"Paganism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lucky thing for the Christian world. We Westerners—we of America and Europe—would go all to pieces otherwise. You see we Occidentals have not eons of fatalistic paganism to fall back on as have the sons of the East. They endure without our religion. But we—what would happen to us if Christianity did not unite, purify, and ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... and that her husband, Lieutenant James, once intercepted a tender passage between herself and a rajah. Further embroideries assert that Lola's father was the son of a Lady Gilbert, and that her mother was the daughter of a "Moorish warrior who abjured paganism." To this rigmarole he adds that she was sent to a boarding-school at Bath, kept by a Mrs. Olridge, where she had an early liaison ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... agreed to conform to his good pleasure, humiliating as it was to them. Accordingly, one and all publicly offered up eleven prayers, which were considered a sufficient testimony of their having renounced paganism, and embraced the doctrines of ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... text-books and philosophical magazines they absorbed and experienced thousands of years ago, when they offered human sacrifice in black and cruel forests and cried to their gods in the dark. Their agnosticism is perhaps merely paganism; their paganism, as in old times, is merely devil-worship. Certainly, Schopenhauer could hardly have written his hideous essay on women except in a country which had once been full of slavery and the service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are tricking us altogether, ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... peoples were from ancient times lovers of song. Much of their early history is preserved in poetry, and no one was more honored among them than the skjald who most skillfully presented their thoughts and deeds in song. Nor was this love of poetry lost with the transition from paganism to Christianity. The splendid folk songs of the Middle Ages prove conclusively that both the love of poetry and the skill in writing it survived into the new age. One can only wonder what fine songs the stirring advent of Christianity might have produced among a people ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... ferias are tremendously worldly; but they are none the less stupendous religious fetes. Its picturesque Easter processions, when colossal images of the Virgin are carried among bareheaded and kneeling crowds, smack of paganism; but we cannot question the genuineness of the religious fervor thus displayed. Its Cathedral touches the arena; and its Archbishop washes the feet of its old men. Its religion is still the living force ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... world has ever known. It is a vast drama that the genius and patience of a Gibbon has alone been able to deal with, defying almost by its gigantic catastrophes and ever raging turbulence the pen of history to chronicle and arrange. When the curtain rises on a new order of things, the age of Paganism has passed away, and the period of the Middle ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... that gave me quite so much artistic pleasure as this poem of yours except 'Hyperion,'—only 'Hyperion' is distinctly classical, while 'Nourhalma' takes us back into some hitherto unexplored world of antique paganism, which, though essentially pagan, is wonderfully full of pure and lofty sentiment. When did ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age. The old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose from the dead, and the followers of Pan say their god never died at all. It is significant ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... to crown the climax in a grand ascent of calamities; it is ranked among the last of curses; and yet by the noblest of Romans it was ranked as the first of blessings. In that difference most readers will see little more than the essential difference between Christianity and Paganism. But this, on consideration, I doubt. The Christian Church may be right in its estimate of sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life, as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, with penitential ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... miracles? I soon convinced myself that popular Catholicism, as it exists in southern Europe and as it has existed through a long course of centuries, is as literally polytheistic and idolatrous as any form of paganism, though it has many beauties, and though much of its very mingled influence has been for good. In the teaching of my early youth, this transformation of Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... were now to be reckoned with. The converts were disturbed, or soon might be disturbed, by being told that proselytism to Moses, sealed by circumcision, was a sine qua non in order to a valid hope of salvation through the Gospel; that the man awakened from his paganism must be at least something of a Jew to be anything of a Christian; that the door was not absolutely open between the sinner's soul and the Saviour, to be passed through by the one step of a ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... fasces of the Lictor, and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in the dust. Soon after Christianity had achieved its triumph, the principle which had assisted it began to corrupt it. It became a new Paganism. Patron saints assumed the offices of household gods. St. George took the place of Mars. St. Elmo consoled the mariner for the loss of Castor and Pollux. The Virgin Mother and Cecilia succeeded to Venus and the Muses. The fascination of sex and loveliness ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tendency was encouraged by his education, which, like that of all well-born Romans, even in the sixth century after Christ, had savoured much more of paganism than of Christianity. Like his ancestors, before the age of Constantine, he had been taught grammar and rhetoric; grammar which was supposed to include all sciences, meaning practically a comment on a few classical ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... occasionally mentioned Miriam in her letters, and always with a jest. "I strongly suspect she is studying Greek. Is she, perchance, the author of that delightful paper on 'Modern Paganism,' in the current Fortnightly? Something strange awaits us, be ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... and that the Government should have left education to the care of the missionaries during the proselytizing period was undoubtedly the most natural course to take. It was desirable that conversion from paganism should precede any kind of secular tuition. But the friars, to the last, held tenaciously to their old monopoly; hence the University, the High Schools, and the Colleges (except the Jesuit Schools) were in their hands, and they remained as stumbling-blocks in the intellectual ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals; and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the orator with new topics of declamation, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... It is best described in her own words: "Might not a poem of some extent and importance, if the execution were at all equal to the design, be produced, from contrasting the spirit and tenets of Paganism with those of Christianity? It would contain, of course, much classical allusion; and all the graceful and sportive fictions of ancient Greece and Italy, as well as the superstitions of more barbarous climes, might be introduced, to prove how little consolation they could convey in the ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... extolled by the zealous and pious fathers of the Roman Church, is the introduction of the Christian faith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire horror, to behold these savages tumbling among the dark mountains of paganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance of religion. It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded; they were sober, frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; but though they acted right habitually, it was all in vain, unless they acted so from precept. The new comers, therefore, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... world, as they discovered them, they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it not as knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... and schoolmen were labouring to deduce a science of meteorology from our sacred books, there oozed up in European society a mass of traditions and observances which had been lurking since the days of paganism; and, although here and there appeared a churchman to oppose them, the theologians and ecclesiastics ere long began to adopt them and to clothe them with the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... yet, the chief feeling was almost that of a paganism, of an earth-smell and an earth-worship, of a giant awakening from torpor, ravenous with hunger. It was all the grand savagery, the terrible strength of Mother Earth, the Great Protector, from whose loins I had sprung, but who is unspeakably awesome until you see her face in the rising ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... there is scarce a sound part to be found, or any agreement amongst them. Presbyter John, in Africa, lord of those Abyssinians, or Ethiopians, is by his profession a Christian, but so different from us, with such new absurdities and ceremonies, such liberty, such a mixture of idolatry and paganism, [6359]that they keep little more than a bare title of Christianity. They suffer polygamy, circumcision, stupend fastings, divorce as they will themselves, &c., and as the papists call on the Virgin ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... India under European sway, where Buddhism or Paganism and Protestantism exist together, the author does not hesitate to say that the latter is gradually overcoming the former, "whose light is becoming more and more dim." This is a very remarkable concession, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... ecclesiastical discipline, that weakening of censure, that abandonment of religion of which we have spoken already; hence everywhere that substitution of raging barbarism for Christian meekness—yea, a sort of paganism brought in under the name of Christianity. For—a thing unheard of from the very beginning of the Christian faith—bishops were transferred and multiplied, without order or reason, at the will of the metropolitan, ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... just delivered from paganism. Like lambs in the midst of wolves, they stood amongst bitter enemies, their teacher had left them alone, and their raw convictions needed to be consolidated and matured in the face of much opposition. No wonder then that over and over again, in both letters, we have references to the persecutions ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was never attacked. Every locality had its war-chants, its songs of defiance. Today only a few fragments survive. Wars were waged mostly on account of the ambitions of princes, as to-day in Europe and Asia. But the effort of Christianity to oust paganism in Tahiti brought about many sanguinary conflicts, and plainly God was with the missionaries, who caused the battles. In 1815 the Battle of Feipi gave Tahiti to Pomare the Great, and to the Protestant ministers, who were his backers. Over three hundred were killed. A woman, the queen of the island ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follows the defence of poetry, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... of many ancient authors who have made way for the legends of saints, or other ecclesiastical rubbish."[80] But we may reasonably question this opinion, when we consider the value of books in the middle ages, and with what esteem the monks regarded, in spite of all their paganism, those "heathen dogs" of the ancient world. A doubt has often forced itself upon my mind when turning over the "crackling leaves" of many ancient MSS., whether the peculiarity mentioned by Montfaucon, and described as parchment from which ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... of the literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to the throne and long stood there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life——" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is well mirrored in his novels—for he was a man who felt at home in mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... absorbed this atmosphere of the old religious rites, and the paganism of the cattle and nature, and spoke little. When he was six he was sent to the Jewish school. This was in session from eight in the morning until five in the evening. He and the other children used to watch the sun ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... western Europe indeed, from the borders of Slavonia to the Atlantic, with the exception of Spain, was his. He was the bulwark of civilization against the barbarism of the north and east, the right hand of the church in its conflict with paganism, the greatest and noblest warrior the world had seen since the days of the great Caesar, and it seemed fitting that he should be given the honor which was his due, and that in him and his kingdom the great empire of Rome ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... very strange and even startling to Oowikapun. He had lived all his life in a land dark with superstition and paganism. The Gospel had as yet never been proclaimed there. The name of Jesus had never been heard in that wild north-land, and so as none of the blessedness of religion had entered into the hearts of the people, so none of its sweet, losing, elevating influences ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... free educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned educationists. A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless creature could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerning all our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and its replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion has not been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and less beautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puritans destroyed images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the Roman empire, which must come, will be a less tumultuous one, in proportion as we can obtain even so much as a hearing from those who sit at the head of society in rank and intelligence. Let me make a sincere convert of a Roman emperor, and in a few years the temples of Paganism would lie even with the ground. Believe me, Christianity has penetrated deeper and farther, than you in the seats of power dream of. While you are satisfied with things as they are, and are content to live on and enjoy the leisure and honors the gods crown you with, the classes below ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... their remains put into sacks and cast into the sea in thirty fathoms deep: Yet the priests got them up again, and kept their remains secretly as relics. There are many others in prison, both here and in other places, who look hourly to be ordered for execution, as very few of them revert to paganism. Last year, about Christmas, the emperor deposed one of the greatest princes in all Japan, called Frushma-tay, lord of sixty or seventy mangocas, and banished him to a corner in the north of Japan, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... popular phrases. I did really have, in that short and shrieking period, a rapid succession of a number of fundamental points of view. I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as many seconds. My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere men is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded a state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has ever been found. The ancients called it Stoicism, and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean (if they mean anything) ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... unending progress; and that the mission of the Bible is not yet complete. The Bible is not responsible for the partial miscarriage of Christianity, due to the compromises made by its organizers, who, in their too great zeal to conquer and convert Paganism, were themselves converted by it. But everything in Christianity which comes in a direct line from Judaism lives, and will live; and it is Judaism which through Christianity has cast into the old polytheistic world, to ferment there ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... recall the well-known origin of Christianity, and show its advance to the attainment of imperial power, the transformation it underwent by its incorporation with paganism, the existing religion of the Roman Empire. A clear conception of its incompatibility with science caused it to suppress forcibly the Schools of Alexandria. It was constrained to this by the political necessities ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin, have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405] One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous incumbent, so the three have combined. The great historical destiny of the small, barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of Christians in Him. The wonderful associations of the place lent to such occasions a special interest and solemnity. Surrounded by the ruins of man's glory, we felt deeply how unchanging was the word of God. In a city of gorgeous ceremonials that had changed Christianity into a kind of baptized paganism, we felt it indescribably refreshing to partake, in the beautiful simplicity of our own worship, of the symbols of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord. We seemed to be compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses, apostles, martyrs, and saints, who in the early ages of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony, declined with Paganism; but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends. At present it is only practiced as a mark of obedience from the subject to the sovereign, and by lovers, who are solicitous to preserve this ancient usage ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... doorway, fat, distorted bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation to attack the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... when occult formulas and ceremonies, which have no connection with virtue, are made the chief thing. The points in which the creeds agree are more important than those by which they are differentiated. Natural religion has found its most perfect expression in Christianity, although paganism and Judaism had also grasped portions of the truth. Salvation is not denied to the heathen, for moral purity is sufficient to make one a partaker of the grace of God. The religion of the Jews elevated monotheism, which, it is true, made its appearance among the heathen in isolated ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Dei, Deo Gracias, Nos cum prole pia, Benedicat Virgo Maria, Per omnia secula seculorum, Kyrie eleyson, Christe eleyson, came under the category of enchantments (ensalmos) known by the terms bolong and mantala of the primitive mangkukulam, manghihikup, mananangisama, etc. etc., of Philippine paganism. All of these Latin phrases acquired so great a prestige that they were looked upon as a form of irresistible invocation for conquering the divine will, and a certain ridiculous sect came to be known as the Colorum, which ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... bravely. It is indeed a Piece of Piety to fly from wicked Parents to Christ: But to fly from pious Parents to a Monkery, that is (as it too often proves) to fly from ought to stark naught. What Pity is that I pray? Although in old Time, he that was converted from Paganism to Christianity, paid yet as great a Reverence to his idolatrous Parents, as it was possible to do without ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Constantinople no Emperor had lived in Rome. She had ceased to be mistress even of the West, and rapidly fell to the rank of a provincial city.) He died during a campaign on the Danube. His son GRATIAN (375-383) succeeded him. He discouraged Paganism, and under him Christianity made rapid strides. His uncle Valens was slain in a battle against the Goths; but so completely were the Eastern and Western Empires now separated, that Gratian did not ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... environment failed to subdue him. He preserved his spiritual 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 ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... to devotion, from paganism to Christianity, has something startling and unnatural about it. At fifty-nine minutes past eleven the senses are all aglow; midnight sounds, and in a minute they are supposed to be brought low, and the heart to be full of humble repentance; it is ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... which Hilda, for three years past, had been wandering without a protector or a guide. She had trodden lightly over the crumble of old crimes; she had taken her way amid the grime and corruption which Paganism had left there, and a perverted Christianity had made more noisome; walking saint-like through it all, with white, innocent feet; until, in some dark pitfall that lay right across her path, she had vanished out of sight. It was terrible to imagine what hideous outrage ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greatest obstacles were found, not in the hopeless paganism of the degraded tribes of the Dark Continent, but in the apathy, if not antipathy, of the representatives of Christian governments. The British governor would have penned him up within the bounds of Cape Colony, lest he should ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... doubt, out of some of the fragments that would suffice to build a city; and I think there is another convent among the baths. The Catholics have taken a peculiar pleasure in planting themselves in the very citadels of paganism, whether temples or palaces. There has been a good deal of enjoyment in the destruction of old Rome. I often think so when I see the elaborate pains that have been taken to smash and demolish some beautiful column, for no purpose whatever, except the mere ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cycle of ecclesiastical themes, he could not work out all the possibilities of his genius. Nevertheless, he infused into the old themes an altogether new spirit, the spirit of his own individuality. It is a spirit which we call distinctly modern, yet it is as old as paganism. ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... however, that in the earlier centuries the churches regarded themselves as bound to protect all men from the dangers of heresy. For centuries in the early history of Christianity the defenders of the faith had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle with paganism, the followers of which held all that was known of Nature. Quite naturally the priestly class feared that the revival of scientific inquiry would bring with it the evils from which the world had suffered in pagan ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... of woman. Christian civilization has exalted her almost infinitely above the position to which either paganism or Mohammedanism assigned her. This elevation is the natural outgrowth of the example and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike other ancient great instructors, he did not repel women from discipleship, but cordially welcomed her presence wherever he taught. ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable blending of Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle's "blackguards," achieves the same synthesis. It is this spiritual achievement—at once a religious and an aesthetic triumph—that makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really great man. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... is, generally, Paganism, directed principally by the priests of magi, men of strict austere life, forbidding the use of either ornament or gold; making the ground their bed, and herbs their food. Their whole time is spent in offering to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... The Paganism of our own Celtic art, when it appears, is an interpolation between our first and second Christian conversions, and was brought to us in the incursions of the Vikings ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Germany alone, by the bishops of the Church, who refuse to admit that, after two thousand years of Christian teaching, a so-called Christian nation should fall so low as to revive, for her own benefit, the worst custom of Paganism. ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... more than seventy years after, religion was on the decline, and the idolatry of the Druids prevailed; they were an order of Heathen priests, who performed their rites in groves of oak trees; this was a species of Paganism of great antiquity, being that kind of idolatry to which the Jews were often revolting, of which mention is made in the lives of Ahab, Manasseh, &c. in the books of the kings. These Druids likewise possessed a considerable share ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... that his hands had an healing virtue against all distempers. One of his most famous cures, was that of Antonio Fernandez, a youth not above fifteen years of age, who was sick to death. His mother, a Christian by profession, but not without some remainders of paganism in her heart, seeing that all natural remedies were of no effect, had recourse to certain enchantments frequently practised amongst the heathens, and sent for an old sorceress, who was called Nai. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... he revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,— of rites which had become unmeaning,—he substituted an admiration for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... wolf; and it is known that the Lupercalia held out to a very late period[647] after every other observance of the ancient superstition had totally expired. This may account for the preservation of the ancient image longer than the other early symbols of Paganism. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... tolerates the unspeakable wickedness of the world,—if He calmly looks down upon the frightful holocaust of iniquity that steams up before His eyes from the cities and towns and hamlets of the world,—if He tolerates the abomination of paganism, and the still worse, because conscious, wickedness of the Christian world, why should we be fretful and impatient? And if Christ was so gentle and so tender towards these foul, ill-smelling, leprous, and ungrateful Jews, why should we not be tolerant of the venial falls of the holy people,—the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... of all religious bibles, and particularly pondered on the Christian story of the creation, prophecies, crucifixion and revelation. Paganism was the advanced guard ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Day, one of the four high festivals in the Roman Catholic Church, and a day on which all Christians who hold to ancient forms commemorate the noble doings of the holy dead. But the All-hallow's frolics you will see this evening have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. They are relics of old paganism, of the days when 'millions of spiritual creatures' were supposed to be allowed that night 'to walk the earth'—ghosts, fairy folk, witches, gnomes, and brownies, all creatures of the fancy whose home ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Spain, which is a jealous fanaticism, having reference to their catholicism, and always glancing on heresy. The popular superstition of Italy is the offspring of the climate, the old associations, the manners, and the very names of the places. It is pure paganism, undisturbed by any anxiety about orthodoxy, or animosity against heretics. Hence, it is much more good-natured and pleasing to a traveller's feelings, and certainly not a whit less like the true religion of our dear Lord than the ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... these sayings of Mannhardt; or, if he has not, no author is obliged to mention everybody who disagrees with him. Mannhardt's method was mainly that of folklore, not of philology. He examined peasant customs and rites as 'survivals' of the oldest paganism. Mr. Frazer applies Mannhardt's rich lore to the explanation of Greek and other rites in The Golden Bough, that entrancing book. Such was Mannhardt's position (as I shall prove at large) when he was writing his most famous works. But he 'returned at last to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... the cross, and prayed God would deliver them from this imminent danger. In ancient days Helgoland was ten times larger than it its now, and on this old rocky island, which had been the last aslyum of the gods of northern paganism, lived a warlike people, who knew no other laws than those, of their own will, no other toil than piracy, and who submitted to no other master than the chieftain chosen from among their most colossal fellows. The pirates of Helgoland were desperate men, who had selected for themselves ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... enlist the loyal support of the Christians, treated them with increasing favour, and finally was baptized upon his death-bed (337). Under his successors, except during the brief reign of Julian (361-363), when the effort was made to reinstate paganism in its former place of supremacy, the Church received growing support, until, under Theodosius the Great (379-395), orthodox Christianity, which stood upon the platform adopted at Nicaea in 325, was finally established as the sole official religion of the state, and heathen worship ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... movement showed a tendency to drift back into a refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of Humanists of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 262.) It will not be thought that we quote this writer in order to recommend his temper or his judgment, but to show the comparative state of Christianity and of Heathenism at this period. Fifty years afterwards, Jerome represents the decline of Paganism, in language which conveys the same idea of its approaching extinction: "Solitudinem patitur et in urbe gentilitas. Dii quondam nationum, cum bubonibus et noctuis, in solis culminibus remanserunt." (Jer. ad Lect. ep. 5, 7.) Jerome here indulges a triumph, natural and ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... itself which alienates us therefrom. Hitherto the positive sciences have studied the "external world" in its analytical details, and if they could have made a "sympathetic," religion that religion might be the pagan creed. Indeed, so far science has brought a very perceptive breath of paganism among us. But when it shall have succeeded in penetrating the inner man, and there making manifest the laws of life and the realities of existence, a great Christian light will surely shine upon men; and maybe children, like ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... white, pure of admixture: but of all creeds and religions now or ever before known, was not that of thoughtless thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox? We will exchange it even with Paganism, with Fetishism; and, on the whole, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... been as old as Paganism, wherein, whilst all voluntary acts are attributed to the individual, all involuntary ones are ascribed to the Deity. Even sneezing was so considered: hence the phrase common in the lower circles in England, "Bless us," and in a higher grade in Germany, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... casual reference, in Anrich's work on the Mysteries, to the Naassene Document, caused me to apply to Mr G. R. S. Mead, of whose knowledge of the mysterious border-land between Christianity and Paganism, and willingness to place that knowledge at the disposal of others, I had, for some years past, had pleasant experience. Mr Mead referred me to his own translation and analysis of the text in question, and there, to my satisfaction, I found, not only the final link that completed the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... remarkable narratives in history than that of the facility and enthusiasm with which the Anglo-Saxons, a people conservative then as now to the degree of extreme obstinacy, accepted Christianity and the new learning which followed in the train of the new religion. After a few lapses into paganism in some localities, we find these people, who lately had swept Christian Britain with fire and sword, themselves became most zealous followers of Christ. Under the influence of the Roman missionaries who, under St. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... thought if he could but see him and talk to him, he would redeem him from his apostacy; but, alas! his duty was in Hurdwar, he was bound there and could not move. One day (it was during the fair) he had wandered at a distance from the river, that he might not witness the delusions of paganism, and his mind was intensely absorbed in prayer. Anon, unusual sounds broke on his ears; sounds well known, sounds reminding him of his country, of his beautiful Italy. They came from a little bower ten steps before him; and as past scenes rushed to his memory, his heart beat ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... sanguinary metaphor is drawn really from the Pagan rites of Mithra, where the neophyte was actually placed under a bull at the ceremony of the TAUROBOLIUM, and was drenched, through a grating, with the blood of the slaughtered animal. Such reminiscences of the more brutal side of Paganism are not helpful to the thoughtful and sensitive modern mind. But what is always fresh and always useful and always beautiful, is the memory of the sweet Spirit who wandered on the hillsides of Galilee; who gathered the children around him; who met his friends in innocent good-fellowship; who ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Famianus Strada, and his less known contemporary, but most able Chamberlain of Urban VIII., Augustino Mascardi,—as if all these pious Christians found it quite impossible to pardon a heathen, blinded by the prejudices of paganism, for believing what he did of the Hebrews; and for recording which belief he ought to receive immediate forgiveness, seeing that Justin, Plutarch, Strabo and Democritus said as bad, if not worse things of that ancient people and ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... powers, exercised them for their own aggrandizement. This has been known through the ages as Black Magic, and is laughed at to-day by so-called "Scientists" as "nothing but the fears, credulity, and superstitions of the ignorant multitude." This was the core of Egyptian Paganism, and is the very genius of Clericalism to-day—the domination of the Individual Will, through superstition ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... before. Among the other misfortunes of this ominous marriage, Roland's wife had possessed all the superstitions of a Roman Catholic Spaniard; and with these the boy had unconsciously intermingled doctrines far more dreary, imbibed from the dark paganism of the Gitanos. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ascent of calamities; it is the last of curses; and yet, by the noblest of Romans, it was treated as the first of blessings. In that difference, most readers will see little more than the difference between Christianity and Paganism. But there I hesitate. The Christian church may be right in its estimate of sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life—as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... he call? For Pagan? For Christian? For neither, and for both. Paganism speaks for the men in Man, Christianity for the Man in men. The fruit that was eaten in Paradise, sown in the soul of man, bore in Hellas its first and fairest harvest. There rose upon the world of mind the triple sun of the Ideal. Aphrodite, born of the foam, flowered on the azure main, Tritons ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... like a tonic and becomes her like a decoration. It has been discovered that she can compete with men in the domain of lighter labor, in several of the professions, and in not a few of the useful arts. The impression of her as a pawn, a property or a plaything, came down from paganism to Christianity and was too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as significance. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the essential principle of life. Day by day, so he thought, he was getting nearer to, and in closer union with the great power itself which caused all life to be, the spirit of nature, of force, or the spirit of God. For himself, he confessed to what others would call paganism; it was sufficient for him that there existed a principle of life. He did not worship it, he did not pray to it, he did not praise it. Some of it existed in all human beings, just as it existed in trees and animals; to realize and make living ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Missionary of this place. 'I am old, my children,' said the aged Missionary, 'and I wish to die among my own people—I must leave you.' He left; and in the course of time the Arbre-Croche Indians relapsed into Paganism. They continued in this state until a young Christian Ottawa, named Aw-taw-weesh, who had just returned from among the Catholic Algonquins in Canada, appeared among them and taught religion. He became also, in some respects, what Cadmus was of ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... man must I be useless?" she continued. "Is a woman's life of so little influence in the world that she can spend it in make-believe living as little girls play at being grown up? Have I not as great a right to my paganism as you call it, as you have ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Armenian did this squadron guide, That in his youth from Christ's true faith and light To the blind lore of Paganism did slide, That Clement late, now Emireno, hight; Yet to his king he faithful was, and tried True in all causes, his in wrong and right: A cunning leader and a soldier bold, For strength and courage, young; ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... transcendent god or semi-divine prophet is but the counterpart and analogue of the transcendent governing class. So soon as we are rid of the desire of one section of society to enslave another, the dogmas of an effete creed will lose their interest. As the religion of slave industry was Paganism; as the religion of serfage was Catholic Christianity, or Sacerdotalism; as the religion of Capitalism is Protestant Christianity or Biblical dogma, so the religion of collective and co-operative industry ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... was orthodox. Suspected during his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic. Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... determination. We remember La Vendee, we remember our Puritans, and we have had recent experience in the Soudan. We know what Christianity has done again and again; what Judaism, what Mahommedanism, what many kinds of paganism, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... the sail was set, and, filled by the breeze, it carried us away from the dreary spot where we had sorrowfully left all that was good and faithful. It was a happy end—most merciful, as he had been taken from a land of iniquity in all the purity of a child converted from Paganism to Christianity. He had lived and died in our service a good Christian. Our voyage was nearly over, and we looked forward to home and friends, but we had still fatigues before us: poor Saat had reached his home and rest. Two faithful followers we had buried,—Johann Schmidt ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... lording it with imperial sway over, not only the surrounding villages, but extending its paternal wings into Middlesex and even as far as London. The abbey was of the Benedictine order, and founded, almost as soon as the Saxons were converted from Paganism; but it was finished and chiefly endowed by Frithwald, Earl of Surrey. The endowment prospered rarely; the establishment increased in the reputation of wealth and sanctity; that it was "thickly populated" is certain, for when the abbey was sacked ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... now the priests thought they had found the cause. On one of the rocks of Lake Ste. Claire was a stone, to which the Indians offered sacrifices for safe passage on the lakes. To the priests the rude drawing of a face seemed graven images of paganism,—signs of Satan, who had baffled their hunting and caused loss {132} of their packs. "I consecrated one of my axes to break this god of stone, and, having yoked our canoes abreast, we carried the largest pieces to the middle of the river and cast them in. God ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... like the picture, dear? Have you aught of doubt or fear? Have you any criticism Of my neo-Paganism? If not, dearie, let us fly To that passion-ripening sky, Where our souls may have their fling, And our ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... government. Thomas Jefferson and the fathers of the Revolution were mistaken in holding slavery wrong. It is a rightful and natural relation, as between an inferior and superior race. The black race is far better off here in America, in slavery, than they would be in Africa, in freedom and in paganism; and if there is something of hardship in their lot, it is only because there is hardship in the lot ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... return to National paganism, both political and social, is the mockery that Bismarck decided with all his almighty strength, nay his supreme rage, to set aside; and for him Prussian Militarism, which he so jealously set his heart on, against the rising tides of French ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... of Koyuwo, King of India, a religions high priest from Siaka (the author of that Eastern paganism about a thousand years before the Christian era), coming to China, to teach the way of happiness, lived a most austere life, passing his days in continual mortification, and retiring by night to solitudes, in which he fed only upon the leaves of ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... shall have penetrated the gloom of Africa, and until the heathen shall gather to the brightness of its shining. May it stand through the ages as a Christian Republic, as a faithful light-house along the dark and trackless sea of African paganism! ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Augustine's genius was primarily religious, and the "Confessions," in which he records the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with God, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent himself, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to God, whether ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... converted, was not yet rebuilt in the forces of his manhood." On the side of his moral nature, where he is weakest, the black man of the South has still to be girded and energized. In him are still the tendencies of his hereditary paganism, the vices of his slavehood. These will sink him unless his whole nature is regenerated by the ministration of a pure ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... and never return; and I will declare it with shame and confusion that I do not remember any one who may be said to have embraced Christianity from conviction and from quite disinterested motives. Among these newcomers many apostatized and relapsed into paganism, finding that the Christian religion did not afford them the temporal advantages they had looked for in embracing it; and I am very much ashamed that the resolution I have taken to tell the whole truth on this subject forces me to make the humiliating avowal ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... turning-point in their history in another and more serious respect. In Sogdiana and Khorasan, they had become converts to the Mahometan faith. You will not suppose I am going to praise a religious imposture, but no Catholic need deny that it is, considered in itself, a great improvement upon Paganism. Paganism has no rule of right and wrong, no supreme and immutable judge, no intelligible revelation, no fixed dogma whatever; on the other hand, the being of one God, the fact of His revelation, His faithfulness to His ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than in tilling his own. The religion of the greater part of the Highlands was a rude mixture of Popery and Paganism. The symbol of redemption was associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale to one Daemon, and set out drink offerings of milk for another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bulls' hides, and awaited, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... see that the primary religion, which is popularly known as Paganism, was founded in the worship of personified nature; that, according special homage to the imaginary genii of the stars, and inculcating supreme adoration to the divinity supposed to reside in the sun, it was anciently known by the general ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... and published, in the first volume of the Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, an ancient poem attributed to St. Columba, and which, at all events, was certainly composed at a period when some remains of Paganism existed in Ireland. In this production the poet makes St. Columba say, "My order is at Cennanus (Kells)," etc.; and in his note to this allusion Dr. O'Donovan states that at Kells "St. Columbkille erected a ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Rome. But this is not enough; for Rome has presented two great phases to the world, and the inquirer wants to know which one is intended by this symbol. The answer then is, Pagan Rome; but just as soon as we add "Pagan," we introduce a religious element; for paganism is one of the mightiest systems of false religion ever devised by the arch-enemy of truth. It was, then, the religious element in the empire that determined what symbol should be used to represent it; and the dragon represented Rome while under ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... pronouncing that this age is greater than all preceding ages in its possibilities. In His view, it may be that greater deeds may be attempted and accomplished by the Church of to-day than ever in that past age, when she grappled with and vanquished the whole force of Paganism. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... haunt of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... heritage of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of Africa, ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... few individuals the true principles of religious liberty. Even in Protestant lands, the masses of the people have not yet fully learned that lesson. All over Catholic Europe, and all through the realms of paganism, intolerance still sways her cruel and bloody sceptre. These miserable religious wars in France, the birth of ignorance, fanaticism, and depravity, for seventy years polluted the state with gory scaffolds and blazing stakes. Three thousand ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... regretted by his mother, who could see nothing but eternal damnation in store for her son because he never went to church and professed no orthodox creed. She knew him to be a good lad, but to her simple mind a conduct of life based merely on a system of moral philosophy was the worst kind of paganism. There could, she argued, be no religion, and assuredly no salvation, outside the dogmatic teachings of the Church. But otherwise Jefferson was a model son and, with the exception of this bad habit of thinking for himself on religious matters, really gave her no anxiety. When Jefferson left college, ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... used the names Sunday or Sabbath. They objected is the first as savoring of Paganism and to the second as pertaining to Judaism; and yet they enforced the observance of the Christian's day of rest ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... year 323, the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian. The Empire threw off its old Greek paganism and ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various |
