"Venial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... veleno. Velocipede velocipedo. Velocity rapideco. Velvet veluro. Venal acxetebla. Vend vendi. Venerable respektinda. Venerable (aged) maljuna. Venerate respektegi. Veneration respektego. Vengeance vengxo. Venial pardonebla. Venison cxasajxo. Venom veneno. Venomous venena. Vent ellaso. Vent-hole ellastruo. Ventilate ventoli. Ventilator ventolilo. Ventriloquist ventroparolisto. Venture riski. Venture risko. Venturous ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... long ago, how well I remember our next-door neighbour, old Lady Cork, "The Dowager-Countess of Cork and Orrery," as her door-plate proclaimed, some of whose peculiarities I may mention without offence, as they were notorious and (the physicians judged) innocent and venial. Whenever she found herself alone (and she kept profuse hospitality three or four days a week, with her vast illuminated conservatory full of artificial flowers and grapes and oranges tied on everything), when those famous routs were silent, and dance music no longer kept us awake ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... believed to go straight to hell. Thus practically the Intermediate State is cancelled for these two classes. There remains, therefore, only one class which is supposed to enter the Intermediate State, those namely, who have died in venial sin. And since it is part of the Romish doctrine to regard Paradise as the same thing as Heaven, and to hold that the souls which alone enter Purgatory, after suffering due torments, pass direct out of Purgatory into Paradise or Heaven, it follows that in the Intermediate ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... Anthony. She contemns the law which adjudged her guilty, and its duly appointed administrators are either too timid or too negligent of duty to endeavor to enforce it.... It is doubtful whether they had the right to refuse those votes. In any event their offense is venial as compared with hers. It does not look well for the District Attorney thus to proceed against the lesser offenders, while the chief offender snaps her fingers at the law, and dares its ministers to make her a martyr.... We write in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Willading," returned the Genoese, a gleam of humor lighting his eye. "This courteous reception quite outdoes us of Italy; for I doubt if there be a man south of the Alps, who would be willing to condemn either of our seas to so overwhelming a punishment, for a fault so venial, or at least so natural. I beg, however, that the lake may be pardoned; since, at the worst, it was but a secondary agent in the affair, and, I doubt not, it would have treated us as it treats all travellers, had we kept ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... creed of the Church of Rome a place in which the souls of the dead, saved from hell by the death of Christ, are chastened and purified from venial sins, a result which is, in great part, ascribed to the prayers of the faithful and the sacrifice of the Mass. The creed of the Church in this matter was first formulated by Gregory the Great, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... probably think that killing an officer of the Inquisition was a very venial offence, and not look upon him with any horror on that account; but depend on it, an avenging Nemesis followed him to his grave, or will follow him, if he still lives," remarked the priest. "But we are now close to your ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... made him only more intolerant of hers. He saw now how much better it would have been, instead of trusting for immunity to her ignorance, to have taken his courage in his hands and made a clean breast of what, after all, was only a venial offence. A counsel of perfection, no doubt, but Mark wished ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... heaping up money were accounted lawful, how indirect soever, and extortion was publicly protest. Murder was reckoned but a venial trespass, and was boasted as a piece ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... impenitence; and that they can obtain salvation by means of a few prayers, and a few alms, which shall be made after their death; not regarding that these good works can be useful only to those who died in a state of grace, although stained by some venial fault, since the Scripture informs us[399] that nothing impure will enter the kingdom ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... the Gods of heaven and hell, abstractions of virtue or vice, might unblamed be made the objects of religious worship. Witchcraft therefore, and the invocation of the spirits of the dead, might be practised with toleration; or at all events were not regarded otherwise than as venial deviations from the religion ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... not follow that they sin in everything they do; but whenever they do anything out of their unbelief, then they sin. For even as one who has the faith, can commit an actual sin, venial or even mortal, which he does not refer to the end of faith, so too, an unbeliever can do a good deed in a matter which he does not refer to the end of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... one of the governed. He was not swift to adopt new ideas, but he was thoroughly honest in his opposition to them. His somewhat exaggerated estimate of his own importance in the world of letters and of politics was one of those venial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Mahommed Ali Pasha's son his life: Ishmail Pasha was burned to death by Malik Nimr, chief of Shendy (Pilgrimage, i., 203). Moreover, the actual wound is less considered in Moslem law than the instrument which caused it: so sticks and stones are venial weapons, whilst sword and dagger, gun and pistol are felonious. See ibid. (i., 336) for a note upon the weapons with which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and console him. Oh! who could blame her if in so doing she departed from the strict and literal meaning of that vow which had bound her to consider her relations as dead to her? But the fault—if fault it were—was so venial, that to justify it is to invest it with an importance which it would not have possessed save for the frightful results to which it led. You have already heard how foully he was waylaid, how ruthlessly he was murdered! Holy Virgin! my brain whirls ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... do that in this case,—not so much because she was his wife, as because she was so young, so innocent, so unaware of the complications of existence. How could she understand the temptations that assail a young man in the heyday of life, to whom many indulgences appear permissible or venial, which to her limited and innocent soul would seem unpardonable sins? To live even for a few years with a stainless nature like that of Lucy, in whom there was not even so much knowledge as would make the approaches of ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... of the Brissotins, with their newly-acquired authority, have vanity, interest, and revenge, to satiate; and there is no reason to suppose that a crime, which should favour these views, would, in their estimation, be considered otherwise than venial. To these are added Sieyes, Louvet, &c. men not only eager to retain their power, but known to have been of the Orleans faction, and who, if they are royalists, are not loyalists, and the last persons to whose care a son of Louis the Sixteenth ought ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... purged from selfishness and self-will, and ready for obedience, to know when God speaks, though men may be His mouthpieces, and when men speak, though they may call themselves His messengers. The child's mistake was venial. It is less pardonable and more dangerous when repeated by us. If we would be guarded against it, we must be continually where Samuel was, and we must not sleep in the Temple, but 'watch ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... friends did not choose to be over-curious upon the subject, and on his return to his affairs it was by common consent passed over as hardly criminal in one who was otherwise so much afflicted. For they regard bodily ailments as the more venial in proportion as they have been produced by causes independent of the constitution. Thus if a person ruin his health by excessive indulgence at the table or by drinking, they count it to be almost a part ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... up to meditation, or even to works of charity. They perform some exterior austerities; endeavour, little by little, to purify themselves, to rid themselves of certain notable sins, and even of voluntary venial ones. They endeavour, with all their little strength, to advance gradually, but ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... archers and yeomen, whose outlawry had been incurred only for shooting the king's deer. Indeed, to most men of that time—that is, to most men who were not in the royal service—the shooting of deer, and the pursuit of game in general, were not only venial offences, but the most natural thing in life. The royal claim to exclusive hunting in the vast forests of Epping, Sherwood, Needwood, Barnesdale, Englewood, and many others seemed preposterous to the yeomen who lived on the borders of the ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... of a moment, so soon repented of, so largely excusable, is far more venial than many of our denials. For a continuous life in contradiction to our profession is a blacker crime than a momentary fall, and they who, year in and year out, call themselves Christians, and deny their profession by the whole tenor of their lives, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the words of Clarimonde were ever upon my lips like an involuntary refrain. Oh, brother, meditate well on this! Through having but once lifted my eyes to look upon a woman, through one fault apparently so venial, I have for years remained a victim to the most miserable agonies, and the happiness of my life has been destroyed ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world thinks venial. His keen sensibility and his powerful imagination made his internal conflicts singularly terrible. He fancied that he was under sentence of reprobation, that he had committed blasphemy against the Holy ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... you. I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... when you have said enough—the same rule applies with equal force to the tale-writer. There are two errors into which he may fall—he may say too little, or he may say too much. The first is a venial 473 sin, and easily forgiven—the second nearly unpardonable. Such, at all events, being my ideas on the subject, I shall merely proceed to give a brief outline of the fate of the principal personages who have figured in these pages ere ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... theology fell off several points towards latitudinarianism in the course of the next ten minutes. He had a deep inward sense that everything was as it should be, human nature included. The little accidents of humanity, known collectively to moralists as sin, looked very venial to his growing sense ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... general, even to the saints; any known sin given way to, and entertained without controlment, without wrestling against it, hindereth the acceptation of your solemn approaches. If your heart regard iniquity, shall God hear? Psal. lxvi. 18. No, believe it, the least sin that you may judge at first venial, and then give it toleration and indulgence, shall separate between God's face and you. Your prayers are abomination, because of such an idol perked up in the heart beside God, that getteth the honour and worship due to him, and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... satisfy him that an attempt to arrest Holden had been made. For the cause, he was at first at a loss; for, though he had heard of the disturbance at the conference, he hardly supposed that an offence which he regarded as so venial, would have drawn along such serious consequences. But when he heard that generally assigned as the reason, having no words of his own to express his astonishment, he was obliged to resort to ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... venial fault of my uncle's came to be pretty well understood in time, and an unfair advantage was taken of it; the students laid wait for him in dangerous places, and when he began to stumble, loud was the laughter, which is not in good taste, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... on the other hand,—the occasional omission of words, whether few or many,—especially that passing from one line to the corresponding place in a subsequent line, which generally results from the proximity of a similar ending,—is a purely venial offence. It is an evidence of carelessness, but it proves ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... Rather not! One resource suggests itself: a highly improper one, I admit, not far removed indeed from larceny. O quiet paths of algebra, you are my excuse for this venial sin! Let me confess the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... companionship of others of her age, permitted no familiarity with any living being, no sympathies with any other heart, commanded but never indulged, rebuked but never applauded, she must have sunk beneath the severities imposed on her by her father, but for the venial disobedience committed in the pursuit of the solitary pleasure procured for her by her lute. Vainly, in her hours of study, did she read the fierce anathemas against love, liberty, and pleasure, poetry, painting, and music, gold, silver, and precious stones, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... special privilege of divine grace, man, even though he be in the state of sanctifying grace, is unable to avoid venial sin throughout life.* ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... was safe home. To tell the truth he writes extraordinarily well; one's only feeling is that the simplest idiom would be best for such an amazing narrative, and Mr. PYKE is too young and too clever (both charmingly venial faults) to write simply. When I tell you that this persistent youngster, hardly out of his teens, patiently worked out a plan of escape which depended for its efficacy on an optical illusion (the precise secret of which he does not give away), and with his friend, Mr. EDWARD ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... to the tones of his voice during that hour snatched under the Argus eyes of the Maison Vauquer? He had trampled on his conscience; he knew that he was doing wrong, and did it deliberately; he had said to himself that a woman's happiness should atone for this venial sin. The energy of desperation had lent new beauty to his face; the lurid fire that burned in his heart shone from his eyes. Luckily for him, the miracle took place. Vautrin came in in high spirits, and at once read the hearts of these two young creatures ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... think fit. But I have already said I am not here to excuse myself or inculpate others. I ask you but to extend to one, whose fault was committed under strong temptation, that mercy, which even you yourself, Lord King, must one day supplicate at a higher tribunal, and for faults, perhaps, less venial." ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... omnium fidelimm defunctorum), the day set apart in the Roman Catholic Church for the commemoration of the faithful departed. The celebration is based on the doctrine that the souls of the faithful which at death have not been cleansed from venial sins, or have not atoned for past transgressions, cannot attain the Beatific Vision, and that they may be helped to do so by prayer and by the sacrifice of the mass. The feast falls on the 2nd of November; or on ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the new spring of life in her is too genuine and great to keep her entirely free from this evident danger. But it is strange that any one who loves Italy, and sincerely rejoices in her amazing resurrection, should fail to recognise how venial is this fault. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... crowd that pronounces judgment on us, that disposes of our honour, that lifts us to the clouds or trails us through the mud. Opinion passed through every phase about Desroches. The shifting event is ever their one measure of praise and blame. A fault which nobody thought more than venial became gradually aggravated in their eyes by a succession of incidents which it was impossible for Desroches either to foresee or to prevent. At first opinion was on his side, and his wife was thought to have carried things with too high a hand. Then, after she had fallen ill, and her child had ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... heard carelessly, and so are incompetent to describe accurately; and probably, also, neither has cultivated the habit of speaking correctly, as that habit is not apt to be found united with carelessness of observation. Such persons would, perhaps, look upon this sort of carelessness as a venial offence; but it is not so. Anything that interferes with, or diminishes the capacity for, perceiving or speaking the truth is of importance, and should never be passed over lightly. God is truth no less than love, and every ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... however, to expatiate upon his defects, which are of the slenderest and most venial kind. The Scarlet Letter has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and its weaker spots, whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere light flaws and inequalities of surface. One can often return to it; it supports familiarity and has ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... and confession. Events have been transposed to the extent of some few months in this narrative in order to preserve the continuity and evenness of the story. I hope so small a divergence may seem a venial error after so many centuries. For the rest, it is as accurate as a good deal of research and hard ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that while a perception of the ridiculous, perhaps to excess, is characteristic of the British mind, and is at the bottom of many defects in the national manners, commonly attributed to less venial feelings, our Transatlantic descendants err in just the opposite direction. The Americans seldom laugh at any body, or any thing—never at themselves; and this, next to an unfortunate trick of insolvency, and a preternatural abhorrence of niggers, is perhaps the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... seems, with things so richly odd, The mosque of Mahound, or some queer Pagod. See them survey their limbs by Durer's rules, Of all beau-kind the best proportioned fools! Adjust their clothes, and to confession draw Those venial sins, an atom, or a straw; But oh! what terrors must distract the soul Convicted of that mortal crime, a hole; Or should one pound of powder less bespread Those monkey tails that wag behind their head. Thus finished, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... endless controversies which science in every stage provokes, and in none more than in the earliest. Or, if he retires as from a scene of contest that he had not anticipated, he retires as one confessing a human precipitance and a human oversight, weaknesses, venial in others, but fatal to the pretensions of a divine teacher. Starting besides from such pretensions, he could not (as others might) have the privilege of selecting arbitrarily or partially. If upon one science, then upon all,—if upon science, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... fire greeted her like living eyes in the corpse of day. There she stood still, around her stretching the vast night atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with the total darkness of the heath below it might have represented a venial beside ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... carry a load or raise a sheep from the ditch on the Sabbath,—this was a sin which, to the Pharisees, would weigh a man down to hell itself; while to lie or to use other foul language, or to trample under foot the whole decalogue was, by comparison, a venial offence. The whole moral code was rendered impotent by them, while ceremonial cleansing was the be-all and end-all of their system. Christ was daily thrown into conflict with these "blind leaders of the blind"; His soul abhorred their whole religious system. He characterized them as "whited ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... up to the very hour of the penance will all be purged away and thereby remitted to thee, and the sins which thou shalt commit thereafter will not be written against thee to thy damnation, but will be quit by holy water, like venial sins. First of all then the penitent must with great exactitude confess his sins when he comes to begin the penance. Then follows a period of fasting and very strict abstinence which must last for forty days, during which time he is to touch no woman whomsoever, not even his wife. Moreover, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... out a hint concerning the difference in our respective stations aboard the Julia; or else the planters must have considered him some illustrious individual, for certain inscrutable reasons, going incog. With this idea of him, his undisguised disinclination for work became venial; and entertaining such views of extending their business, they counted more upon his ultimate value to them as a man of science than as ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... that her want of insight into Paul de Roustache's true character was inconceivably stupid, the Countess of Fieramondi maintained that her other mistakes (that was the word she chose—indiscretions she rejected as too severe) were extremely venial, and indeed, under all the circumstances, quite natural. It was true that she had promised to hold no communication with Paul after that affair of the Baroness von Englebaden's diamond necklace, in which his part was certainly peculiar, though hardly so damnatory as Andrea chose ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... her person Sally turned again to the clothes-press, by now so far gone in self-indulgence, her moral sense so insidiously sapped by the sheer sensual delight she had of all this pilfered luxury, that she could contemplate without a qualm less venial experiments with the law ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... failed, was to her a matter of little moment. She had experienced the emotion of it, and just the same would it have been a matter of indifference to her had the dagger pierced Natalie's breast—she was sufficiently a child of the South to consider a murder as only a venial sin, for which ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... twaddling, again, mere rambling grows venial. One of H. J. Byron's burlesque heroes says ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... and otherwise aggravated their inevitable woes, but disorder was dangerous under the iron rule of the inexorable Roberval. Michel Gaillon was detected in a petty theft, and hanged. Jean de Nantes, for a more venial offence, was kept in irons. The quarrels of men and the scolding of women were alike requited at the whipping-post, "by which means," quaintly says the narrative, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... parents, and so ought rather to be pitied than blamed," agreed Mrs. Herbert, who would cheerfully have poured out all the vials of the Book of Revelation upon any impecunious doubter who had dared to add the mortal sin of poverty to the venial one ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... could not be convinced that his sin of autograph collecting was not venial. When authors denied his requests, on the ground that they were intrusions, he was inclined to believe that selfishness lay at the basis of their motives. Some men are quite willing to accept great ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... but habituated by reflection to consider them. You appear effeminate, I know that none are more daring—indolent, none are more actively ambitious—utterly selfish, and I know that no earthly interest could bribe you into meanness or injustice—no, nor even into a venial dereliction of principle. It is from this estimate of your character, that I am frank and open to you. Besides, I recognize something in the careful pride with which you conceal your higher and deeper feelings, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... commonly so bad. The thing gives the lie to both the adjective and the noun of its title. Anything more flat and flavorless, whether in sentiment or language, is beyond the conception even of an editor with the nightmare. Men have been hanged for more venial murders than some have been praised for who have choked out the immortal soul of the Psalms of David. We have, however, the consolation of thinking that the Devil's Psalter of convivial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... possessing the most minute knowledge of the subjects she handles, by the manner in which she has described the Jews—the great unknown of humanity. She has penetrated into their history and literature affectionately and thoroughly; and her knowledge in a field where ignorance is still venial if not expressly authorized, has astonished even experts. In her selection of almost always unfamiliar quotations, she shows a taste and a facility of reference really amazing. When shall we see a German writer exhibiting ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Here was a thing to relish! The Frontier comes to town "heeled for a big time," finds that presents are all the rage, and must immediately give somebody something. Oh, childlike, miscellaneous Frontier! So thought the good-hearted Governor; and it seems a venial misconception. "My dear fellow," he added, meaning as well as possible, "I don't want you to spend your money ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... audacity, his inveterate good-nature, his nimble craft, his jocular sportiveness, his shrewd knowledge of character and of society, and his scholar-like quaintness, he becomes a delightful presence; for his mendacity disappears in the sunshine of his humour; his faults seem venial; and we entertain him much as we do the infinitely greater and more disreputable character of Falstaff,—knowing him to be a vagabond, but finding him a charming companion, for all that. This is one great ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... to crush into nothingness? Not at all. If we have any compunctions, they are quickly absorbed in the pride of our capture. And more often still, as in the present case, we set our foot upon the poor victim by pure accident or venial carelessness. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... against Addenbroke for the payment of No. 6, and No. 1, 5s. 0d. costs." Now a lawyer would never have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but to find a verdict on the facts. The error is, indeed, a venial one, but it is just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or "one ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... deprecate. For of sins heteroclital, and such as want name or precedent, there is ofttimes a sin even in their history. We do desire no record of enormities: sins should he accounted new. They omit of their monstrosity as they fall from their rarity; for men count it venial to err with their forefathers, and foolishly conceive they divide a sin in its society.... In things of this nature, silence commendeth history: 'tis the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... can be—without morbid prudery on the one hand, or morbid sentimentality on the other—in the coldest scientific language; the right course of action is pointed out for all the cases that may occur, and we are told what is lawful, what a venial sin, what a mortal sin. Now I do not consider that sexual matters concern the theologian alone, and I deny altogether that he is competent to deal with them. In his hands, also, undoubtedly, they sometimes become prurient, as they can scarcely fail to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of the second), eleven others were called for up to 1709. But it was not for a hundred years that they were again printed, and then the well-meaning but misguided zeal of their resuscitator led him not merely to modernise their spelling, etc. (a venial sin, if, which I am not inclined very positively to lay down, it is a sin at all), but to "improve" their style, sense, and sentiment by omission, alteration, and other tamperings with the text, so as to give the reader not what Mr. Felltham wrote early in the seventeenth century, but ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... truthfulness is by no means very powerful or universal. Few laws enforce it. No very severe reprobation follows untruthfulness. In all ages and countries, falsehood has been thought allowable in love, and laudable in war; while, at the present day, it is held to be venial by the majority of mankind, in trade, commerce, and speculation. A certain amount of untruthfulness is a necessary part of politeness in the east and west alike, while even severe moralists have held a lie justifiable, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... them. It is regrettable that criticism should be written in this fashion, since it causes a feeling of distrust. Probably the writer had no desire to be unjust, or even unfair in the comparatively venial way of doing rather less than justice to the author in his desire to do ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... rather than of yellow corn: he had other faults. It is not known that William Burns was aware before his death that his eldest son had sinned in rhyme; but we have Gilbert's assurance, that his father went to the grave in ignorance of his son's errors of a less venial kind—unwitting that he was soon to give a two-fold proof of both in "Rob the Rhymer's Address to his Bastard Child"—a poem ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was old-fashioned, and even the good Abbot of Sheering had been struck by his literal way of accepting all beliefs, in the manner of a past time when the world had trembled at the near certainty of the Last Judgment, expiating its misdeeds by barefooted pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and its venial faults by cruel macerations ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... their strong personal attachment. There are men no doubt whose natures are proof against kindness and consideration, but my experience is that they are few and far between. I have found also that if one refrains from fault- finding, gives praise where praise is due, and overlooks small or venial faults, when reproof becomes necessary, if it be temperately administered, it is always effective and productive of good. But even such reproof may be carried too far as on one occasion I found to my ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... the side of this hindrance, especially in the country districts, is our ignorant, and, in too many cases, venial ministry, for ignorance is the greatest curse on earth, save sin. The Sunday-school is destined to be the most potent factor in the removal of this evil. As our children see the light as revealed in the Sunday-school by the teachers of God's word, they will demand an intelligent ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... exercised in a purely selfish direction;—I am using the word "selfish" in its ordinary acceptation. A greedy ant, a sensual ant, an ant capable of any one of the seven deadly sins, or even of a small venial sin, is unimaginable. Equally unimaginable, of course, a romantic ant, an ideological ant, a poetical ant, or an ant inclined to metaphysical speculations. No human mind could attain to the absolute matter-of-fact ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... a Christian must not talk in this Manner, yet I believe it may be one of those Sins which the Church of Rome holds to be venial, or rather venal. ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... her great scene, she had made her point, and now she had her eye at the hole in the curtain and she was watching the house! But she blushed as she perceived his smile, and her blush, which was beautiful, made her fault venial. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... These errors are not venial. Those that are such have not been mentioned, as they occur in almost every book, and appear to be unavoidable. Other errors, evincing a lack of knowledge of good usage in book-typography, must ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... one of the Cardinal-Bishops, starting toward the wavering priest. "Down on your knees before the Holy Father, who waits to forgive your venial sin!" ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... in preparing some warm compound, which she knew would be required by her unhappy brother after his debauch, Dorothy passed often between the fire and the canoe, feeling a wife's anxiety in the fate of her husband. As for the Chippewa, intoxication was a very venial offence in his eyes; though he had a contempt for a man who would thus indulge while on a warpath. The American Indian does possess this merit of adapting his deportment to his circumstances. When engaged in war he usually prepares himself, in the coolest and wisest manner, to meet its ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... p. 147, and Bollandus ad 21 Jan. pp. 563 & 564. Nicholas a Lyra and Ribera cannot be persuaded that St. Timothy ever deserved such a censure, unless we understand it only of his flock. The others say, he might have fallen into some venial remissness in not reprehending the vices of others with sufficient vigor; which fault he repaired, upon this admonition, with such earnestness, as to have given occasion to his martyrdom, in 97. He was succeeded in the see of Ephesus by John I., ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... reason thus because, blinded by the gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable to comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin. They reason thus because they are unable to comprehend that even venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature that even if the omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the world, the wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... questions pitilessly asked by husbands, the mere apprehension of which gives a chill, while the actual words enter the heart like the blade of a dagger. It is from such crises that the maxim has come, "All women lie." Falsehood, kindly falsehood, venial falsehood, sublime falsehood, horrible falsehood,—but always the necessity to lie. This necessity admitted, ought they not to know how to lie well? French women do it admirably. Our manners and customs teach them deception! Besides, women are so naively saucy, so pretty, graceful, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... walked away to a window, to conceal the paleness of her cheeks. Admiral Bluewater, though perfectly abstemious himself, regarded license with the bottle after dinner, like most men of that age, as a very venial weakness, and he quietly took a seat by the side of Mildred, and began ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to me, my dear Madam, for absolution as tho' I was your father Confessor; and as tho' you had committed a crime, great in itself, yet of the venial class. You have reason good—for I find myself strangely disposed to be a very indulgent ghostly adviser on this occasion; and, notwithstanding 'you are the most offending Soul alive' (that is, if it is a crime to write elegant Poetry,) ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... Pitiable and melancholy as was Hazlet's course, I liked him so little as to feel for him far less than I otherwise should have done. His worst error never caused me half the pain of Kennedy's most venial fault. Must I then tell a sad tale of Kennedy too—my brave, bright, beautiful, light-hearted Kennedy, whom I always loved so well? May I not throw over the story of his college days the rosy colourings of romance and fancy, the warm ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... in England, if of sufficiently ancient lineage, grows venial with the years and, if carried out with adequate ruthlessness or at least success, may quickly find itself invested with grandeur. No one boasts of his own illegitimacy, but most men like it to be known that an ancestress, whose memory is kept green, once enjoyed royal favour. No man ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... in the most public places of Glasgow—when it is known that holy men and women were burned alive there for adhering to the principles of the Reformation—when it is known that men and women were imprisoned and whipped every day during the kirk-session's pleasure, for offences now considered venial—when it is known that, for a breach of the seventh commandment, some were carted through the streets, whipped, and thereafter banished from the town; that others, for a violation of the said commandment, were fined and ordained to stand at the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... of his humour was the subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities—a fault which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to. The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the basis for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations innumerable, from the epigram to the anecdote. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... support them in venial errors Possible to do, only because we see that it has been done Repose in the other world, "Repos ailleurs" Soldiers enough to animate the good and terrify the bad To work, ever to work, was the primary law of his nature When persons of merit ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... what has been actually done may have taken his bias from the weight of these considerations, as well as from considerations of a sinister nature. The predetermined adversary, on the other hand, can have been governed by no venial motive whatever. The intentions of the first may be upright, as they may on the contrary be culpable. The views of the last cannot be upright, and must be culpable. But the truth is, that these papers are not addressed to persons falling under either of these characters. They ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... These and many other vexed theological questions flitted anxiously through my mind and brought me to a careful scrutiny of Jerry's acts as I knew them. To engage in a prize fight, whatever the prize, whether money or merely the love of woman, if a venial, was not a mortal sin. To be sure, anger was a mortal sin and Jerry had yielded to it. Such fighting as Jerry had done, was not and could not by dint of argument become a part of any philosophy that I had taught him. He had sinned. He would sin again. As Miss Gore had ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... sanctuary has fallen to our lot, and this possibility of a holy life. We must take every advantage of it, thanking Heaven if our stay be long enough for us to repent of our sins and obtain indulgence for our venial shortcomings. It is wicked to desire to shorten our lives. It is wicked to desire anything which is not the will of God. We are here to live, to watch and to pray—not ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... But such venial faults, common to every army, and almost justified by the deficiencies of the Southern commissariat, were more than atoned for when the enemy was met. Of the prowess of Lee's veterans sufficient ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... is said too, though we know not how truly, that Munden was once seen, walking to Kentish Town, with four mackerel, suspended from his fingers by a twig, he having purchased the fish at a low price in Clare-Market. But this is venial: for a string of fish is one of the parcels which John Wilkes said, a gentleman may carry. Munden was a willing diner-out, and his conviviality made him a welcome guest at any board. His hospitality at home was unbounded; and above all, he has left an exemplary character ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Where judges sob like children, and jurors swoon away with emotionalism; where floods of bombast—go to the courts, and listen!—take the place of cross-examination and duly-sworn affidavits; where perjury is a humanly venial and almost praiseworthy failing—how shall the code, defective as it is, be administered? Rhetoric, and rhetoric alone, sways the decision of the courts. Scholars are only now beginning to realize to what an extent the ancient sense of veracity was tainted with this vice—how deeply ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... said that a man should sin like a gentleman; but I am much disposed to think that the gentleman nature appears in the non-sinning lucid intervals.)] When I speak of sin I will be understood to mean the venial offences of prevarication and sleeping in church. I am not thinking of sheep-stealing or highway robbery. My clever friend's work consists chiefly in reducing files of correspondence on a particular subject to one or two leading thoughts. Upon these he ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... be surprised, then, that the history of most young men is, that they yield to temptation in a greater or less degree and in different ways. With many, no doubt, the indulgence is transient, accidental, and does not become habitual. It does not get to be regarded as venial. It is never yielded to without remorse. The wish and the purpose are to resist; but the animal nature bears down the moral. Still, transgression is always ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... the girl was consciously not much impressed by this alleged peril. She had never been aware of any failing such as Victor would have endowed her with; so far as she could remember she had never been tempted to commit more venial sins than inhered in lying to Mama Therese now and then in order to escape unmerited disciplining at the heavy hands of that industrious virago; and as for thieving, the very thought of anything of that ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... will have cleared the stage; and no one will witness with more pleasure than myself the spectacle of the true Scotch Florimel resuming the girdle which she can have dropped only from accident or venial negligence. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... a prison. We are perhaps censurable in making the dwelling and the food of acknowledged and convicted guilt more comfortable and palatable than what the parties could have gained by any exertions when at large, and supporting themselves by honest labour; but this is a venial error compared to that of our ancestors, who, considering a charge and a conviction as synonymous, treated the accused before sentence in a manner which would have been of itself a severe punishment after he was found guilty. Damian, therefore, notwithstanding ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... considered, the potter has produced a tolerable pot, and we may write down his fault of extreme foolhardiness as venial. What, however, Mr. CONRAD himself thought of the rehearsals, if he attended them—but perhaps we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... indwelling, then the solution in my mind of the problem of the safety of others; and then I halted, having given up the thought that in this life it was possible to regenerate the body, putting down its failings as venial and connected with our human infirmities. In time it came to me that surely some growth, some improvement, ought to be made, some increased sanctification ought to be expected, one ought not to be so very barren; glimpses of selfishness, self-seeking pride, and a certain weariness of one's chateaux ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... the law to a Field Marshal is as obnoxious to military "form" as a vacuum was once supposed to be to the sentiments of nature. The child, who teaches its grandmother to suck eggs, commits a venial fault in comparison. So I have had to convey my precepts insensibly to Milord K.—to convey them in homeopathic doses of parable. The brilliant French success of the 21st-22nd, I explain to him, was due to the showers of shell wherewith they deluged the Turkish lines until their defenders were ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... to the true Church, had insensibly recommended it to her confidence. At first, she deemed herself unworthy to enter the fold. She had broken, in thought, one of its stringent laws. What she had come to regard as but a venial error, now appeared to her as an unpardonable sin. So unpardonable, indeed, that left to herself, she might have despaired of forgiveness, and returned to it cherishingly, seven times worse than before. But this aged ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... senior service. So shy indeed is our Fleet of praise that I feel my apologies are due to their Chaplain for my perfectly honest commendation of his book. But he seems human enough to pardon the more venial sins. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... the first chapter, are mere hors d'oeuvres: such "copy" should have been reserved for another edition of "The Modern Egyptians." The substitution of chapters for Nights was perverse and ill-judged as it could be, but it appears venial compared with condensing the tales in a commentary, thus converting the Arabian Nights into Arabian Notes. However, "Arabian Society in the Middle Ages," a legacy left by the "Uncle and Master", ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... nomadic as their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting and changing about so ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... be set aside as if it were secondary, nor can the secondary be sought as if it were primary. To invert the ethical order is to bring in that disorder which is called sin. If the human act brings in a slight disorder, it is venial sin; if the human act brings in a grievous disorder it is a grievous or ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... supposed till the self-accusations of his journal were laid bare. Though there was little in him of the Calvinism of his maternal ancestors, he judged himself on this point with the severity of an austere moralist. In the world of pleasure in which he moved such offences were considered venial, but he looked upon them with the disgust of a man who reckons personal freedom beyond all earthly goods, and who sees himself in danger of becoming a slave. "The humiliating and degrading emotions of play" threaten, he says, to undermine his intellectual and moral faculties; ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul,—I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.' I should steal the farthing and assume the 'excuse.' I confess that I would not only lie, but should think lying ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... longer respect. I do not hate you; but I do sincerely pity you, and humbly, and fervently do I pray that you may, ere too late, see the errors of your conduct. You, by your own confession, deem coquetry a venial error; can that be such, from which come such cruel and mischievous results. But no more. I forgive you most freely, and shall ever fervently pray that you may see and feel how inimical to peace here, as well as hereafter, is such conduct as ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... much excuse she felt inclined to admit just then for the sins both of commission and omission—sins that, at another time, when her faculties were fresh and her judgment unbiassed, she might have looked upon as any thing but venial. Ah! Mr. Fullarton, the seed you have scattered so profusely to-night is beginning to bear fruit already you never dreamed of. Beet-root and turnips will not succeed on every soil. It must be long before ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... servants to attend to them; indeed, they are told so by every magistrate who cares about the peace of his district. The people, seeing how much we expect from the Thanadar, and how little we give him, submit to his demands for contribution without a murmur, and consider almost any demand venial from a man so employed and paid. They are confounded at our inconsistency, and say, where they dare to speak their minds, 'We see you giving high salaries and high prospects of advancement to men who have nothing on earth to do but to collect your revenues and to decide our disputes about pounds, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... incident. It was the turning-point in Douglas's political fortunes. With the whole South, and with a few prominent politicians of the North, it served to put him outside the pale of party fellowship. Compared with this his Lecompton revolt had been a venial offense. In that case he had merely contended for the machinery of a fair popular vote. This was the avowal of a principle as obnoxious to the slavery propaganda as the unqualified abolitionism of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... not to give a summary of religious conduct, but to inculcate ceremonial rules. Of the more importance, therefore, is the occasional pause which is made to insist, beyond peradventure, on the superiority of moral rules. A very good instance of this is found in Gautama. He has a list of venial sins. Since lying is one of the most heinous offences to a Hindu lawgiver, and the penances are severe, all the treatises state formally that an untruth uttered in fun, or when one is in danger, or an oath of the sort implied by Plato: [Greek: aphrodision orkon ou phasin einai],—all these ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... first origin of such instinct were the fear of consequences or the love of approbation; it is quite another—the inward condemnation of something which "the deceitfulness of sin" is able to excuse, and which the world at large would regard as permissible or at least venial. Even if inherited use has its full play, there is still a something wanted before the one can be got into (or out of) the other. Why, again, are savages prone to imagine natural phenomena to be caused or actuated by "spirits"? Surely it is because there is consciously a spirit in man, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... the colonel had not yet heard the full story, and it was just as evident that the portion of it that he had heard had disturbed him almost beyond precedent. He was taciturn in speech, and severe and formal in manner. To misuse and neglect the flag of his country was, indeed, no venial offense in ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... severely arraign a fault that was venial in you. Your father gave himself to Edward, and his son ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... allowance for, give credit for, do justice to; give one his due, give the Devil his due. make good; prove the truth of, prove one's case; be justified by the event. Adj. vindicated, vindicating &c v.; exculpatory; apologetic. excusable, defensible, pardonable; venial, veniable[obs3]; specious, plausible, justifiable. Phr. "honi sot qui mal y pense"; ; "good ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... somewhat at the claim; but, when one or two highly-placed officials presumed to follow in the footsteps of their Sovereign, and were in consequence banished irrevocably from his presence, Scandalmongrian Society realised with a pained surprise that what is venial in a monarch may, in a subject, be a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... with her assistance, this outraged husband accomplished his purpose with diabolical deliberation. He must have been well aware that, had he acted on the natural impulse of the moment and revenged himself then and there on Aubert, he would have committed what is regarded by a French jury as the most venial of crimes, and would have escaped with little or no punishment. He preferred, for reasons of his own, to set about the commission of a deliberate and cold-blooded murder that bears the stamp of a more sinister motive than the vengeance of ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... of yours on the subject of obscurity I am disposed to think reasonable; and, unless the contrary should appear in the course of our conversations, I will concede them to be applicable to the case of Mr. Ricardo; his obscurity may be venial, or it may be inevitable, or even none at all (if you will have it so). But I cannot allow of the cases of Kant and Leibnitz as at all relevant to that before us. For, the obscurity complained of in metaphysics, etc., is inherent in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Christopher Snider. These were not the beginning of the trouble, but rather the arrogance, greed, selfishness, and intolerance of the repressive measures of a bigot king, a servile ministry, and a venial Parliament. ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... accomplished author of his day, yet he had none of the airs of authorship." He continues—"He was a proud man; not a proud poet, or historian, or novelist." His was the pride of ancestry—a weakness, to be sure, but of a venial nature: "he loved to be looked on as a gentleman of old family, who built Abbotsford, and laid out its garden, and planted its avenues, rather than a genius, whose works influenced mankind, and diffused happiness among millions." His own narrative will best illustrate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... experiment upon another society; and found them equally ready to consider it as a venial fault, always incident to a man of quickness and gaiety; till by degrees he began to think himself at liberty to follow the last invitation, and was no longer shocked at the turpitude of falsehood. He made no difficulty to promise ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... the office should remind priests and the faithful of those servants of God, whom the Church wishes ever to honour. I have said the order given for commemoration in the Ordo should be followed; but not to follow this order does not exceed a venial sin. Even the deliberate omission of a commemoration in Lauds or Vespers is not a ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... fears of the Duchess Regent, who was certainly placed in a terrible position. Her conduct was not heroic, although she might be forgiven for trepidation. Her treachery, however, under these trying circumstances was less venial. At three o'clock in the morning of the 22nd of August, Orange, Egmont, Horn, Hoogatraaten, Mansfeld, and others were summoned to the palace. They found her already equipped for flight, surrounded by her waiting-women, chamberlains ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... influence with the nation of the prisoner by effecting his release. His first point was won. Champlain would not give up the murderer, knowing those with whom he was dealing too well to take a course which would have proclaimed the killing of a Frenchman a venial offence. The Hurons thereupon refused to carry the missionaries to their country; coupling the refusal with many regrets and many protestations of love, partly, no doubt, sincere,—for the Jesuits had contrived ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... with the vicious, the egotist with the ignorant, the demagogue with the venial, and when the sun set, Nebraska's opportunity to do the act of simple justice was gone—lost by a vote of 50,693 to 25,756—so the record gives it. But it must not be forgotten that many tickets were fraudulently printed, and that tickets which contained ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... peep from every tatter, And men—a charitable dose— Should physic thee with food and clothes! Nursling of adversity! 'Tis thy glory thus to be Sinking fund of raggery! Thus to scrape a nation's dishes, And fatten on a few good wishes! Or, on some venial treason bent, Frame thyself a government, For thy crest a brirnless hat, Poverty's aristocrat! Nonne habeam te tristem, Planet of the human system? Comet lank and melancholic —Orbit shocking parabolic— Seen for a little in the sky Of the world of sympathy— Seldom failing when ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... to graver musings that they served the cause of religion and morality. They were true sons of the Church; and if they did not go far below the surface, nor profess to do more as a rule than satirise follies and censure venial forms of vice, their tone was ever that of Christian moralists. They did no scanty service as mediators, so to say, between religion and the world. This phase of literature lived on later into the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... one class of heretics rejecting the Old Testament entirely; another contending for the obligation of its law, in all its parts, throughout its whole extent, and over every one who sought acceptance with God. Upon the two latter subjects, a natural, perhaps, and venial, but a fruitless, eager, and impatient curiosity, prompted by the philosophy and by the scholastic habits of the age, which carried men much into bold hypotheses and conjectural solutions, raised, amongst some who professed Christianity, very wild and unfounded ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... the understanding, but only that a man has shifted the boundaries of chronology a little this way or that; as if, for example, a writer should speak of printed books as existing at the day of Agincourt, or of artillery as existing in the first Crusade, here would be an error, but a venial one. A far worse kind of anachronism, though rarely noticed as such, is where a writer ascribes sentiments and modes of thought incapable of co-existing with the sort or the degree of civilization then attained, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... look upon such offences as venial; a few unprincipled mothers may be anxious to catch a young man of fortune without reference to his character; and thoughtless girls may be glad to win the smiles of so handsome a gentleman, without seeking to penetrate ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... judged allowable. No Orthodox creed is assumed to be inspired as to its language. The same essential truth may be expressed in different terms. How, then, are we to define the limits of expression so as to know what error of opinion is venial, and what vital? Orthodoxy assures us that our salvation depends on accepting its statements. In which particular form, then, must we accept them? In so important a matter as this, where salvation is assumed to depend ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity, they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began, and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples dwell, and form autonymous provinces ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... mistrustful of Ralegh's disposition to comply with the compact. The national eagerness, however, for the adventure, and the confidence of Ralegh's well-wishers, overpowered his reluctance. He was moved also by the venial hope of a vast influx of innocent profit into his empty Treasury. From the first it was understood plainly that the admiral accepted the entire responsibility for the maintenance of a peaceable ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Voltaire; De Prades writing, Friedrich covertly dictating: no date). "The King has held his Consistory; and it has there been discussed, Whether your case was a mortal sin or a venial? In truth, all the Doctors owned that it was mortal, and even exceedingly confirmed as such by repeated lapses and relapses. Nevertheless, by the plenitude of the grace of Beelzebub, which rests in the said King, he thinks he can absolve you, if not in whole, yet ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... length of life Upon Purgatory Upon Penance Upon penitent confusion Upon interior peace amidst anxieties Upon discouragement Upon rising after a fall Upon kindliness towards ourselves Upon imperfections The just man falls seven times in the day Upon the purgative way Upon venial sin Upon complicity in the sins of another Upon equivocating Upon solitude Upon vanity Upon the knowledge which puffs up Upon scruples Upon temptations Upon the same subject Thoughts on the Incarnation Upon Confession and Communion Upon Confession ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... seem to have drawn, whose loose conduct, in that loose age, exposed them to be duped like the hero of the play. It is a singular mark of the dissolute manners of those times, that an audience, to whom matrimonial infidelity was nightly held out, not only as the most venial of trespasses, but as a matter of triumphant applause, were unable to brook any ridicule, upon the mere transitory connection formed betwixt the keeper and his mistress. Dryden had spared neither kind of union; and accordingly his opponents ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... that these sentences showed a commendable moderation. It was thought necessary that a few examples should be made, as Lord Durham's amnesty of the previous year had evidently encouraged some {127} habitants to believe that rebellion was a venial offence. And the execution of twelve men, out of the thousands who had taken part in the revolt, cannot be said to have shown a bloodthirsty disposition on the part of ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles |
