"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of above 1000 years, introduc'd by Avitus the pious bishop of Vienna, in a great dearth, unseasonable weather, and other calamities, (however in tract of time abus'd by many gross superstitions and insignificant rites, in imitation of the pagan robigalia) upon which days, (about the Ascension, and beginning of Spring especially) prayers were made, as well deprecatory of epidemical evils, (amongst which blasts and smut of corn were none of the least) as supplications for propitious ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... public amusements, we shall arrive in no time at the mens sana in corpore sano of the ancients. Don't be alarmed at the quotation, sir. I dabble a little in Latin after business hours, and enlarge my sympathies by occasional perusal of the Pagan writers, assisted by a crib. William, dinner at five; and, as it's particularly important to-day, I'll ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... literature (for the same thing is to be found, more or less, in many of our most genial works of imagination,—Don Quixote, for instance, and the writings of Jeremy Taylor), seems to be that well-known one of the predominant objectivity of the Pagan mind; while among us the subjective has risen into superiority, and brought with it in each individual a multitude of peculiar associations and relations. These, as not explicable from any one external principle assumed as a premise ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion for it, for me: it was remarkable too, I had but three subjects, and they were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father a Pagan and a cannibal; and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions: but this by ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... blind guides of erring reason and seducers to the paths of sin and destruction. Virgil and Horace were looked upon merely as the advocates of a profane and idolatrous mythology, and Cicero was regarded as a vain declaimer, impiously elated with the talent of Pagan eloquence, but the infidel charge that the church has always been in the way of scientific education, expressed in unqualified terms, is simply false in fact. That there was a time when she was opposed to classical learning is a well attested fact, but ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion for it, for me. It was remarkable, too, I had but three subjects, and they were of three different religions - my man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions. But this ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... Plots devise, And lace with fresh Treason the Pagan Drug; Whilst our Loyal Blood flows our Veins shall shine, Like our Faces inspir'd with a Mug, a Mug: Let Sectaries dream of Alarms, Alarms, And Fools still for new changes tug; While fam'd for our Loyalty we'll stand to our Arms, And drink ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... the training of human character by means of ethical philosophy or moral science—as it used to be called—appears to be somewhat of a theological "survival." When the sanctions of authority were removed from the pagan deities they were found to have been long reduced in the nursery to the dimensions of fairies. The tremendous conceptions of Christian theology may some day be revealed as similarly diminished in the catechised mind of childhood. And the abstract principles of ethical philosophy ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... understand it," the lawyer continued, "is an image of a pagan deity, with considerable dirt sticking to it, and no arms, no nose, and no clothing. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... mountain, in this temple. And the temple spoke to something far down within her; to something which desired long silences and deep retirement, to something mystic which she did not understand. The temple was Pagan and she knew that. But that in her to which it spoke was not Pagan. Before she left Athens she meant to realize that the soul of man, when it speaks through mighty and pure effort, of whatever kind, always speaks ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... fatalism go ever hand in hand in Northern Russia. The Empire of the Tsars being so vast in area and so embracive of races affords space for all forms of belief, or want of belief, within her boundaries. All creeds are represented, from the pagan Samoyede of the tundras to the Mohammedan Tartar of the Steppes. Our concern is with but one of these—the Old Believers. But to understand their doctrine, we must glance at the clergy of the State Church from which ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... religious belief, and can give a sound "reason of the faith that is in them?" When I was a child, I was taught that there were four religions in the world, the Popish, the Protestant, the Mahometan, the Pagan. It is a phenomenon to find the man, who has held the balance steadily, and rendered full and exact justice to the pretensions of each of these. No: tell me the longitude and latitude in which a man is born, and I ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... converts to account for the expression; but I conceive it probable that a solution could be readily given by some of your learned correspondents. The burning of the dead does not appear to be in itself an anti-christian ceremony, nor necessarily connected with Pagan idolatries, and therefore might have been tolerated in the case of Gentile believers like any ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... religion in general; while others make themselves pleasant with the principles of the christian. Of the last kind, this age has seen a most audacious example in the book entitled, a Tale of a Tub. Had this writing been published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... carrying the duke on a litter. There were sixteen Moorish slaves employed to serve as his bearers. This company was divided into sets, four in each, the several sets taking the burden in rotation. Robert and his attendant knights looked down with great contempt on these black pagan slaves. One day the cavalcade was met by a Norman who was returning home to Normandy after having accomplished his pilgrimage. He asked Duke Robert if he had any message to send to his friends at home. "Yes," said he; "tell them ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... your cherished ideal of the true, great poet; I regarded him as a vividly-coloured picture of inflated self-esteem, almost frantic aspiration; of a nature that has made a Moloch of intellect—offered up; in pagan fires, the natural affections—sacrificed the heart to the brain. Do we not all know that true greatness is simple, self-oblivious, prone to unambitious, unselfish attachments? I am certain you feel this truth in ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... I should like to become a Pagan," said Lothaw, one day, after listening to an impassioned discourse on Greek art from the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the Christians, cherishing the desire to die on the cross in order to go to enjoy eternal glory like my former colleagues. On hearing these words the Emperor began to smile, whether in his quality of a pagan of the sect of Shaka which teaches that there is no future life, or whether from the thought that I was frightened at having to be put to death. Then, looking at me kindly, he said, "Be no longer afraid and no longer conceal yourself ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... self-sufficiency, even the pride of reason. It expressed a sense of the general plight of humanity, and looked for relief only through a power with love and might enough to save all. Hence there is this fundamental difference between pagan and Christian pessimism: the pagan confesses his powerlessness to make himself impregnable {115} to fortune, while the Christian convicts himself of sin, confessing his worthlessness when measured by the task of universal ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Between Pagan Rome and Christian Paganism there is small choice—all State religions are very much alike. Caesar was Pope: and no State religion since his time has been an improvement on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... to pagan antiquity for guidance and example when we have near at hand the glorious precedent of Charles V., the greatest of kings, who taught at last by experience, abandoned the bloody path of persecution, and for many years before his abdication adopted milder measures. And Philip himself, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... mere sensuous representation of the Mystery of Life, and for chief recognised element therein Physical Force, as contrasted with Christianism, or Faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... still,' Blake added. 'Unbeheld, undisturbed! I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... 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 began seriously to consider the question ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston
... uncritical literary handling of elements really popular were the national romances of Arthur, of Charlemagne, of Sigurd, or of Etzel. The pagan legends were Christianised, like that of Beowulf; they were expanded into measureless length, whole cycles were invented about the heroic families; poets altered the materials each in his own way and to serve his own purpose, and often to glorify his own country. If the Saracens told their story ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... shouting fowls upon the limb, The kneeling cattle and the rising hymn! Has not a pagan rights to be regarded— His heart assaulted and his ear bombarded With sentiments and sounds that good old Pan Even in his ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... sensitiveness, and literary ideals of a most exalted kind, through the most depressing and demoralizing experiences. The following passage in that first essay offered to Mr. Meynell, entitled "Paganism: Old and New," a vindication of Christian over pagan ideals in art, shows the rich, colorful tone of mind of one who could walk unstained among the world's impurities. "Bring back then, I say, in conclusion, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on the cheek. But you ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... —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 calendar days) rather than to most of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... not merely of ancient song, but of ancient rites and incantations, and of a forgotten speech. Attempts have been made to interpret, for instance, the familiar 'Down, down, derry down,' as a Celtic invocation to assemble at the hill of sacrifice—a survival of pagan times when the altars smoked with human victims. It need only be said that these ingenious theorists have not yet proved their case; and that the origin of the refrain is a subject involved in still greater obscurity than ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... carelessly, "all religions are tolerated. Here we have temples for the worship of the Roman and the Greek gods and mosques for the Moslems. Here Christian, or Jew, Sun- worshipper or Pagan implore their several gods unmolested, and thus is Baalbek prosperous. I confess a liking for this Temple of Life, and come here often. I should, however, warn you that it is the general belief of those ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... from a pagan poet . . . If I were Jove, that stag should sleep to-night under the waves on a coral ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... motherhood to boys fresh from home; and there were moments when this hovering Nike seemed to breathe a mysterious tenderness like hers—became a proud and splendid angel of consolation—only, indeed, to resume, with some fresh change in the shadows, its pagan indifference, its exultant loneliness. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the service of a god implies any duties in common life beyond ceremonial ones is wholly foreign to paganism in all its forms. The establishment of the opposite idea is wholly the consequence of revelation. So we need not wonder if the pagan conception of service was here in the minds of the vowing assembly. If we look at their vow, as recorded in verses 16-18, we see nothing in it which necessarily implies a loftier idea. Jehovah is their national God, who has fought and conquered for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the decline of inspiration, the decline of taste, the decline of language, the decline of intellectual interest. Beneath it all and through it all there is spreading, gradually and silently, the insidious decay that will surely crumble the constitution of the ancient world. Pagan letters are uncreative, and, with few exceptions, without imagination and dull. The literature of the new religion, beginning to push green shoots from the ruins of the times, is a mingling of old and new substance under ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... He says in it, speaking of the conquest of Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince Guedimin at the head of his Lithuanian host, still dressed in the skins of wild beasts, still worshipping the ancient fire and practising pagan rites: "Then Southern Russia, under the mighty protection of Lithuanian princes, completely separated itself from the North. Every bond between them was broken; two kingdoms were established under a single name—Russia—one ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the Negroes, whence our old English term Black-a-moors. It is well known that the Arabs, especially after their conversion to Mahometanism, were great colonizers or conquerors; even the now half-christian kingdom of Abyssinia was an early colony and conquest of the pagan Arabs, and its inhabitants are consequently white Moors in the most extended Portuguese sense. The Arab, or Moorish kingdoms along the African coast of the Indian ocean, are branches from the same original stem, and the early Mahometan missionaries were both zealous and successful ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... a vast shower of cinders and stones was thrown into the air. Unnoticed passed the eruption before the gaze of Saint-Prosper, whose mind in a torpor swept dully back to youth's roseate season, recalling the homage of the younger for the elder brother, a worship as natural as pagan adoration of the sun. From the sanguine fore-time to the dead present lay a bridge of darkness. With honor within grasp, deliberately he had sought dishonor, little recking of shame and murder, and childishly husbanding ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... anything but English. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise—as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality of French civilisation, he suggested without either eagerness or embarrassment that he should take me in his fly for an hour's ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was growing late ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... the sect or religion to which he may have belonged, but qualities which, though connected with his own especial faith or tenets, are recognised as the common property of mankind; he has been great not as Catholic, as Puritan, as Pagan, as Mahometan, but as man; he has been great, because he was pious, brave, patriotic, sagacious, resolute, and has achieved great enterprises on the theatre of life. The greatness of Cromwell was indeed allied to Puritanism, inasmuch as his mind grew up under this peculiar form of religion; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... outnumbered. Their hearts misgave them as they saw ten heathen spring out of the ground for every one that was felled. The struggle grew fiercer as night came on. The Christians were fighting for life; defeat meant that they must perish to a man, by the sword or upon pagan altars; escape there was none. Upon the cliff overlooking the battle-field the archbishop and his priests were praying for success to the King's arms. Tradition that has been busy with this great battle all through the ages tells how, while ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... created inferiority we can trace those irregularities which for many centuries filled the Church with shame, for practices more obscene than the orgies of Babylon or Corinth, and which dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in pagan countries—a darkness upon which the most searching efforts of historians cast scarcely one ray of light—a darkness so profound that from the seventh to the eleventh century no individual thought can be traced. All was sunk in superstition; men were bound by Church dogmas, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is curious, and to 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 ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... freedman and favourite of the Emperor Nero, was the master of Epictetus, the lame slave and Stoic philosopher, who was amongst the greatest of pagan moralists. Epaphroditus, who treated his slave with great cruelty, is said to have been one day twisting his leg for amusement. Epictetus said, 'If you continue, you will break my leg.' Epaphroditus went on, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the [25] "Age of Faith"—this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... I said, "you talk like a pagan. What could you know of fate at that time? What was it like? Did it come down ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... one, must, in your allowance, oversway a whole theatre of others. Oh! there be players, that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely), that neither having the accent of Christian, Pagan, or Norman, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. This should be reformed altogether; and let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them: ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... place and office in the field of Latin literature, as the chief author who bridged the gulf between pagan poetry and ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... 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, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... deluded, miserable nun; clinging to a religion which, instead of Bible truths, filled the anxious, aching heart with monkish legends of unattested miracles, and in place of the pure worship of God, gives us mummeries nearer akin to pagan rites! I thank God that I am released from my thraldom. I see now the tissue of falsehood so plausible in which all things were wrapped. Blackness and deceit in the garb of truth and purity! And it is horrible, to think that he who so led me astray claims to be my brother! ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... and ideals so different from, and so hostile to, those of the heroic age, did not consume the traditions or destroy the pious and reverent spirit in which men still looked back upon those monuments of their own pagan teachers and kings, and the deep spirit of patriotism and affection with which the mind still clung to the old heroic age, whose types were warlike prowess, physical beauty, generosity, hospitality, love of family and nation, and all those ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... 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 to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... happen, transpire happiness, pleasure healthy, healthful hear, listen heathen, pagan honorable, honorary horrible, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... stories were obtained from the Bagobo people, one of the groups of pagan Malays in southeastern Mindanao, Philippine Islands. Their habitat is on the eastern folds of the Cabadangan mountain-range, in the vicinity of Mount Apo, the highest peak, and on the foothills thence sloping down to the west coast of the Gulf of Davao. They practise a primitive agriculture—raising ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... made a mistake, and that she would look upon him as an alien, a pagan, with whom she could have no sympathy. "If I am more modern in my ideas than my forefathers," he said tactfully, "I must not confess it to a Roumia, must I, oh Rose of the West?—for that would be disloyal to Islam. Yet if I did ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... lies! In manhood's early bloom The Christian hero found a Pagan tomb: Religion, sorrowing o'er her favorite son, Points to the glorious trophies which he won. Eternal trophies, not with slaughter red, Not stained with tears by hopeless captives shed; But trophies of the Cross. For that ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... and dealt with familiar spirits and with wizards. These passages seem to concur with the former, in classing witchcraft among other desertions of the prophets of the Deity, in order to obtain responses by the superstitious practices of the pagan nations around them. To understand the texts otherwise seems to confound the modern system of witchcraft, with all its unnatural and improbable outrages on common sense, with the crime of the person who, in classical days, consulted the oracle ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... beautiful Apollo and his loves,—Daphne, pursued by the god, changing into the laurel, and the enamored Clytie into the faithful sunflower. Beauty, for its own sake, supreme and unconditional, charmed her primarily and to the end. Her restless spirit found repose in the pagan idea,—the absolute unity and identity of man with nature, as symbolized in the Greek myths, where every natural force becomes a person, and where, in turn, persons pass with equal readiness and freedom back into ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... by the bell-man, and summoned at the hour of twelve—first washing themselves as aforesaid, in the lake, and then adjourning to the prison which I am about to describe. There is not on earth, with the exception of pagan rites,—and it is melancholy to be compelled to compare any institution of the Christian religion with a Juggernaut,—there is not on earth, I say, a regulation of a religious nature, more barbarous and inhuman than this. It has destroyed ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... books still remain, preserved to us by accident in the great European libraries; but most of them were destroyed by the monks. Their contents were found to relate chiefly to the pagan ritual, to traditions of the heathen times, to astrological superstitions, and the like. Hence, they were considered deleterious, ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... is no real answer to a speech of this character, Peggy Webster made no reply. What Vera's future held in store for her was, according to an ancient pagan expression, "in the lap ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... do not identify this doctrine with pagan fatalism, but I hold that it is akin thereto, and that it tends to the same practical results. It is, in my opinion, worse than pagan fatalism. That doctrine represents all events and actions as strictly necessary, but it binds the gods as well as ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... Then the pagan intoxications of the Catholic rites were no more surrounding him to over-excite him and betray the trouble of his heart and the straying of his thoughts, and if he felt affected before the smiles of these marriageable girls, he ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... among the four "wounds of nature" inflicted by original sin.(126) But this teaching must be regarded in the light in which the Church condemned Quesnel's proposition that "All natural knowledge of God, even that found in pagan philosophers, can come from nowhere else than God, and without grace produces nothing but presumption, vanity, and opposition against God Himself, instead of adoration, gratitude, and love."(127) The Traditionalist contention that the intrinsic weakness of the human ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... O little pagan with the heart of Christ, I go bewildered from thine altar place, These brooding boughs and grey-lit forest wings, Nor know if thou deniest My destiny and race, Man's goalward falterings, To sing the perfect joy ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... nothing. Passing to our own literature, it is certain that Addison was profoundly ignorant of Chaucer and of Spenser. Milton only,—and why? simply because he was a brilliant scholar, and stands like a bridge between the Christian literature and the Pagan,—Addison had read and esteemed. There was also in the very constitution of Milton's mind, in the majestic regularity and planetary solemnity of its epic movements, something which he could understand and appreciate. As to the meteoric and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... may admire, considered purely as art, the Pagan temples of the Greeks and Romans, we must confess that they are lacking in those high ideals and those sustained and inspired motives which seem to penetrate and permeate the buildings and churches of the Christian era. Perfect as is Greek art within its somewhat narrow limits, ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... the bounds of equity, babblers to hear babbling, dumb people to keep in talk: in fine, one has to drink with those that like it, to eat with those that are hungry; one has to become a Jew with Jews, a Pagan with Pagans. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the newborn infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness—typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man every where, and of that benignity in powers invisible, which even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might bear different interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... retired to London, where he preached privately and was 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
... should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... next this pagan personality; it was possibly the lack of fashion in his looks that caused, her to select him for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... remote times from Norway to the shores of the Mediterranean the glow of St. John's fires might have been seen. The Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century forbade the custom as a heathen rite, but the Church endeavoured to win over the custom from its Pagan associations and to attach to it a Christian signification. In the island of Jersey the older inhabitants used to light fires under large iron pots full of water, in which they placed silver articles—as spoons, mugs, &c., and then ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Ta-kuan regarded the country as mainly Buddhist. Parakrama Bahu of Ceylon (1153-1186) was zealous for the faith and so were several kings of Siam. I am inclined to think that this movement was a consequence of the flourishing condition of Buddhism at Pagan in Burma from 1050 to 1250. Pagan certainly stimulated religion in both Siam and Ceylon and Siam reacted strongly on Camboja.[443] It is true that the later Buddhism of Java was by no means of the Siamese type, but probably ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many in the charming language of their natal day, and by others in the modernization of Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth. At this hour, one thousand eight hundred years since their creation, the pagan tales of Ovid, never equaled on this earth for the gayety of their movement and the capricious graces of their narrative, are read ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... with religion rather than with Christianity as yet. I am all but certain, the only thing that will ever make him able to believe in a God at all is meditation on the Christian idea of God,—I mean the idea of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself,—not that pagan corruption of Christ in God reconciling him to the world. He will then see that suffering is not either wrath or neglect, but pure-hearted love and tenderness. But we must give him time, wife; as God has borne with us, we must believe that he bears with others, and so learn ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... exception of the chef d'oeuvres of the English and German poets, the Colonel's library, which was an extensive one, almost wholly consisted of such books as immediately related to military subjects, or might be able to bear on some branch of science connected with military warfare. Pagan, and his follower Vauban, and the more matured treatises of Cormontaigne, were backed by the works of that boast of the Low Countries, Coehorn; and by the ingenious theories, as yet but theories, of Napoleon's minister of ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... been there. So I have no doubt for the present the Pagan remains stubborn. Gone on into Italy I hear; doing me, violating the laws of Nature, and roving about the world, with his own solitary hands in his bottomless pockets,—like the wandering Jew! But, as some slight set-off in my run of ill-luck, I find at the post-office a pleasanter ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... romantic beauty for which it is so justly celebrated. That mountain region, too, guarded by the strong arms and undaunted hearts of its heroic sons, formed an impassable bulwark against the advance of barbarian invaders, and remained for many years, while Saxon England was yet pagan, the main refuge of that Christian religion to which Britain owes its present greatness. Yet subsequently, on account of the inaccessible nature of the country, the inhabitants, separated from their more enlightened fellow-subjects, remained for a long period almost as ignorant as ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... manner. His face cleared, and he waved his arm with a gesture of magnificent condescension. His whole attitude expressed clearly that so enlightened and cultured a person as himself was in the habit of making every allowance for any poor, benighted pagan like me. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... us to confuse. I have no host in battle him to prove, Nor have I strength his forces to undo. Counsel me then, ye that are wise and true; Can ye ward off this present death and dule?" What word to say no pagan of them knew, Save Blancandrin, of th' Castle of ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Rome. But as long as it is so, nothing can be more plain than that the members of that Church can give no reasonable security to any government for their allegiance and peaceable behavior. Therefore, they ought not to be tolerated by any government, Protestant, Mohammedan, or Pagan. You say, 'Nay, but they take an oath of allegiance.' True, five hundred oaths; but the maxim, 'No faith is to be kept with heretics,' sweeps them all away as a spider's web. So that still no governors that are not Roman Catholics can have ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one Fetich for another. The delighted negroes went ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Leave me go, Michael James, leave me go, you old Pagan, leave me go, or I'll get the curse of the priests on you, and of the scarlet-coated bishops of the courts of Rome. [With a sudden movement he pulls himself out of his coat, and disappears out of the door, leaving his coat ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... as 'too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable to the most vitiated class of English readers.' This no doubt was Miss Rigby's interpolation in the proofs in reply to her editor's suggestion that she should 'glance at the novels by Acton and Ellis Bell.' It is ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... it looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like a classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian facade of the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to his surprise, he found another figure there beside the statue, sitting almost equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced the wrinkled brow and ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... something seemed to be calling to her. Silently—"like a thief in the night," to adopt Mrs. Munday's metaphor—had slipped the heavy bolts; had joined the thousand creatures of the wood—had danced and leapt and shouted; had behaved, in short, more as if she had been a Pagan nymph than a happy English child. She had regained the house unnoticed, as she thought, the Devil, no doubt, assisting her; and had hidden her wet clothes in the bottom of a mighty chest. Deceitfulness in her heart, she had greeted Mrs. Munday in sleepy tones from beneath ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... was in the theological seminary I had a very clear idea of the difference between Pagan Rome and Christian Rome. When Constantine came, Christianity was established. It was a wonderful change and made everything different. But when you stroll across from the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine you wonder what the difference was. The two things look so much alike. And in the Vatican ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... sacred a place and engaged in so holy an avocation would have been a great protection from any Christian soldiery; but the monks entirely misconceived the nature of the impulses by which human nature is governed, in supposing that it would have any restraining influence upon the pagan Danes. The first thing the ferocious marauders did, on breaking into the sacred precincts of the chapel, was to cut down the venerable abbot at the altar, in his sacerdotal robes, and then to push forward the work of slaying every other inmate of the abbey, feeble and ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... limited, 250 suppression of, due to danger from doctrine in pagan and mediaeval times, 251; only necessary when practice of, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... after the death that prevails in winter. People of many faiths observe a spring festival of rejoicing, and of prayer for future bounty. Probably the Easter celebration is like that at Christmas and Thanksgiving—a survival of some ancient pagan rite that men established out of overflowing hearts, rejoicing at the end of a good season and praying for favour at the beginning of ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... on the Christian heart That warning still and deep, At which high spirits of old would start E'en from their Pagan sleep. ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... which we live free from the absurdities which confound these necessary distinctions? Have we never beheld on the porticoes of palaces, public halls, or places of amusement, the skins of animals devoted to the rites of the pagan religion, or vases consecrated to the ashes of the dead, or the tears of the living? Violations of sense and character, in this respect, are daily committed. We might, with as much propriety, adorn the ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... seventeenth century, when the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour. The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really paralleled in classical thought. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... that such an idea of marriage should be gaining foothold in America. It has its root in an ignoble view of life,—an utter and pagan darkness as to all that man and woman are called to do in that highest relation where they act as one. It is a mean and low contrivance on both sides, by which all the grand work of home-building, all the noble ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... rabbinical writings, and actually interprets them also 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
... Loads of Curses and Calumny, just as they proved Favourers or Discountenancers of High-Church, without regard to their other Virtues or Vices: for High-Church is to be found in all Religions and Sects, from the Pagan down to the Presbyterian; and is equally detrimental in every one ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... ran on. "Hollow, shallow, inconsistent—loveless. Catholicism equals a modern refinement of pagan principles with all the old deities on their best behaviour thrown in; while Protestantism is an ecclesiastical ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... any contrary example, it could (I think) be taken but from one only Country; wherein (if the Historian says right) Morality was more exemplary than in any other that we know of for near 400 Years that its Pagan Natives possess'd it; whose exterminators (calling themselves Christians) made it a most deplorable Scene of Injustice, Cruelty and Oppression, bringing thither Vices unknown to those former Inhabitants. ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... remember our last meeting. Returning home one evening, I met her at the lodge-gate hurrying away. Our loves had been discovered, and my mother had shuddered to think that so pagan a thing had lived so long in a Christian house. I vowed—ah! what did I not vow?—and then we stole sadly together to comfort our aching hearts under cover of the woodland. For the last time the wild cherry-tree bloomed,—wonderful blossom, glittering with tears, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... clear that this curious story has reached us in a fragmentary and expurgated form, and that if we had the whole narrative before us it would afford us an indication that Clonmacnois was the site of an earlier, Pagan, sanctuary. It will most probably be found to be an invariable rule that the early Christian establishments in Ireland occupy the sites of Pagan sanctuaries; the monastery having been founded to re-consecrate the holy place to the True Faith. The hollow elm was doubtless ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... black mane of the stallion. But it was her face that smote Graham most of all. It was a boy's face; it was a woman's face; it was serious and at the same time amused, expressing the pleasure it found woven with the peril. It was a white woman's face—and modern; and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a situation one happened upon in the twentieth century. It was straight out of old Greece. It was a Maxfield Parrish reminiscence from the Arabian Nights. Genii might be expected to rise from those troubled depths, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... by asking if she knew what a quincunx was, or what Virgil was really driving at when he composed the First Eclogue, and whether she had ever heard of Lycidas; and when she said that she had something better to do than stuff her head with quidnunxes and all such pagan rubbish, he remarked very politely that ignorance was evidently not all of the same sort. Which sent Aunt Charlotte bustling away in a huff to ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... with its magnificent fortifications, and superb harbour, are centred its chief attractions, and which have gained for it a name imperishable on the page of history as the bulwark of Christendom, against the pagan hosts of the Saracens. ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... 14th centuries (that epoch during which an architectural afflatus seems to have descended on the human race), and which are found at intervals over both the Indo-Chinese continent and the Islands, as at Pagan in Burma, at Ayuthia in Siam, at Angkor in Kamboja, at Borobodor and Brambanan in Java. All these remains are deeply marked by Hindu influence, and, at the same time, by strong ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... similarly honoured at Embrun. When the Protestants took that town in 1585, they found, among the relics of the principal church, the Phallus of St. Foutin. The devotees of that town, in imitation of pagan ones, made libations to this obscene idol. They poured wine over the extremity of the Phallus, which was dyed red by it. This wine being afterwards collected and allowed to turn sour, was called the holy vinegar, and, according ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... metaphysical system is evident from the fact that it was not formed at once, but by gradual addition and development, and that it was to the last partly local. It appears to have been, like the other religions of the Pagan world—of Greece and Italy, of Phoenicia and India—a worship of the powers of nature represented by great natural objects, such as the sun and moon, or by forms bestial or human, which were selected as symbolical ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... sir what I am is plainly written on my face. Surely you do not take me for a pagan! I might be a black man from Africa, or an Englishman, but an Indian—that, no! But a minute ago you had the goodness to invite me to smoke. How, sir, can a poor man ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... sorely missed her horizon, and in cities was even unhappy for lack of one. If she could have crystallized, and then formulated her feeling, she would have said she felt lonely, that something or somebody had gone away. Had she been a pagan, it would have been her gods that had forsaken her. Without a horizon she felt as if the wind had forgotten her, the sky did not know her. Often indeed even the farthest horizon could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country; that ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... a little pagan,' said the landlady. 'For that matter, they are all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not. They have ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of an animal so faithful to man, and so exclusively his associate and his friend, as the dog. Accordingly, this question has been entertained ever since Natural History took the rank of a science. But the origin of the dog is lost in antiquity. We find him occupying a place in the earliest pagan worship; his name has been given to one of the first-mentioned stars of the heavens, and his effigy may be seen in some of the most ancient works of art. Pliny was of opinion that there was no domestic animal without its unsubdued counterpart, and dogs ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... likewise blamable for confounding the Christian with the Pagan theology in some parts ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... king Ferdinand," observes Fray Antonio Agapida, "was humbling himself before the cross and devoutly praying for the destruction of his enemies, that fierce pagan, El Zagal, depending merely on arm of flesh and sword of steel, pursued his diabolical outrages upon the Christians." No sooner was the invading army disbanded than he sallied forth from his stronghold, and carried fire and sword into all those parts which ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... which is 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, and is ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... comfort in this stoical thought of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance, and does it satisfy religious souls? The upstart, the rogue, the tyrant, the rake, and all those haughty sinners who make an ill use of life, and whose steps are dogged by Death, will be surely punished; but can the reflection that death is no ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... homage which the innocent Adam rendered to our common Mother and which doubtless suggested to the Serpent the idea of taking them in. But a symptom so complete is not frequent. Most married couples are too good Christians to follow the usages of pagan Greece, so we have ranged, among the last symptoms, the appearance in the calm nuptial couch of those shameless pleasures which spring generally from lawless passion. In their proper time and place we will treat more fully of this fascinating ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... half-savage brothers were these softened and romanized Celts who had tended the olives and the vines on sunny lake sides, and who in earlier days had mingled in Dionysian revels with Roman maidens with curled locks and painted cheeks. Strange their tales of the white pagan temples, and all the glories of the imperial cities left smouldering in ashes after the Teuton hordes had worked their will. The arduous pioneer life of their predecessors and the task of clearing and cultivating their wild asylum among the mountains and the marshes was now their lot. Adopting ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... by Justinian was Singidunum, now Belgrade, which, founded to hold back the Slav, is now his capital. The invading Slavs were pagan, the natives largely Christian. "The Christians," says Presbyter Diocleas, "seeing themselves in great tribulation and persecution, began to gather on the mountains and tried to construct castles and strongholds that they might escape from the hands of the Slavs until ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... been able 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' farewell ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... barren shine Of moral pow'rs an' reason? His English style an' gesture fine Are a' clean out o' season. Like Socrates or Antonine, Or some auld pagan Heathen, The moral man he does define, But ne'er a word o' faith in That's right ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... with implicit faith the different religions of the earth. [3] Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... implied a belief in the presence, not of acquired, but of original impurity. It is based on that; and without it this rite is not only mysterious, but meaningless. Blind is the eye which does not see in this old pagan ceremony a tradition of the primeval Fall, and dull the ear which does not hear in its voice no faint echo of these words, "I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.... Create in me a clean heart, O God; and ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... the bounds of religious instruction; that he had quoted profane writers too complacently; that he had even experienced a dangerous pleasure in roaming with his disciple through the fields of the past, plucking pagan flowers unsprinkled by the waters of baptism, flowers in whose fragrance a priest should ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... is in vain for us to reflect on the absurdity, incongruity and frivolousness, as we apprehend it, of the pagan worship, inasmuch as we find, whatever we may think of its demerits, that the most heroic people that ever existed on earth, in the hour of their direst calamity, regarded a zealous and fervent adherence to that religion as the most sacred of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... heights. When Gaul became Christian, neither monument nor festival perished; a saint took the place of the goddess, and the temple of Victory became the church of St. Victoire. There are still ruins of it to this day; the religious procession which succeeded the pagan festival ceased only at the first outburst of the Revolution; and the vague memory of a great national event still mingles in popular tradition with the legends of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Aberdeen, borne to the 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 visit to ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... periodically, for the benefit of certain charities; but the sight best worth seeing, is the Hall at the period of an election, or of political excitement, crowded with a feverish army of workmen, cheering, groaning, swaying to and fro, under the speeches of their favourite orators. Then in this Pagan temple may be seen a living specimen of a Brummagem Jupiter, with a cross of Vulcan, lion-faced, hairy, bearded, deep-mouthed swaggering, fluent in frank nonsense and bullying clap-trap, loved by the mob for his strength, and by the middle classes for his money. The ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... had been, those impartial witnesses who must have known and should have spoken were silent, and now all the earth was silent: storms rose in their fury and were calmed for no man's Peace, be still; earthquakes engulfed pagan and Christian believer alike; all nature ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... full of. Sacred and universal, this clasps us, as Abraham's bosom did Lazarus, within its infinite embraces, causing every fibre of our being to quicken under its heavenly truths. Ithuriel's golden spear was not more antagonistic to Satan's loathly transformation—than is Christian opposed to pagan art. The wide, the awful gulf, separating one from the other, will be felt instantly in its true force by first thinking ZEUS, and then thinking CHRIST. How pale, shadowy, and shapeless the vision of lust, revenge, and impotence, that rises at the thought of Zeus; but at the thought of ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... turned on the pagan; the Oneidas seemed troubled; the Sagamore serious. Only the Christian Indian remained placid and indifferent, his Testament suspended in his hand. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... pray daily for you being all restored to Christ's Church, by whatsoever method He, who is all-wise, is pleased to direct. In the meantime, surely you will allow it consists with me as a Roman to distinguish far between a Protestant and a pagan; between one that calls on Jesus Christ, though in a way which I do not think is according to the true faith, and a savage or a barbarian, that knows no God, no Christ, no Redeemer; and if you are not within the pale of the Catholic Church, we hope you are ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... biography, and descanting on the wonders and idiosyncrasies of man and nature which they revealed. He was never tired of talking of the intellectual and social conditions that ruled in Greece and Rome from 600 B.C. on, the philosophies, the travels, the art, the simple, natural pagan view of things, and regretting that they were no more. He grieved at times, I think, that he had not been of that world, might not have seen it, or, failing that, might not see all the shards of those extinct civilizations. There was something loving and sad in the manner in which at times, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... commotion that brought Mrs. Munn from her pie-baking in hurried alarm. He washed his hands, resumed his coat, and, leaning out of the window, wished with all his might that he had something to do. He was seized with an honest, pagan desire that some one would get sick, or that there might be an accident in the mill—-just a mild accident, of course; or, better still, that that queer specimen of humanity sitting under his cherry-tree, down there, should ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... Her pagan simplicity, her frank boyishness, and her absolute unconsciousness of self, appealed to him irresistibly. "The dear kid," he said to himself, fondly; "the blessed little kid! Wonder how old ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... several times through the fire with a bold leap, it pursued the people, who ran screaming and laughing in every direction. I asked what the horse was meant for, and was told it represented all cattle. Here was the old pagan worship of Baal, if not of Moloch too, carried on openly and universally in the heart of a nominally Christian country, and by millions professing the Christian name. I was confounded, for I did not then know that Popery is only a crafty adaptation of pagan idolatries to its own scheme; and while ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... fire. The plenteous horns with pleasant mead they crown Nor wanted aught besides in honour of the Moon. Now, while the temple smoked with hallowed steam, They wash the virgin in a living stream; The secret ceremonies I conceal, Uncouth, perhaps unlawful to reveal: But such they were as pagan use required, Performed by women when the men retired, Whose eyes profane their chaste mysterious rites Might turn to scandal or obscene delights. Well-meaners think no harm; but for the rest, Things sacred they pervert, and silence is the best. Her shining hair, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... dark, and in heaven, oh, almost unbearably lovely, the snow of the near mountains was burning rose, against the dark-blue heavens. How unspeakably lovely it was, no one could ever tell, the grand, pagan twilight of the valleys, savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods who knew the right for human sacrifice. It stole away the soul of Alvina. She felt transfigured in it, clairvoyant in another mystery of life. A savage hardness came in her heart. The gods who had demanded human sacrifice ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... distance by the way I came. Inns being now very scarce in the district, I decided to take my chance of lunch in a small village called St. Jean-Lespinasse. Another saint! The map of France is still covered with the names of saints, in spite of all the efforts of revolutionists and pagan reformers to make the people abandon their 'Christian superstitions.' Those who in the 'ages of faith' built up this association of saints and places could have had no conception of the power that these names would have in binding Christianity to the soil in the faithless or doubting ages to ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... essentially Christian in its spirit and motives. It used religious symbols extensively, but incorporated in its ornament a few pagan elements, such as the acanthus and the scroll. Natural forms were always conventionally treated. Its coloring was rich and gorgeous. The principal features of its architecture were the dome and round arch. The plan of the churches was often in the form of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... home in Plassans, which is wrecked by the doings of a certain Abbe Faujas and his relatives. Serge Mouret grows up, is called by an instinctive vocation to the priesthood, and becomes parish priest of Les Artaud, a well-nigh pagan hamlet in one of those bare, burning stretches of country with which Provence abounds. And here it is that 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' opens in the old ruinous church, perched upon a hillock in full view of the squalid village, the arid ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... belief, the god Woden had a favorite white or light-gray horse, created by magic art, and upon which he bestowed the power of assisting and protecting warriors. This horse was regarded as sacred, and shared in the worship given to Woden. The pagan priests had no temples; the art of building was unknown to them; but, instead, their religious ceremonies were performed in thick groves of oak which were set apart for the purpose. In these gloomy woods the priests reared beautiful white horses, which no man ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... the parson left her with a pious thanksgiving that Riccabocca at least was a Christian, and not a Pagan, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... threw a pale ray over the Tomb of San Satiro, where it lay under an arcade to the right of the Altar. This tomb, in shape resembling the great vats used at vintage time, was more ancient than the Church and in all respects similar to a Pagan sarcophagus, except that the sign of the Cross was to be seen traced in three different places on ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... splendour of Oxford and Cambridge that both of them, in a Christian land, make Paley the foundation of their ethics; the alternative being Aristotle. And, in our mind, though far inferior as a moralist to the Stoics, Aristotle is often less a pagan ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... to her; you might let her hear from your consecrated lips that she is not a castaway because she is a Roman; that she may be a Nero and yet a Christian; that she may owe her black locks and dark cheeks to the blood of the pagan Caesars, and yet herself be a child of grace; you will tell her this, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope |
