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Moloch   Listen
proper noun
Moloch  n.  
1.
(Script.) The fire god of the Ammonites in Canaan, to whom human sacrifices were offered; Molech. Also applied figuratively.
2.
(Zool.) A spiny Australian lizard (Moloch horridus). The horns on the head and numerous spines on the body give it a most formidable appearance.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Moloch" Quotes from Famous Books



... Indians not idolaters? Are you no idolater, with your burnt offerings and heathen gibberish? You worship a Baal and a Moloch worse than any Midianite, for you adore the devils of your own ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... because that people turned to idolatry, even after the Law had been made, which was more grievous, as is clear from Ex. 32 and from Amos 5:25, 26: "Did you offer victims and sacrifices to Me in the desert for forty years, O house of Israel? But you carried a tabernacle for your Moloch, and the image of your idols, the star of your god, which you made to yourselves." Moreover it is stated expressly (Deut. 9:6): "Know therefore that the Lord thy God giveth thee not this excellent land in possession for thy justices, for thou art a very ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... did they have in the way of government by that time? A military theocracy, something like the Aztecs of Pre-Conquest Mexico. A matriarchy, at that. And what's their religion based on? That of ancient Phoenicia including plenty of human sacrifice to good old Moloch. What can United Planets do about it, now that they've become a member? Work away very delicately, trying to get them to at least eliminate the child sacrifice phase of their culture. Will they do it? Hell no, not if they can help it. The Head Priestess ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... where suffering men succeed each other day after day, so that we seem to see a mist of pain rising like a ceaseless cloud of incense smoke for the nostrils of the abominable Moloch who is the god of war. A man, though long inured to such things, may curse the Moloch, but he will bless the sufferers who form the sacrifice. Their patience, their silent heroism, are ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... "Aw, him—that murderin' moloch at Tralee!" exclaimed Patsy when the button was pressed. "That Methodys' fella with the face of a pirate! If there wasn't a better Protistan' than him in the world, the Meeting Houses'd be used for kindlin'-wood. Joel, they call ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... sorts, goats and chickens and pigs, among which the people live. Thus busy with the frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, where no green thing has ever grown or even a bird built her nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks among the blocks and hills of broken marble, yellow, black, and white stones, that are hauled ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... therefore, Sir, that you will not lay aside your generous Design of exposing that monstrous Wickedness of the Town, whereby a Multitude of Innocents are sacrificed in a more barbarous Manner than those who were offered to Moloch. The Unchaste are provoked to see their Vice exposed, and the Chaste cannot rake into such Filth without Danger of Defilement; but a meer SPECTATOR may look into the Bottom, and come off without partaking in the Guilt. The doing so will convince ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... God, and take thy place With hateful memories of the elder time, With many a wasting plague, and nameless crime, And bloody war that thinned the human race; With the Black Death, whose way Through wailing cities lay, Worship of Moloch, tyrannies that built The Pyramids, and cruel creeds that taught To avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt— Death at the stake to those that held them not. Lo! the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom Of the flown ages, part to yield ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... and that is fulfilled which is written in the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the children are destroyed by their own parents [Is. 57:5, Jer. 7:31; 32:35], and they do like the king Manasseh, who sacrificed his own son to the idol Moloch and burned him, II. Kings xxi [2 Kings 21:6]. What else is it but to sacrifice one's own child to the idol and to burn it, when parents train their children more in the way of the world than in the ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... to their theory of warfare, the German leaders fed their men into the jaws of Moloch with cynical indifference. They had counted on paying a certain price, and they were willing ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall

... is a close imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics affected toward all the nations of Europe. What the "Christian dogs" were to the followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the "Northern mud-sills" are to the followers of the Southern Moloch. The accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were prefigured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent. In all branches of culture, their ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Josephus, and to translate this passage truly in Josephus, whose copies are supposed to be here imperfect. However, the general sense of both seems to be this: That there were certain chariots, with their horses, dedicated to the idol of the sun, or to Moloch; which idol might be carried about in procession, and worshipped by the people; which chariots were now "taken away," as Josephus says, or, as the Book of Kings says, "burnt with fire, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... the playing of the Republican hymn. Was it because it made men long for some greater ruler than a king, or for no ruler at all? Freedom is more elusive even than happiness. Never yet has she yielded herself to men, though she makes large promises and exacts sacrifices as cruel as ever those of Moloch could have been. Her altars stream with blood, but she ... she is talking, or she is pursuing, or she is on a journey, or peradventure she sleepeth ... and her prophets must still call upon her and ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... a future life against which Moses had so gallantly fought. It is said that a bridge over the grisly "brook Kedron" was called Sirat (the road) and hence the idea, as that of hell-fire from Ge-Hinnom (Gehenna) where children were passed through the fire to Moloch. A doubtful Hadis says, "The Prophet declared Al-Sirat to be the name of a bridge over hell- fire, dividing Hell from Paradise" (pp. 17, 122, Reynold's trans. of Al-Siyuti's Traditions, etc.). In Koran i. 5, "Sirat" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... with a virtual promise of endless increase. Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the field of being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by the hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death these multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... humanity may bear its curses. Man is essentially a selfish animal. Self-preservation is the very first law which he learns to observe and to practice. That he may get on top of the social ladder and remain there, he will sacrifice family, common humanity and patriotism. Naturally, Moloch-self is the god he serves. To enjoy a little brief authority, he would enslave universal mankind, and declare, as Solomon did, after exhausting the catalogue of tyranny and libertinism, "all is vanity"—emptiness! ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... round to the village, he learned I was a writer, rested on his oars, and drifted with the tide. "I'll give you a job," he said. "Write a book that will make people hate the idea that the State is God as Moloch was at last hated. Turn the young against it. The latest priest is the politician. No ritual in any religion was worse than this new worship of the State. If men don't wake up to that then they are doomed." He began then to ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... representations had been made by Lord Granville to foreign Powers upon this subject, and there the matter ended. Since the middle of last month the catalogue of suicides at Monaco has been swollen by the addition of five or six further victims to the Moloch of play; nor can it be wondered at if under these circumstances a loud demand that the Casino at Monte Carlo should be forcibly closed has been made, not only by many public writers in France and Italy, but still more by permanent residents upon the Mediterranean Riviera. Thus ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... valley, sometimes called Gehenna, near Jerusalem, where human sacrifices were burned to the heathen god Moloch. ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various

... calls for our profound gratitude. I confess with shame that I have not only felt it, but have shaped myself, though unconsciously, to it. It has vitiated our charities, corrupted our morals, and invaded even the house of God. We have worshiped the golden calf. We have bowed down to Moloch. We have consented to live under a will that was base and cruel, in all its motives and ends. We have been so dazzled by a great worldly success, that we have ceased to inquire into its sources. We ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... favourites. Tilly Slowboy and her little dot of a baby, charging folks with it as if it were an offensive instrument, or handing it about as if it were something to drink, were not more popular than poor Johnny Tetterby staggering under his Moloch of an infant, the Juggernaut that crushes all his enjoyments. The story itself consists of nothing more than the effects of the Ghost's gift upon the various groups of people introduced, and the way the end is arrived ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... no solitary fate. Every week, every day almost, victims were offered up to the papal Moloch by those who thus hoped to stamp out the very existence of Protestantism from the land. Vain efforts! The seed of religious truth, scattered far and wide, was springing up and bearing fruit—sometimes bitter enough, it must be owned—but such as was not to be destroyed by Roman Pontiff ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston

... discontent, and physical hardships prevailing among large sections of the population which had provided most of the holocausts for the Moloch of War, the ostentatious gaiety of the prosperous few might well seem a challenge. And so it was construed by the sullen lack-alls who prowled about the streets of Paris and told one another that their turn ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... of inhumanity. It is no wonder that Zachary Macaulay, from his experience in Jamaica as the superintendent of an estate, formed in quiet sternness that resolution to devote his life to uprooting a social system whose presiding divinities he saw to be Mammon and Moloch, which he afterward so nobly fulfilled. The graces and virtues of private character that lent some relief to this dreary picture, I shall ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... mother, it is said, was not allowed to sit in the presence of her imperial son. He was sometimes softened, we are told, by the sight of the field of battle strewn with the wounded and dead. But, if the Moloch of his ambition claimed new heaps of slain to-morrow, it was never denied. With all his sensibility, he gave millions to the sword with as little compunction as he would have brushed away so many insects which had infested his march. To him all human will, desire, power were to bend. His superiority ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... who has been consecrated by destiny to the saving from Moloch of this globe's civilization, is he who will prove once more that in the conflict between the finely tempered sword and the finely tempered brain, it is the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... room, sage old Beelzebub sat at the right of His Majesty's chair; huge Moloch with his evil grin and snaggle teeth, at the left. Tall, prissy Azazel, always acting important, planted Satan's flag and then sat down at a table opposite wide-shouldered Mulciber and handsome Belial. ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt

... judge me that did His will, to the best of my power and knowledge, because now and then a human sob breaks from my woman-heart, by reason that I am not yet an angel, and that He did not make me a stone? I do not believe it. I will not believe it. He that gave His own Son to die for man can be no Moloch delighting in human suffering—caring not how many hearts be crushed so long as there be flowers upon His altar, how many lives be made desolate so long as there be choirs to sing antiphons! Annora, it is not God who does ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt

... priests and people get miserably burnt on these occasions." Escayrac de Lauture says that on those days they leap, dance, and whirl round the fire, striking at the devils with a straight Roman-like sword, and sometimes wounding themselves as the priests of Baal and Moloch used to do. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... and eye of a mason or blacksmith as of an artist—as if, in short, the fellow were a god, as canting brain worshippers have for years past been assuring him he is. Artists are the high priests of the modern Moloch. Nine out of ten of them are diseased creatures, just sane enough to trade on their own neuroses. The only quality of theirs which extorts my respect is a certain sublime selfishness which makes them willing to starve and to let their families starve sooner than do any ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... for a long time to come invincible, and however false it be philosophically it imposes itself upon the most luminous intelligence. Have not the European peoples regarded as incontrovertible for more than fifteen centuries religious legends which, closely examined, are as barbarous[21] as those of Moloch? The frightful absurdity of the legend of a God who revenges himself for the disobedience of one of his creatures by inflicting horrible tortures on his son remained unperceived during many centuries. Such potent geniuses as a Galileo, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... peace? What pride of power, what lust of ambition, what desire of imperial dominion cast the armed hosts of the nations into the field of conflict, on which multitudes of innocent victims were to be sacrificed to the insatiate hunger for blood of the modern Moloch? ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall

... hands she also suffered the same kind of moral degradation exacted of the serf under feudalism. In some portions of Christendom the "service"[224] of young girls to-day implies their sacrifice to the Moloch of man's unrestrained passions. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the anathema maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place worship was paid to Charles and James—Belial and Moloch,—and England propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime and disgrace to disgrace, until the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... beset by boats, their owners pushing, vociferating, and chaffering for fares, as though Mammon, and not Moloch, were the ruling spirit. Together with a chance companion of the voyage, Signor Alvigini, Intendente of Genoa, and his party, we are soon in the hands of the commissionnaire of the Hotel de Rome. As we land, our passports are received by the police of Victor Emmanuel, who have replaced those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... during this King's reign, and the thousands of victims that fell a sacrifice to them; when one contemplates the myriads upon myriads of brave Britons whose lives were offered up as a sacrifice to these Moloch wars, it may well and truly be called the UNFORTUNATE REIGN of King George the Third—which reign was concluded by the King himself being locked up, for many years, in his own castle, a solitary captive, suffering under the complicated and melancholy visitation ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt

... paganized, prostituted, and entirely misrepresented. His life and labors were transformed from the natural into what was considered by the vulgar the supernatural, and all those who dared—like Hypatia, with thousands of other pious and noble ancients—to deny his divinity, were sacrificed to this new Moloch, set up by parricide Constantines, or adulterers of the Theodosius caste. Thus through the ages, has the race suffered under such murder, rapine, and lust, as never disgraced tolerant ancient heathendom in the interests of paganism, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... Holy Scripture. It says that they are in error who believe the Bible account of the sons of Reuben, of the sons of Eli, and of the sons of Samuel. It allows usury, and the passing of children through the fire to Moloch. It permits deceit, and supports it with the text, "With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure, and with the froward thou wilt show thyself unsavory" (2 Sam. xxii. 27). The Rabbis teach hatred of Christians ...
— Hebrew Literature

... &c. Among the Chaldeans, and, after them, among the Jews, they were classed in principalities, powers, and dominions of angels and devils, under chiefs, who bore the names of Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Moloch, Legion, Satan, Beelzebub, &c. Among the Greeks, the accommodating Plato flattered the priests and the vulgar, by pretending to demonstrate that their personifications were necessary emanations from THE ONE; and he, and ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... right. Let me have a blue pencil instantly." Lady P——, a witty woman of the widest European experience, attempted a similar task. She, too, asked me to look at what she had written, deploring the fact that all the most amusing parts had passed through the fire to the Moloch of an almost excessive caution. Here again I pointed out to the writer passages which had escaped the sacrifice, and which the living would certainly, even if not justifiably, resent—which they would, indeed, resent in ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... bitter thoughts in her heart concerning him. That imagination of hers—which was always prone to lead her astray—bore most terribly false witness against Christopher just then. It portrayed him as a hard, self-righteous man, ready to sacrifice the rest of mankind to the Moloch of what he considered to be his own particular duty and spiritual welfare, and utterly indifferent as to how severe was the suffering entailed on the victims of this sacrifice. And, as Christopher ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... their daughters into interested marriage, are worse than the Ammonites who sacrificed their children to Moloch—the latter undergoing a speedy death, the former suffering years of torture, but too frequently leading to ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... the suppliants, they began sacrificing human lives in the vain hope of allaying the anger and vengeance of the dissatisfied all-powerful gods, and beautiful young maidens were thrust into the fiery jaws of Moloch, or crushed in the coils of sacred serpents, or slain upon altars according to the special god whose propitiation ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... of Cromwellian scenes of desolation in every county of that unfortunate country. It is self-interest, with humanity, in the hearts of good men, and the dread of assassination in the hearts of bad men, that prevent at the present moment the immolation of the Irish people to the Moloch of territorial despotism. It is the effort to render impossible those human sacrifices, those holocausts of Christian households, that the priests of feudal landlordism denounce so frantically ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... down from Moloch to modern predestinarianism, and the human sacrifices of the heathens to the christian sacrifice of the Creator, have been produced by admitting of what is called revealed religion, the most effectual means to prevent all such evils and impositions is, not to admit of any other ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... own life. For my father's father was out in the raids of that tempestuous season, and it was by him, and from the stories he was wont to tell of what the Government did when drunken with the sorceries of the gorgeous Roman harlot, and rampaging with the wrath of Moloch and of Belial, it trampled on the hearts and thought to devour the souls of the subjects that I first was taught to feel, know and understand the divine ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... the heathen knowledge of His laws. And, therefore, they did not trust God; they did not consider Him a good God, and so they worshipped Baalim, the sun and moon and stars, with silly and foul ceremonies, to procure from them good harvests; and burnt their children in the fire to Moloch, the fire-king, to keep off the earthquakes and the floods. God had not taught them what He had taught Israel—to trust in Him, and in His word which ran very swiftly, and in His laws, which could not be broken: a faith which, my friends, we must ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various

... win hard Moloch's heart; Make him forget his rites, and turn man-nurse. O, fool! I would renounce my war with Heaven, Eat up my pains in one most bitter mouthful, And sue for pardon from God's hated Throne, If such an offspring might but call me father! Where is thy ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... Belial, the adroit, is in our midst; Mammon, more swoln to squeeze the slavish sweat From hopeless toil: and overshadowingly (Aggrandized, monstrous in his grinning mask Of hypocritical Peace,) inveterate Moloch Remains the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the fair Jewess, "and what is it, valiant knight, save an offering of sacrifice to a demon of vain glory, and a passing through the fire to Moloch?—What remains to you as the prize of all the blood you have spilled—of all the travail and pain you have endured—of all the tears which your deeds have caused, when death hath broken the strong man's spear, and overtaken the speed ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... to the conceptions which the worshippers entertained of the objects of their worship; and being mostly taken from among men, the offerings were adapted to the characters which they had respectively sustained while resident in the body. Hence the homage paid to Baal, Moloch, Mars, Bacchus, Venus and others. Thus every abomination was sanctioned, and made an ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... unrighteous and strange orgies which we felt must take place in those precincts which we were never permitted to enter. Our Sunday Scripture lessons had grounded us very familiarly with the perverse habits of that section of the Chosen People who would serve Baal and Moloch, when it obviously paid so much better not to do so. But although we counted the numbers which we saw going in, and sometimes met them coming out, they seemed never to lessen perceptibly. On this account our minds, with the merciless ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... noyade^; thuggery, Thuggism^. deathblow, finishing stroke, coup de grace, quietus; execution &c (capital punishment) 972; judicial murder; martyrdom. butcher, slayer, murderer, Cain, assassin, terrorist, cutthroat, garroter, bravo, Thug, Moloch, matador, sabreur^; guet-a-pens; gallows, executioner &c (punishment) 975; man-eater, apache^, hatchet man [U.S.], highbinder [U.S.]. regicide, parricide, matricide, fratricide, infanticide, feticide, foeticide^, uxoricide^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... said George one night in their own room. "People don't seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in. The way she tells it, Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch." ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... good enough to go with any angel—at his heels of course! If he had been a bad dog, it would have been wicked to name him after a good angel. If the dog had been Tommy—I mean if Tommy had been the dog, I should have had to call him Moloch, or Belzebub! God made the angels and the dogs; and if the dogs are good, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... their very lives. They sought to propitiate this fierce Power, which was evidently hostile to man, with offerings of the life it devoured so pitilessly. The choicest lives—the first-born son, the fairest maiden of the village—were sacrificed to glut its greed of death. Into the fiery arms of Moloch parents laid the children of their love. Human sacrifices were unquestionably a recognized form of worship during this period, at least in times of deep distress.[41] The libertine longings of nature, the free fecundities of mother-earth, imaged to the grosser ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton

... accusing each other innocently,—as many confessed afterwards,—but this was the last straw that these sinking people could see to catch at, and this they did involuntarily. "Victims were required; and those who brought them to the altar of Moloch, purchased their own safety, or, at ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... Will furnish cast-off rings on easy terms; There double, treble births will be recorded; No wedding, but our rallying rub-a-dub Shall drum to the performance all the club; No suit rejected, but we'll set it down, In letters large, with other news of weight Thus: "Amor-Moloch, we regret to state, Has claimed another victim in our town." You'll see, we'll catch subscribers: once in sight Of the propitious season when they bite, By way of throwing them the bait they'll brook I'll ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... created in Setebos's moment of being ill at ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But Caliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! They were pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban's Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. And the Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the world, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... enough stand deserted on the streets; these six move on,—through angry multitudes, cursing as they move. Accursed Aristocrat Tartuffes, this is the pass ye have brought us to! And now ye will break the Prisons, and set Capet Veto on horseback to ride over us? Out upon you, Priests of Beelzebub and Moloch; of Tartuffery, Mammon, and the Prussian Gallows,—which ye name Mother-Church and God! Such reproaches have the poor Nonjurants to endure, and worse; spoken in on them by frantic Patriots, who mount even on the carriage-steps; the very Guards hardly refraining. Pull up your ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... not now exist. A woman constituted like Portia, and placed in this age, and in the actual state of society, would find society armed against her; and instead of being like Portia, a gracious, happy, beloved, and loving creature, would be a victim, immolated in fire to that multitudinous Moloch termed Opinion. With her, the world without would be at war with the world within; in the perpetual strife, either her nature would "be subdued to the element it worked in," and bending to a necessity it could neither escape nor approve, lose at last something ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... heaven or earth, or under the earth. Take one specimen of all. There is "the lord of the world," Juggernath. "When you think of the monster block of the idol, with its frightfully grim and distorted visage, so justly styled the Moloch of the East, sitting enthroned amid thousands of massive sculptures, the representative emblems of that cruelty and vice which constitute the very essence of his worship; when you think of the countless multitudes that annually congregate there, from all parts ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... fewer in number, it is true, but scarcely less to be pitied, who exceed this enforced servility in the most abject fashion of voluntary adulation; who flatter, persuade, and bring rich tribute to this smiling Moloch, only waiting his own time to turn upon and destroy his idolaters. For the pampered stomach, like all other spoiled potentates, is treacherous and ungrateful ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... human beings, legends of colossal dragons swallowing annually their quota of fair virgins, were insignificant expressions of damage done to the human race compared to that annual tribute poured into the insatiable maw of the railway Moloch. Every great line of traffic, like the Pennsylvania or New York Central Railway, ate up a man a day. Sometimes, between sunrise and sunset, a single road made four or five widows, with a profusion ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... read like records of slaughter-houses. No Moloch or Shiva has won more victims to his shrine than has this idea of Japanese loyalty which is so beautiful in theory and so hideous in practice. Despite the military clamps and frightful despotism of Yedo, which for two hundred and fifty years gave to the world a delusive idea ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... his life to the salamander. His wicked father, King Ahaz, had delivered him to the fires of Moloch, and he would have been burnt, had his mother not painted him with the blood of the salamander, so that the fire ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... And sullen Moloch fled, Hath left in shadows dred, His burning Idol all of blackest hue, In vain with Cymbals ring, They call the grisly king, In dismall dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis and Orus, and the Dog ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... well. Only, you see, it's a piecemeal sort of business to call yourselves the representatives of Labour in its broadest sense. I belong more, I am afraid, to the school of theorists. In my mind I bring all Labour together, all the toilers of the world who are slaves to the great Moloch, Capital. You have an immense middle class here in England, who are living in fatness and content. The keynote of my creed is that these people have twice the incomes they ought to have, and Labour half as much. That, of course, is just the simple, oldfashioned, ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... definitely the relation between him and Zeus. It is probable that he represents an older cult that was largely displaced by that of Zeus. The custom of human sacrifice in his cult led to the identification of him with the Phoenician (Carthaginian) Melek (Moloch), and his name has been interpreted (from [Greek: kraino]) as meaning 'king' ( melek); but this resemblance does not prove a Semitic origin for him. Whether his role as king of the Age of Gold was anything more than a late construction ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... Martel at Tours saved Europe from becoming Saracen, just as in September, 1914, more than eleven centuries later, General Joffre with the citizen soldiery of France upon that same Marne saved Europe from the heel of the Prussianized Teuton, the reign of brute force and the religion of the Moloch State. These were among the world's "check battles." Yet the flood of barbarism was only checked at the Marne, not broken; again the flood arose and pressed on to be stopped once more at Verdun—the Gateway of France—in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... torrent in the plain, a tornado in the forest; its very pathway is destruction to whoso crosses it—man or beast; it is the heathenish God of the Americanos; they build temples for it, and flock there and worship it whenever it stops, breathing fire and flame like a very Moloch." ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte

... commanding a division. He was challenged and so was his companion; their faces expressed the long strain of a terrible war; both looked years older than their actual age, for, like the sons and daughters of the worshippers of Moloch, "they had passed through ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... in every separate action whether I could keep up the requisite connection with my brother, and, in case I could not, the utter darkness that surrounded my fate; whether, as a trophy won from Israel, I should be dedicated to the service of some Manchester Dagon, or pass through fire to Moloch,—all these contingencies, for me that had no friend to consult, ran too violently into the master current of my constitutional despondency ever to give way under any casual elation of success. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... away! Because one blot has lighted on an imperishable page, they would burn it up! Let us hope, that as our age is fast becoming ashamed of those infernal sacrifices called executions, so it shall also soon forbear to make its most gifted sons pass through the fire to Moloch, till it has tested ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... if, like the patriarch of old, though from very different circumstances, he was expecting some ram caught in a thicket some substitution for the sacrifice which his comrade proposed to offer, not to the Supreme Being, but to the Moloch of their own ambition. As he looked, the broad folds of the ensign of England, heavily distending itself to the failing night-breeze, caught his eye. It was displayed upon an artificial mound, nearly in the midst of the camp, which ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... Moloch and Beelzebub together, "for Heaven's sake let your Majesty consider what he ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... hardened as his heart was by religious and political fanaticism; and though he held them in abhorrence as rebels and traitors a tear did fall for them down his iron cheek. How fortunate for the liberties of Holland that William the Taciturn did not also fall into the claws of that Moloch Philip! I next visited the museum and picture gallery, where I witnessed the annual exposition of the modern school of painting. The specimens I saw pleased me much, particularly because the subjects ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... joyfully announced that work and he would from then on be total strangers. He alluded in feeling terms to the Providence which watches over good young men and saves them from the blighting necessity of offering themselves in the flower of their golden youth as human sacrifices to the Moloch of capitalistic greed: and, having commiserated with his guests in that a similar stroke of luck had not happened to each of them, advised them to drown their sorrows in ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... families are the best sign of vigor in a nation. Impurity, not chastity, is the enemy of the race. Instead of warring against those whose lives are pure, why not destroy that monster that is gnawing at the very vitals of the race, sapping its strength at the very font of life, that modern Moloch, to whom fashionable society offers sacrifice more abominable than the hecatombs of Carthage. This iniquity, rampant wherever the sense of God is absent, and none other, is the cause which some people do not see because they have good reasons ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... pretty wings, and tarnished the gilding, and rubbed off the fresh enamelling, I would if I could crawl back into a safe brown cocoon, or hide in some quiet and forgotten chrysalis. Did you ever hear of Moloch?" ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... sentiment; second, it is not a system but a method of religion and life; and, third, its eminently practical nature. The Deity adored by many people is a pure fabrication, for superstition projects its own divinity, which of course will be after its own impure mould. Men call the phantom God, Moloch, or Jehovah, and then attempt to please the capricious being whom they have conjured up. The true idea of God is his infinite presence in each point of space; this immanence in matter is the basis of his influence; this imposition ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... of the land of Goelo, to remain some time in their families, in the midst of love, marriages, and births. Very often they find unseen babies upon their return, waiting for godfathers ere they can be baptized, for many children are needed to keep up this race of fishermen, which the Icelandic Moloch devours. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... however barbarous.—This helps us to see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best and dearest possession ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... The venerable Moloch smiled fatuously. He carried the fire with which to consume all these tributes to Billy, the smoke of which would ascend as an ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... sincere wish for your welfare and prosperity in this undertaking, and to the hope that the great change of climate will bring with it no corresponding risk to health. I should think you will be missed in Cornhill, but doubtless "business" is a Moloch which demands such sacrifices. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all forms of Materialism and Hedonism, which he brands as "worships of Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. Similarly he denounces Atheism, never more vehemently than in his Journals ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... masking in the guise of religion. Preachers as jealous of the power slipping from their hands as ever was primate of England! A poor gentleman hounded to his death because he practised the sciences! Millions of victims all the world over burned for witchcraft, sacrificed to a Moloch of superstition in the name of a Christ who came to let in the light of knowledge on ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... look my way I could easily avoid discovery by crouching among the leaves. It shows how pleasant must be the paths of unrighteousness that we are tempted to climb trees to see those who walk therein. My imagination busied itself with the infidel. I pictured him as a sort of Moloch treading our pleasant countryside, flames and smoke proceeding from his nostrils, his feet striking fire, his voice like the sound of a great wind. At least that was the picture I formed of ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... we received a letter of thanks from his Excellency and the members of the Legislative Council for the services we had rendered the colony. My friend Lieutenant Roe presented me, also, with two specimens of the Spined Lizard Moloch horridus, which I intended to present to Her Majesty; but, unfortunately, I did not succeed in bringing either of them alive to England; one, however, lived ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... the vermin from your rags! Get rid of your filth! Your God is not a Moloch who requires flesh as ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... tasted that divinest fruit, Look on this world of yours with opened eyes! Y e are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods,— Each day ye break an image in your shrine And plant a fairer image where it stood Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed, Whose fires of torment burned for span—long babes? Fit object for a tender mother's love! Why not? It was a bargain duly made For these same infants through the surety's act Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven, By Him ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the dream of yesterday becomes the confident hope of to-day and the realized fact of to-morrow. As old systems fail to meet new conditions and new ideals, they are discarded; and into the limbo of worse than useless things is passing the system of human sacrifice to the Moloch of international warfare. For centuries world peace has been the dream of the poet, the philanthropist, the statesman, and the Christian. That dream is becoming a confident hope. This generation should ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... cried the old man, again beginning to pace the room with measured strides; "you are dear to me, very dear, for you're the image of one lost to me years ago, long weary years ago. I cannot bear to see you offered as another victim on the altar of the Drink-Moloch: he has had victims enough: too many, too many. Do you wish to wither into a premature grave? Do you wish to see the light die out of your mother's smile? Then marry a drink-worshipper. Do you wish to tremble ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson

... if it had passed fifty times—and through the fires of Moloch; only let us have this biscuit, such as it is." In good faith, then, fasting reader, you are not likely to see much more than you have seen. It is a very Barmecide feast, we do assure you—this same "jentaculum;" at which abstinence and patience are ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... MOLOCH. 'What doubt we to incense His utmost ire? which, to the height enraged, Will either quite consume us, and reduce To nothing this essential; happier far Than miserable to have ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... type, we still have the type no less ubiquitously with us. The bugbear of such is "modern science," or "modern thought," a monster which, we are frequently assured, is fast devouring all the beautiful and good in human life, a Moloch fed on the dreams and ideals and noble faiths of man. Modernity! For such "modernity" has taken the place of "Anti-Christ." These sad, nervous people have no eye for the beautiful patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to watch "the roaring ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... upon the base body what might have so profited the eternal mind? In his relentless ardour, in his sublime devotion and loyalty to his abstract idea, there was a devouring cruelty, of which this meek and gentle scholar was wholly unconscious. The grim iron model, like a Moloch, ate up all things,—health, life, love; and its jaws now opened for his child. He rose from his bed,—it was daybreak,—he threw on his dressing-robe, he strode into his daughter's room; the gray twilight came through the comfortless, curtainless ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the while they were going through this wretched mummery, they were hungry and thirsty and naked—destitute in a smiling land of plenty. Do you wonder that I think old-soldierism is the meanest profession the Lord ever suffered to thrive? I tell you Baal and Moloch never took such toll of their idolaters as these shabby old gods ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... "valley of the son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the gate of potsherds, called Tophet." The southwestern gate of the City of Jerusalem overlooked this valley where an altar had been erected for the atrocious Moloch-worship, but which was destroyed by Josiah ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman

... gap in the tale of days enumerated by Milton. We are not told how long it took Satan to reach the Earth. Driven back on precedents and analogies we find them conflicting. The outcast angels took nine days to fall the same distance. But falling, as Moloch points out in his speech at the Infernal Council, was to them less natural than rising; and Raphael, who was subsequently sent to guard the gates of Hell during the Creation, made the ascent easily in part of a day. If we allow a day and a night for ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... innocence of countenance, as well as its pleasing and graceful manners, render it a favourite pet wherever it can be obtained. Its rich robe of yellowish-grey, mixed with green, adds to the attraction of its presence. There are several species of Sajouins, known as the Widow monkey, the Moloch, the Mitred monkey, and the Black-handed Sajouin—all of them dwellers in the tropical regions of America. The Doroucouli is another small species, that in the nocturnal forest often alarms the traveller ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid

... call themselves, are like Mr. Grant Allen: they say that all their failures are 'pot-boilers.' They love that word. It covers so many sins of commission. They set down their incompetence as an assumption, which makes it almost graceful, and stick up the struggle for life as a Moloch requiring the sacrifice of genius. And then people believe in the travesty. Mr. Grant Allen could have been Darwin, no doubt; but Darwin could never have been Mr. Grant Allen. But what is the good ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... 'midst his viscous mazes once secure, Them he might seize and suck. The Birds, the Boar, The Lion, or the Bull, all whom before Great Herschelles had tackled, were not worse Than the Colossal Spider, Albion's curse, The scourge of childish Wealth and youthful Rank, The Moloch of our Minors! Fathers, thank Our new Alcides, who, with legal club, Could dare the web assault, the Spider drub! Worse than Tarantula venom hath the bite Of this Conkiferous Ogre, which to fight Herschelles did adventure! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various



Words linked to "Moloch" :   agamid lizard, power, spiny lizard, Moloch horridus, Semitic deity, Molech, agamid, genus Moloch, mountain devil, force



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