"Simony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Anthony. I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning; I don't think so much learning becomes a young woman: for instance, I would never let her meddle with Greek, or Hebrew, or algebra, or simony, or fluxions, or paradoxes, or such inflammatory branches of learning; neither would it be necessary for her to handle any of your mathematical, astronomical, diabolical instruments. But, Sir Anthony, I would send her at nine years old to a boarding-school, in order ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... had often said to me: "I am not long for this world," and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... of centralization developed, maxims, that in the olden times would have been held to be shocking, were boldly avowed—the whole Church is the property of the pope to do with as he will; what is simony in others is not simony in him; he is above all law, and can be called to account by none; whoever disobeys him must be put to death; every baptized man is his subject, and must for life remain so, whether he will or not. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... oath; took a hand at cards; or ridiculed the mysteries, the experiences, the circumspect professor of the Christian faith, is almost certain to have the presentation: perhaps he covenanted for it as part of his wages. For what simony, sacrilege, and deceitful perjury, with respect to ordination vows, patronage opens a door, he that runs may read. Shocked with the view, let ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... profession, I will tell him in brief, I do not otherwise by them, than they do by us. If it be for their advantage, I know many of their sect which have taken orders, in hope of a benefice, 'tis a common transition, and why may not a melancholy divine, that can get nothing but by simony, profess physic? Drusianus an Italian (Crusianus, but corruptly, Trithemius calls him) [164]"because he was not fortunate in his practice, forsook his profession, and writ afterwards in divinity." Marcilius Ficinus was semel et simul; a priest and a physician at once, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... [Footnote 127: Simony was not unknown in those times; and the clergy some times bought what they intended to sell. It appears that the bishopric of Carthage was purchased by a wealthy matron, named Lucilla, for her servant Majorinus. The price was 400 Folles. (Monument. Antiq. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Sherburn-in-Elmet. Sheriffs; for Scotland. Shire, system in Wales; courts; knights of the. Shrewsbury; Castle of; treaty of; parliament at. Shrewsbury, Ralph of, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Shropshire. Sicilian Vespers, the. Sicily. Silegrave's Henry of, Chronicle. Simony. Siward, Richard. Skeat's editions of Chaucer and Langland. Skelton Castle. Skenfrith, Castle of. Skicsea Castle. Sluys. Smith's, S. Armitage, John of Gaunt. Smithfield. Snowdon. Soissonais, the. Soisy. Sellers, Rostand de, seneschal of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... studying the affair, powerfully attracted by the visionary's pure, upright nature, but indignant with all that had subsequently sprouted up—the barbarous fetishism, the painful superstitions, and the triumphant simony. In the access of unbelief which had come upon him, this story of Lourdes was certainly of a nature to complete the collapse of his faith. However, it had also excited his curiosity, and he would have ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Spenser described the Irish Protestant clergy of the period as "bad, licentious, and most disordered." "Whatever disorders," he writes, "you see in the Church of England, you may find in Ireland, and many more, namely, gross simony, greedy covetousness, incontinence, careless sloth, and generally all disordered life in the common clergyman. And, besides all these, they have their particular enormities; for all Irish ministers that now enjoy church livings are in a manner mere laymen, saving that they have taken holy orders, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... freely among the other members of the Sacred College, with the result that he was elected on the 11th of August, and proclaimed Pope under the title of Alexander VI. The secret Archives of the Vatican[28] give full particulars of this election, which was obtained by the most flagrant simony, and proved a prelude to the days of confusion and misery which Fra Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican of Florence, daily prophesied were in store for the Church. Ascanio Sforza was the first to reap the reward ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... archdeacon,—who but he? Who boldly did the work of his high station In punishing improper conversation, And all the slidings thereunto belonging; Witchcraft, and scandal also, and the wronging Of holy Church, by blinking of her dues In sacraments and contracts, wills and pews; Usury furthermore, and simony; But people of ill lives most loathed he: Lord! how he made them sing if they were caught. And tithe-defaulters, ye may guess, were taught Never to venture on the like again; To the last farthing would he rack and strain. For stinted ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... are given for our warning, as well as specimen graces for our emulation. One such sin, so subtle, so dangerous, and so constantly recurring in Christian history, having taken the name of its first author and being called "simony," has been handed down from generation to generation. "Because thou hast thought that the gift of God can be purchased with money" is the solemn indictment against one who had purposed to buy the power of the Holy Ghost. Many desire the gifts of the Spirit who little care for the Spirit himself. ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... John XXII. had fixed his residence entirely in that city since October, 1316, and had appropriated to himself the nomination to all the vacant benefices. The pretence for this appropriation was to prevent simony—in others, not in his Holiness—as the sale of benefices was carried by him to an enormous height. At every promotion to a bishopric, he removed other bishops; and, by the meanest impositions, soon amassed prodigious wealth. Scandalous ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... as the representatives by an hereditary descent, considered all the more real because it was spiritual and not carnal, of the Roman Church; to prevent his being entangled, whether by marriage or otherwise, in the business of this life; out of which would flow nepotism, Simony, and Erastian submission to those sovereigns who ought to be the servants, not the lords of the Church. For this end no means were too costly. St. Dunstan, in order to expel the married secular priests, and replace them by Benedictine monks of the Italian order ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... that means these violent changes the air rather of reformation than oppression. He began with Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury. A synod was called, in which, for the first time in England, the Pope's legate a latere is said to have presided. In this council, Stigand, for simony and for other crimes, of which it is easy to convict those who are out of favor, was solemnly degraded from his dignity. The king filled his place with Lanfranc, an Italian. By his whole conduct he appeared resolved to reduce his subjects of all orders to the most ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... commentator concerning Pope Nicholas III. is deprived of its most telling points: "Nam fuit primus in cujus curia palam committeretur Simonia per suos attinentes. Quapropter multum ditavit eos possessionibus, pecuniis et castellis, super onmes Romanos": "For he was the first at whose court Simony was openly committed in favor of his adherents. Whereby he greatly enriched them with possessions, money, and strongholds, above all the Romans." "Sed quod Clerici capiunt raro dimittunt": "What the clergy have once ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... against his will, he led a life of anguish, mourning for the lost peace of his cloister; but he fought none the less with incredible energy against the inroads of the Barbarians, the heresies of Africa, the intrigues of Byzantium, and the Simony of his own priests. ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... was unborn, No simony men did use; Christians did usury scorn, Devised among the Jews. The lawyers to be fee'd At that time hardly knew; For man with man agreed, When ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... papacy and also to the royal power is indicated by the fact that the pallium is given in response to the request of the king. The condition of the church under Childebert is also shown; see 98 for canons bearing on simony and irregularities in connection ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Papa, to whose doings already attaches considerable importance. One of the last acts of the Senate which had any real meaning was to make a decree with regard to the election of this Bishop, forbidding his advance by the way of Simony. Theodoric, an Arian, interferes only with the Church of Rome in so far as public peace demands it. In one of his letters occurs a most remarkable dictum on the subject of toleration. "Religionem imperare non possumus, quia nemo cogitur ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... the race on which it inflicts them. Is your Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was there ever a simony like this,—that does not sell, but withholds, the gift of God for ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... apprehending the great trouble and charge that he was like to draw upon himself, his relations and friends, before it could be finished, sent for him from London to Chelsea,—where she then dwelt,—and at his coming, said, "George, I sent for you, to persuade you to commit Simony, by giving your patron as good a gift as he has given to you; namely, that you give him back his prebend; for, George, it is not for your weak body, and empty purse, to undertake to build Churches." Of ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... his place." Yes, indeed, let that be so, every man in his place, and every man fit for it. See that he holds that place from Heaven's Providence; and not from his family's Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit themselves of simony, we laymen will look after the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of their authority for them. Publish for us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one subject of daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion; a gazette ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... tracts he said, speaking of the pope and his collectors: "They draw out of our land poor men's livelihood, and many thousand marks, by the year, of the king's money, for sacraments and spiritual things, that is cursed heresy of simony, and maketh all Christendom assent and maintain this heresy. And certes though our realm had a huge hill of gold, and never other man took thereof but only this proud worldly priest's collector, by process of time this hill must be spended; for he taketh ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... terms for the most pious divine. Yet to such a degree had his manners been corrupted by evil communications, and his understanding obscured by inordinate zeal for a single object, that he did not scruple to become a broker in simony of a peculiarly discreditable kind, and to use a bishopric as a bait to tempt a divine to perjury. Hough replied with civil contempt that he wanted nothing from the crown but common justice. "We stand," he ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... emphasis. "Ah, that explains the whole affair. To be sure, now I remember, the weather has been too thick for a man to see the head of his own horse. The Doones (if still there be any Doones) could never have come abroad; that is as sure as simony. Master Huckaback, for your good sake, I am heartily glad that this charge has miscarried. I thoroughly understand it now. The fog explains the whole ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... of St. Paul, walks were laid out for merchants, as in the Royal Exchange. Thus, "the south alley for usurye, and poperye; the north for simony and the horse fair; in the middest for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawlings, murthers, conspiracies; and the font for ordinary paiements of money, are so well knowne to all menne as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... ninth canon in the council of Poictiers, (centy. xi.) ordained "That the sub-deacons, deacons, and priests, shall have no concubine, or any other suspicious women in their houses; and that all those who shall wittingly hear the mass of a priest that keeps a concubine, or is guilty of simony, shall ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... A church endowed with a revenue for the performance of Divine Service; the holder of which is called a Rector, or Vicar, or Incumbent, or Perpetual Curate (see under each head). Heresy, Simony, and other grave offences, disqualify a man from holding ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... the chapter to lease at a handsome price to seignorial families, and even to rich burghers, the right to be present at the services, themselves and their servants exclusively, in the various lateral chapels of the long side-aisles of the cathedral. This simony is in practice to the present day. A woman had her chapel as she now has her opera-box. The families who hired these privileged places were required to decorate the altar of the chapel thus conceded to them, and each made it their pride to adorn their own sumptuously,—a vanity which the ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... all sorts of shameless conduct; and there are many other accounts of the same general tenor. Pope Gregory VII. tried again to do something for the cause of public morality, in 1074, when he issued edicts against both concubinage and simony—or the then prevalent custom of buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment; but the edict was too harsh and unreasonable with regard to the first, inasmuch as it provided that no priest should marry in the future, and that those who already possessed wives or concubines were to give them ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences), usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Consequently an expensive lot. The fact is, Mr. Bolton, that the price is raised so high on United States Senator now, that it affects the whole market; you can't get any public improvement through on reasonable terms. Simony is what I call it, Simony," repeated Mr. Bigler, as if he ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... records. In the confusion Sigebert is murdered, and of his successor we know nothing. He may have reigned at Kingsbury or at Tilbury, where—not in London—Cedd preached: at Colchester or at St. Albans. Then there comes a story of "simony," in which the influence of Worcester is again apparent. Then, at last, we have some documentary evidence. The kings, or kinglets, of Essex were usually two in number. At this time they were Sebbi and his colleague, Sighere, and ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... many Romanists have rejected him as a heretic, is viewed by Dr. Madden as a monk of Florence at the close of the fifteenth century, who was of opinion that the mortal enemy of Christ's gospel in all ages of the world had been mammon; that simony was the sin against the Holy Ghost; that the interests of religion were naturally allied with those of liberty; that the Arts were the handmaids of both, of a Divine origin, and were given to earth for purposes that tended to spiritualise humanity; and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... control, the interference of lay patrons in the appointments to benefices, the absence of seminaries, and the failure of the universities to give a proper ecclesiastical training, produced their natural effect on a large body of the clergy. Grave charges of ignorance, indifference, concubinage, and simony were not wholly groundless, as the decrees of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... oaths, and declared that they had been induced by others to swear; whereupon the judge declared him free from that calumny. Further, on the part of the archbishop, they accused the master Don Andres Xiron of an act of simony; but he gave the lie to that, as salt dissolves in water, by means of authentic documents and reports. They opposed him with other things of less account, but these were not proved, nor was there any witness of them, nor were the accusations completed; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... presented Giovanni with land for his monastery, and that he built of timber. Nor was he alone, for he had found there already two hermits, who agreed to join him; so under the rule of St. Benedict the Vallombrosan Order was founded.[133] Of S. Giovanni's work in Florence, of his fight with Simony and Nicolaitanism, this is no place to speak. He became the hero of that country; yet such was his humility that he never proceeded further than minor orders, and, though Abbot of Vallombrosa, was never a priest. He founded many houses, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... poet, and from the Duchess of Kingston down to the Bird of Paradise, or Kitty Fisher. Here I have met very queer characters, who came to queer ends too: poor Hackman, that afterwards was hanged for killing Miss Reay, and (on the sly) his Reverence Doctor Simony, whom my friend Sam Foote, of the 'Little Theatre,' bade to live even after forgery and the rope cut short the unlucky ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... harlots! I beg that if you were to die for it, you tell the Holy Father to put an end to such iniquities. And when the time comes to make priests or cardinals, let them not be chosen through flatteries or moneys or simony; but beg him, as far as you can, that he notice well if virtue and a good and holy fame are found in the man; and let him not prefer a gentleman to a tradesman, for virtue is the thing that makes a man gentle." ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Lydford law, martial law, drumhead law; coup d'etat [Fr.]; le droit du plus fort [Fr.]; argumentum baculinum [Lat.]. illegality, informality, unlawfulness, illegitimacy, bar sinister. trover and conversion [Law]; smuggling, poaching; simony. [person who violates the law] outlaw, bad man &c 949. v.. offend against the law; violate the law, infringe the law, break the law; set the law at defiance, ride roughshod over, drive a coach and six through a statute; ignore the law, make the law a dead letter, take the law ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... itself. There was only one sin which excited my curiosity and made me feel uneasy. I was afraid that I might have been guilty of it unawares. I mustered up courage enough, one day, to ask my confessor what was meant by the phrase: "To be guilty of simony in the collation of benefices." The good priest reassured me and told me that I could ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... in the missionary service of the Latin Church,—and, a little later, the founding of the Society of Jesus, with its immense potency for good and for evil. At the same time the court of Rome, sobered in some measure, by the perilous crisis that confronted it, from its long orgy of simony, nepotism, and sensuality, began to find time and thought for spiritual duties. The establishment of the "congregations" or administrative boards, and especially of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... very scarce in this part of England. My predecessor had served the parish fourteen years, for twelve pounds per annum. The present rector was in the annual receipt of forty-three pounds, out of which he had to pay me, but with the aid of a little simony, this was easily avoided, and as I took no fees, I can hardly call it a lucrative appointment, and certainly not ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... denieth to follow CHRIST and his Apostles in wilful poverty and other virtues; and coveteth worldly worship, and taketh it gladly, and gathereth together with pleting [? pleading] menacing or with flattering, or with simony, any worldly goods: and most if a priest busy him not chiefly in himself, and after in all other men and women, after his cunning ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... give up his canonry, which he sold to Menage's man-servant, a little bit of simony which was not even noticed in those days. It is amusing to find a man who laughed at all religion, insisting that his wife should make a formal avowal of the Romish faith. Of the character of this marriage we need say no more than that Scarron had at that time the use of no more than ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... him as legate. This bull directed the Archbishop to visit all the larger monasteries in which he had reason to suspect that evil practices prevailed, and the Archbishop threatens to visit St. Albans because he has heard of cases of simony, usury, lavish expenditure, and immorality. He says unless within sixty days things are reduced to order, not only in the monastery but also in the nunneries of Pre and Sopwell and other cells, he will visit personally or by commission ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... to us, the said apostolical commissary-general, his holiness concedes that we may be able to dispense and compound for any irregularity whatsoever, provided it shall not arise out of any wilful homicide, simony, apostasy from the faith, heresy, or bad inception of orders; and in like manner to absolve those who shall have contracted matrimony, there being impediment of secret affinity, arising from previous illicit copulation, one of the contracting parties being ignorant ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... the cathedral, but a train of whispers runs buzzing round the congregation in a moment: Who is he? Whence comes he? Do you know him?Then I, sir, tips me the verger with half-a-crown; he pockets the simony, and inducts me into the best pew in the church; I pull out my snuff-box, turn myself round, bow to the bishop, or the dean, if he be the commanding-officer; single out a beauty, rivet both my eyes to hers, set my nose a-bleeding ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... 1671 died Alexander,[608] Lord Halkerton, at his oune house, of the age of 77. He entered to his place in Session by simony, or rather committendo crimen ambitus, for he payed to my Lord Balmanno 7000 merks (a great soume at that tyme when their salaries ware small), to dimit in his favors, and by my Lord Traquaires moyen, then Threasurer whosse creature he was, he got the dimission ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... was a man Of an unbounded Stomach, ever ranking Himself with Princes; one that by Suggestion Ty'd all the kingdom. Simony was fair play. His own opinion was his law, i' th' presence He would say untruths, and be ever double Both in his words and meaning. He was never, But where he meant to ruin, pitiful. His promises were, as he then was, mighty; But his performance, as he now is, nothing. Of his ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... had indeed a difficult team to drive; especially as his coadjutors were not wholly proof against Martin's jibes. In '84 his brother of York had been mixed up in a shocking scandal; in '85 the Bishop of Lichfield was accused of simony; Bishop Aylmer was continually under suspicion of avarice, dishonesty, vanity and swearing; and the Bench as a whole was universally reprobated ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson |
