well-known or "Christian lands" of Europe; but they believed that all "pagan lands" belonged by right to the first European king whose sailors should discover and ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... it will stand as closely related to Christianity as Christianity stood closely related to the old Judaic dispensation. It is commonly assumed that the rejecters of the popular religion stand in face of it, as the Christians stood in face of the pagan belief and pagan rites in the Empire. The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if he is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of a creed to come, is nearer to the position of the Christianising Jew.[20] Science, when she has accomplished ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... was stricken to death, but he would not fall unavenged. With his great sword Hautclere he smote the Caliph on his head and cleft it to the teeth. "Curse on you, pagan. Neither your wife nor any woman in the land of your birth shall boast that you have taken a penny's worth from King Charles!" But to Roland he cried, "Come, comrade, help me; well I know that we two shall part in great sorrow ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... and those other martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan Christmas of ours is as ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... friend, James Kenneth Stephen, too pagan, wayward and lonely to be available for the Souls, but a man of genius. One afternoon he came to see me in Grosvenor Square and, being told by the footman that I was riding in the Row, he asked for tea and, while waiting for me wrote the following parody of Kipling ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... next J.P. that went out back Was shocked, or pained, or both, At hearing every pagan black ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... extant. The General Assembly had charged the chaplains to divide the colonists into congregations, to appoint ruling elders, to constitute a presbytery, and to labour for the propagation of divine truth among the Pagan inhabitants of Darien. The second expedition sailed as the first had sailed, amidst the acclamations and blessings of all Scotland. During the earlier part of September the whole nation was dreaming a delightful ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshipers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... spent our money among them like princes. Prejudice however is not banished from Leghorn, though convenience keeps all in good-humour with each other. The Italians fail not to class the subjects of Great Britain among the Pagan inhabitants of the town, and to distinguish themselves, say, "Noi altri Christiani[Footnote: We that are Christians.]:" their aversion to a Protestant, conceal it as they may, is ever implacable; and the last day only will convince them that it ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... same cheerful pagan philosopher as ever. He swims like a little duck; rides well; stands quite severe injuries without complaint, and is really becoming a manly little fellow. Archie is devoted to the Why (sailboat). ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... Eton still prevails for the Boy-Captain; and there is a closer connexion, perhaps, between the custom which produced the "Songs of the Crow and the Swallow," and our Northern mummeries, than may be at first suspected. The Pagan Saturnalia, which the Swallow song by its pleasant menaces resembles, were afterwards disguised in the forms adopted by the early Christians; and such are the remains of the Roman Catholic religion, in which the people were long indulged in their old taste for mockery and mummery. I must ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... none appear to be of earlier date than the ninth or tenth century, these stories all breathe the very breath of a primitive world. An air of remote pagan antiquity hangs over them, and as we read we seem gradually to realize an Ireland as unlike the one we know now as if, like the magic island of Buz, it had sunk under the waves and been lost. Take, for instance—for space will not ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... there was Greek influence, but in them the result was modern. In Arnold the antiquity remains; remains in mood, just as in Landor it remains in form. The Greek twilight broods over all his poetry. It is pagan in philosophic spirit; not Attic, but of a later and stoical time, with the very virtues of patience, endurance, suffering, not in their Christian types, but as they now seem to a post-Christian imagination looking back to the imperial past. There is a difference, it ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to shame those who have greater Advantages of knowing their Duty, and therefore greater Obligations to perform it, into a better Course of Life; Besides that many among us are unreasonably disposed to give a fairer hearing to a Pagan Philosopher, than to a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... scheme of celestial interposition that ever was formed. The surprises and terrours of enchantments, which have succeeded to the intrigues and oppositions of pagan deities, afford very striking scenes, and open a vast extent to the imagination; but, as Boileau observes, (and Boileau will be seldom found mistaken,) with this incurable defect, that, in a contest between heaven and hell, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... however, America is very old indeed. In one respect America is more historic than England; I might almost say more archaeological than England. The record of one period of the past, morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more general sense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere contrast between the old world and the new. There is a superficial satire about the millionaire's daughter who has ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... me somewhat puzzling; how could the soul of Duke Robert await the general Resurrection, when, as a Catholic, he ought to have believed that it must, as soon as separated from his body, go to Purgatory? Or is there some semi-pagan superstition of the Renaissance (most strange, certainly, in a man who had been a Cardinal) connecting the soul with a guardian genius, who could be compelled, by magic rites ("ab astrologis sacrato," the MS. says of the little idol), to remain fixed ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... history had been made in this mountain passage whose walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the white spume ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his very bearing, and in every lineament of his face. It was more difficult to imagine a young and charming woman housed in such a place, but his first glimpse of the bishop's daughter showed him that her Pagan beauty was emphasized rather than lessened by contrast with ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... is not lawful to receive Baptism from a schismatic, save in a case of necessity, since it is better for a man to quit this life, marked with the sign of Christ, no matter from whom he may receive it, whether from a Jew or a pagan, than deprived of that mark, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of annihilation, a longing after immortality, a starting back from the last leap in the dark. Men, if they have not true religion, will cling to the greatest absurdities as substitutes. Hence the pagan world is full of idols. Tribes and nations seemingly destitute of all moral sense, nevertheless have 'gods many and lords many.' If there are any cold-blooded, incorrigible atheists in the world, you must look for them not in heathen lands. You must go where the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... much respected. He dy'd at his house in Hatton Garden, April 1, 1681. He was preparing for the press, and had almost finished, a book entituled 'Imago Imaginis,' the design of which was to show that Rome Papal was an image of Rome Pagan." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... writer, "was as the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness." London was in ruins; the Danish standard, with its black Raven, fluttered everywhere; and the forests were filled with outposts and spies of the "pagan army." There was nothing for the King to do but gather his men and dash into the fray to "let the hard steel ring upon the high helmet." Time after time the Danes are overthrown, but, like the heads of the fabled Hydra, they grow and flourish ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with much frankness and power. The German soldiers are said to have carried off "a vast deal of Spoil and Plunder into Germany," and the Redcoats had Plays and Diversions (cricket, probably) on the Inch of Perth, on a Sabbath. "The Hellish, Pagan, Juggler plays are set up and frequented with more impudence and audacity than ever." Only the Jews, "our elder Brethren," are exempted from the curses of Haldane and Leslie, who promise to recover for them ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Menelek II of Abyssinia ever swayed the destinies of a people. Throughout the vast territory of the Abyssinian highlands his individual will is law to some millions of subjects; law also to hordes of savage Mohammedan and pagan tribesmen without the confines of his kingdom. His court includes no councillors. Alone throughout the long years of his reign Menelek has dealt with all domestic and foreign affairs ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Commons. What said Statius, Juvenal—let alone Tully or Tacitus—on such and such a point? Their reign is over now, the good old Heathens: the worship of Jupiter and Juno is not more out of mode than the cultivation of Pagan poetry or ethics. The age of economists and calculators has succeeded, and Tooke's Pantheon is deserted and ridiculous. Now and then, perhaps, a Stanley kills a kid, a Gladstone bangs up a wreath, a Lytton ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... vast sums of money to the religious establishments, and behaved generally like a very devout pagan. His piety and generosity made him so desirable a patron that efforts were made by the priests of other religions to convert him. Jews, Mohammedans, Catholics, and Greeks all sought to win him, and Vladimir ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston
... bringing about a change in the morals and manners of a nation. These changes, which may be for good or evil, do not come of a sudden. Even during the Christian ages the principles of the gospel do not always prevail in their fulness and beauty. At times, through the passions of men, non-Christian and pagan ideas gain ground and for a time predominate. It is only by dealing tactfully with human nature and by persistent efforts that the Church has been enabled to make ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... a sober life and to the due performance of individual and social duties, that the preacher exhausted his stores of learning, and invoked alike the reproofs of the fathers of the Church, the history and legend of chroniclers, pagan and Christian, and the words of prophets and poets. As a memorial of the literature and learning of the middle ages, it must always possess a permanent value. From it we may learn, and always with interest, ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... Church, following the light of the Gospel, forbids a divorced man to enter into second espousals during the life of his former partner. This is the inflexible law she first proclaimed in the face of Pagan Emperors and people and which she has ever upheld, in spite of the passions and voluptuousness of her own ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... human kind, and point to a noble pre-eminence, cease to operate, and expire for want of action. This state of things is unnatural, contrary to the original purpose of creation, and in fact, more dishonorable to the usurper than to the degraded sufferer. In Mahometan and Pagan countries the rights of women have been sacrificed to the caprices of men; and, having plucked this fair flower of creation from its original and highly elevated situation, its beauty has faded, its glory ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... time out of mind been known as the Temple of Vesta, though the designation, as modern archaeologists tell us, is probably erroneous. All the world, whether of those who have been at Rome or not, knows the Temple of Vesta, for it is the prettiest, if not the grandest, of the legacies to us of old pagan Rome, and it has been reproduced in little drawing-room models by the thousand in every conceivable material. Close to it, at one corner of the piazza, is the ancient and half-ruinous house which is pointed out as the habitation of Cola di Rienzi. It is altogether a strange-looking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through sin to a conception of the necessity of atonement, we feel, that, while we looked to be entertained with the airiest of fictions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... followed their favorites in all their wanderings, and when exposed to danger, or threatened with destruction, would unveil themselves in their awful beauty and power, and stand forth to preserve them from harm or to avenge their wrongs. Odd-Fellowship realizes this myth of the pagan gods; she surrounds all her children with her preserving presence, and reveals herself always in the hour of peril, sickness or distress. Nowhere in our country can a true Odd-Fellow feel himself alone, friendless ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... sepulchral, developing in the catacombs the symbols of the new faith. Once liberated, however, Christianity appropriated bodily for its public rites the basilica-type and the general substance of Roman architecture. Shafts and capitals, architraves and rich linings of veined marble, even the pagan Bacchic symbolism of the vine, it adapted to new uses in its own service. Constantine led the way in architecture, endowing Bethlehem and Jerusalem with splendid churches, and his new capital on the Bosphorus with the first of the three historic basilicas dedicated to the Holy Wisdom ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an almost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful and benignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for the making of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almost scientific consciousness of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... been an undisciplined girl, called a tomboy in those days, whose farmer forbears had given to her a pagan passion for the soil and the open sky. Although brought up with a rigid training in theology, religion had never meant more to her than a certainty of hell as a punishment for misdeeds which neither she nor any of the valley ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... shades of midnight darkness Abject sits the Pagan world; There the banner of salvation Ne'er hath been by time unfurled; Nor their idols ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams |
