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Ritual   /rˈɪtʃuəl/   Listen
Ritual

noun
1.
Any customary observance or practice.  Synonym: rite.
2.
The prescribed procedure for conducting religious ceremonies.
3.
Stereotyped behavior.



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"Ritual" Quotes from Famous Books



... from Dr. Battershall, at St. Peter's, on "Seeing Him who is invisible,"—the Apostle's definition of faith. We remained to Holy Communion. He is evidently fond of ritual, but there was nothing really objectionable. In the evening we all went to Judge Parker's, and Mrs. Parker, who had not left her room for some weeks, came down to see me, and is a very nice old lady; ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh

... for breaking faith even with a child,—no 'permit' existing anywhere to destroy the life of the soul by so much as one false or cruel word! It is with a deep sense of the exact balance of God's justice, that I stand before you to-day, my friends, and ask you without any accepted ritual or ceremonial to hear my vows of marriage. She to whom I pledge my word and life, is one who in the world's eyes is accounted great, because rich in this world's goods,—but her wealth has no attraction for me, and for ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... edicts were issued forbidding not only the sacrifice of animals but even the representation of living things in embroidery, on the ground that people might cut up such figures and thus become callous to the sanctity of life. The emperor expounded sutras in public and wrote a work on Buddhist ritual.[631] The first Chinese edition of the Tripitaka, in manuscript and not printed, was collected in 518. Although Wu-Ti's edicts, particularly that against animal sacrifices, gave great dissatisfaction, yet the Buddhist movement seems ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... every father in Al-Islam was made priest and pontiff in his own house, able unaided to marry himself, to circumcise (to baptise as it were) his children, to instruct them in the law and canonically to bury himself (vol. viii. 22). Ritual, properly so called, there was none; congregational prayers were merely those of the individual en masse, and the only admitted approach to a sacerdotal order were the Olema or scholars learned in the legistic and the Mullah or schoolmaster. By thus abolishing the priesthood Mohammed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... had neither rites nor ritual. It was merely a mendicant order in which one tried to do what is right, with, for reward, the hope of Pratscha-Paramita, the peace that is beyond all knowledge and which Nirvana provides. That peace is—or was—the complete absence of anything, extinction utter ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... has been firmly established its evolution always follows similar lines. Ritual becomes increasingly elaborate: metaphysical dogma grows too subtle for a layman's comprehension. Commercialism spreads from the market to the sanctuary, whose guardians exploit the all-pervading fear of the unknown to serve their lust ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... after Wiclif's death an enemy bitterly observed that if you met any two men one was sure to be a Lollard. It was the "first time in English history that an appeal had been made to the people instead of the scholars." Religion was to be made rather a matter of practical life than of dogma or of ritual. The "poor priests" in their cheap brown robes became a mighty religious force, and evoked opposition from the Church powers. A generation after Wiclif's death they had become a mighty political force in the controversy between the King and the Pope. As late as ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... meeting a literary lady in London, repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her house; and the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... reformer, so she stamped him down into nothingness under her iron heel. And for almost a score of years she had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he. Some few of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the Church did indeed think that it was waste of great powers, but he had the Sacred College against him, and no one ventured to speak in his favour at ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... repaired to Deptford and was honoured with several audiences. The Czar could not be persuaded to exhibit himself at Saint Paul's; but he was induced to visit Lambeth palace. There he saw the ceremony of ordination performed, and expressed warm approbation of the Anglican ritual. Nothing in England astonished him so much as the Archiepiscopal library. It was the first good collection of books that he had seen; and he declared that he had never imagined that there were so many printed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... and sculpture are creeping back into the Protestant churches, to combine with poetry and music in expressing the religious life of man. For the intellect alone is inadequate either to express that life as it exists, or to call it into existence where it does not exist. The tendency to ritual in our time is a tendency not to substitute aesthetic for spiritual life, though there is probably always a danger that such a substitution may be unconsciously made, but to express a religious life which ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... son of Kunti, Bharadwaja returned to his hermitage after performing the ritual duties of the day, and having collected the sacrificial fuel. And because his son had been slain, the sacrificial fires which used to welcome him everyday, did not on that day come forward to welcome him. And marking this change in the Agnihotra, the great sage asked ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... be well at the outset to say clearly what is the aim of the present volume. The title is Ancient Art and Ritual, but the reader will find in it no general summary or even outline of the facts of either ancient art or ancient ritual. These facts are easily accessible in handbooks. The point of my title and the real gist of my argument lie perhaps in the word "and"—that is, in the intimate connection which I have tried to show exists between ritual and art. This connection has, I believe, an important ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... mass of the armed people; whose zeal it promotes by strict religious and moral injunctions enjoining purity of life, exact regard to the ritual of the Koran, teaching pilgrimages, fasting, ablutions; the duty of implacable war against the Infidel, the sin of ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... of this text is May we acquire the knowledge of Brahman, the Supreme, in both manifested and unmanifested form. He is manifested as the Lord of sacrifice for those who follow the path of ritual He is the unmanifested, eternal, universal Supreme Being for those who follow the path of wisdom. The "other shore," being the realm of immortality, is said to be beyond fear; because disease, death, and all that which mortals fear, cease to exist there. It is believed by many that these two opening ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda

... wealth and elaborate ceremonial, exist and are kept up solely because, things of earth as we are, we cannot be depended upon to praise God lovingly within the white-washed walls of a conventicle, or according to the simple ritual of the Society of Friends. We would not, even if we could, pray habitually among such surroundings, where we could afford to better them. We have before us the principle of St. Thomas (1a 2a, q. 24, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... having served as a slave at false altars of which she did not even know the ritual, it was no wonder that, after all she had suffered, she could not now bring herself into tune with the commonplace intercourse of life. Not that her friends utterly failed to lure her into it. She might well have been the victim of hysterics, but she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications, but divine gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole material world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and blessings. Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man's common life into a wonderful world of mystic spirituality. Thus there was a great fund of spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... he was slain during the Laurentine sacrifice, and hence also his memory was hateful. The existence of a Sabine town on the Quirinal is attested by the undoubted occurrence there of a number of Sabine chapels, which were known as late as the time of Varro, and from which he proved that the Sabine ritual was adopted by the Romans. This Sabine element in the worship of the Romans has almost always been overlooked, in consequence of the prevailing desire to look upon everything as Etruscan; but, I repeat, there is no ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... from his biased scales. But now, when a man of noble birth was to be tried, the whole legal and ecclesiastical ceremony was carried out with every detail, grotesque or impressive, which the full ritual prescribed. The distant roll of church music and the slow tolling of the Abbey bell; the white-robed brethren, two and two, walked thrice round the hall singing the "Benedicite" and the "Veni, Creator" before they settled in their places at the desks on either side. Then in turn each high ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to whom books were roads open to adventures; he saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his excesses something of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... pains to keep his antiseptic as remote as possible from the tissues to whose vitality he trusted, and went half-way to meet the aseptic doctrine. If he retained a belief in the need for carbolic and distrusted the elaborate ritual of the modern hospital, with its boiling of everybody and everything connected with an operation, it was not either from blindness or from pettiness of mind. As in the case of abandoning the spray, it was his love of simplicity which influenced him. If the detailed precautions ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... that the exigences of bodily life gave consciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or reproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness is a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the chief episodes in the body's fortunes. The organs, by their structure, select the impressions possible to them from the divers influences abroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... composite in origin. Their ceremonials are perhaps the most elaborate of any Indians except the Pueblos; indeed the very life of this people so teems with ceremony as almost to pass comprehension. The Navaho ritual probably reached its highest phase about the beginning of the nineteenth century. It would seem impossible for a religion so highly developed as this to have attained such a stage within a ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... mass, to what Goethe's and Kant's philosophy, which is neither materialism nor spiritualism, is for the few—a religion based on feeling and intuition, on conscience and reverence, but a religion without dogmas, without ritual, without forms, above all without exclusiveness and without intolerance. I doubt whether this mild and noble spirit, which is by no means indifferentism, will soon revive, as I doubt whether Germany will quickly get over the conflict between ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... themselves with the learning of their men-folk, and were eager to contribute to the support of schools and pupils. They were extremely pious, often scrupulously so. The women in a family of scholars had sufficient knowledge to be called upon in ritual questions, as, for instance, Bellette, sister of Isaac ben Menahem the Great, of Orleans, a contemporary of Rashi, who appealed to her authority. Other cases of the same kind are mentioned, some occurring in Rashi's own family, his granddaughter ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... white men he was serving, stung all over by a swarm of bees, and mauled in both thighs by a crocodile; but each time he turned up smiling and ready to go on. Nothing could stop him, for did he not keep the solemn ritual of the guides, sacrificing a black ram at the threshold of every country they entered, drawing the magic triangles and hieroglyphs on the sand of every desert they had to cross, and keeping fast in his scrip that lock of a white man's hair, which added all the knowledge of a European ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... which is the artistic expression of the soul's faith and love, of its hopes and yearnings. We are, indeed, still subdued by the majesty of dimly lighted cathedrals, by solemn music, and the various symbolism of the ritual, but we feel not the deep awe of our fathers whose knees furrowed the pavement stones, and whose burning lips kissed them smooth; and to blame ourselves for this would serve no purpose. To those who find no pleasure in sweet sounds, we pipe in vain, and argument to show that one ought to be ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... favored the "Sons of the Covenant," putting in an appearance either at the commencement or the fag end, for he was not above praying odd bits of the service twice over, and even sometimes prefaced or supplemented his synagogal performances by solo renditions of the entire ritual of a hundred pages at home. The morning services began at six in summer and seven in winter, so that the workingman might start his long ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... of ritual and doctrine—offences to which, fortunately, we can afford to be more indifferent than our ancestors were, no reasonable man now thinking twice about them—Pocklington was deprived of all his livings and dignities and preferments, and incapacitated from holding any for ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer

... either to read or write the language of the country that gave them birth. They confine themselves to a bastard or vulgar Hebrew, which has little analogy to the original. They observe the particular ritual of the German Synagogue, and also include the Polish, Russian, and Turkish Jews established in London. With the exception of a few wealthy individuals, and as many families who are in trade on the Royal Exchange, they are in general a very indigent class of people. Their community being too ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... to be considered the peculiar product of a race of 'Brythonic' or British origin, and it is likely that the stones so carved were utilized in the ritual of rain-worship or rain-making by sympathetic magic. The grooves in the stone were probably filled with water to typify a country partially ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... now are they all, and dry yellow bone; but in the houses of Phanar and noisy old Galata, and in the Jew quarter of Pri-pacha, the black shoe and head-dress of the Greek is still distinguishable from the Hebrew blue. It was a mixed ritual of colours here in boot and hat: yellow for Mussulman, red boots, black calpac for Armenian, for the Effendi a white turban, for the Greek a black. The Tartar skull shines from under a high taper calpac, the Nizain-djid's from a melon-shaped head-piece; ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... the Puranas, their theological character, the modern ritual, the introduction and rise of caste, and the treatment ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir

... up, and only opened it on great holidays for important visitors, while he lived himself in the office, in a little room covered with ikons. He had leanings towards the Old Believers, and was continually entertaining priests and bishops of the old ritual, though he had been christened, and married, and had buried his wife in accordance with the Orthodox rites. He disliked Akim, his only brother and his heir, for his frivolity, which he called simpleness and folly, and for his indifference to religion. He treated him as an inferior, ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... small chapel they sought, situated at the extreme end of the straggling street, and the worshippers were few. At the conclusion of the ritual and the sermon the two walked forth together in silence, their former brief intimacy a mere memory, neither realizing exactly how best to resume a conversation which had been interrupted by so solemn a service. It was Miss Norvell who first broke ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... disguise itself in the frippery of aesthetic Anglicanism, it leads captive not a few. In the churches commonly called Ritualistic, I note one great and significant improvement. English Churchmen have gradually discovered that they have an indigenous ritual of their own—dignified, expressive, artistic, free from fuss and fidgets—and that they have no need to import strange rites from France or Belgium. The evolution of the English Rite is one of the wholesome signs of the times. About preaching, I am not so clear. The ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... the preceding arguments were directed rather against excessive work than in favour of recreation. But the first object in an essay of this kind should be to bring down the absurd estimate that is often formed of mere work. What ritual is to the formalist, or contemplation to the devotee, business is to the man of the world. He thinks he cannot be doing wrong as long as he ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... rediscovered a home truth the American people have never forgotten: the government is too big and spends too much. And I call on Congress to adopt a measure that will help put an end to the annual ritual of filling the budget with pork-barrel appropriations. Every year, the press has a field day making fun of outrageous examples, a Lawrence Welk Museum, a research grant for Belgian Endive. We all know how these things get into the budget, and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George H.W. Bush • George H.W. Bush

... was put into the ground. Some of the eyes were a trifle dim, but in a general way it may be said that at that interment there was lack of neither observance nor observation; Silas was indubitably dead, and none could have pointed out any ritual delinquency that would have justified him in coming back from the grave. Yet if human testimony is good for anything (and certainly it once put an end to witchcraft in and about Salem) ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... inventive imagination could conceive. There, with a multitude of beautiful things which overload the memory, are represented all the ways of the ancients, the statues of sages, and most lovely women: and there are all the sorts of ancient sacrifices with their ritual, and an army in the various stages between embarking and fighting with an extraordinary variety of arms and implements, all executed with such grace and finished with such masterly skill, that the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... not thought it necessary to illustrate at length the characteristics of savage thought enumerated above. They are exhaustively discussed by Dr. Tylor in "Primitive Culture," Sir John Lubbock in "The Origin of Civilization," Mr. Andrew Lang in "Myth Ritual and Religion," and some of them by Mr. J. G. Frazer in "Totemism," and more recently in "The Golden Bough," published since these ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... life and hopes, have educated us, and made possible for us a career. The same motives play a part in our affection for teachers who have beneficently influenced our lives, for other older people who "give us a start," advice and encouragement or financial aid. Even the love of God has in religious ritual been colored with gratitude for God's ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... for thine only Son, Jesus Christ's sake." The ritual rang upon that note. The music of the hymns of charity was part of the light that penetrated her, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... des Peuples Indignes de l'AmŽrique', t. ii., p. 301. The rare manuscript which belonged to the Archbishop of Rheims, Le Tellier, contains various kinds of extracts from an Aztec ritual, an astrological calendar, and historical annals, extending from 1197 to 1549, and embracing a notice of different natural phenomena, epochs of earthquakes and comets (as, for instance, those of ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... madame, thinking that the deprivation of the rites and ceremonies of your church might be painful to you, has consented that you should read every day the ordinary of your Mass; and here is a book which contains the ritual." ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonly happened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there was nothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank was innocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in the ritual was its supervision by the priests, who knew something of their parishioners' character. Military tenants, however, preferred their privilege of trial by battle. Now Henry began to teach men to rely upon their judgment; ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... sepulture, according to the forms of his denomination, would be denied to his remains. The aged sufferer, it is related, read his own funeral service while on the scaffold. Solemn, sublime, and affecting as are passages of this portion of the ritual of the Church, surely it was never performed under circumstances so well suited to impress with awe and tenderness as when uttered by the calumniated, oppressed, and dying old man. Baxter had been tried for sedition, on the ground ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... wonder whether the rapid but insidious increase of ritual in India is understood at home. In England it is bad enough, but in a heathen and Mohammedan land it is, if possible, worse; and the worst is, the spirit of it, or the spirit of tolerance toward it, which is on the increase even ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... Buddhistic ritual, discipline, and costume, and those which especially claim the name of CATHOLIC in the Christian Church, has been often noticed; and though the parallel has never been elaborated as it might be, some of the more salient facts are familiar to most readers. Still many may be unaware that ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... worship of any one instinct or organ, or any external object or agent. How could Carpenter have so far forgotten his own definition of health as to applaud the primitive ritualistic worship of the glories of the human body and the procession of the stars? That ritual was itself the symptom of the break-up of man's character into multiplicity, and the insubordination of specific organs. Surely when man has gained centrality of health, he will worship the unifying will which is dominant whenever health prevails. He will ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit

... covered with the figures of Egyptian divinities and inscriptions to the deceased; that of the latter, in arragonite, is in the form of a mummy, like those first examined by the visitor. This coffin has five distinct lines of hieroglyphics engraved down the front, expressing a chapter of the funeral ritual: and the face bears ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... a corner of the Empire as Borneo, ten thousand miles from the lights of the restaurants in Piccadilly, the men religiously observe the English ritual of dressing for dinner, for when the mercury climbs to 110, though the temptation is to go about in pajamas, one's drenched body and drooping spirits need to be bolstered up with a stiff shirt and a white mess jacket. That ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... Templar in Rapier Commandery and was one of its past eminent commanders. He was a member of the Scottish Rite bodies in the Valley of Indianapolis in the early days and performed his work with a ritual perfection unsurpassed. He received the thirty-third and last degree as a merited honor for proficiency ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster

... noted, in order to bring out more vividly the force of the figure, that Paul here speaks of the libation being poured 'on' the sacrifice, as was the practice in heathen ritual. The sacrifice is the victim, 'service' is the technical word for priestly ministration, and the general meaning is, 'If my blood is poured out as a drink offering on the sacrifice ministered by you, which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... her forth then—Dura-ki, the chosen one. Shod in golden sandals, and wearing the crimson robe of the ritual, she moved out of Ra-sed's sight, behind the high altar. No acolyte was permitted to ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown

... Protestantism, and determine its relation to dogma. A closer examination, however, shews that in none of the great confessions does religion live in dogma, as of old. Dogma everywhere has fallen into the background; in the Eastern Church it has given place to ritual, in the Roman Church to ecclesiastical instructions, in the Protestant Churches, so far as they are mindful of their origin, to the Gospel. At the same time, however, the paradoxical fact is unmistakable that dogma as such is nowhere at this moment so powerful as in the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... as appointed here, divides itself into two main parts—the sprinkling of the sacrificial blood on the door-posts and lintels, and the feast on the sacrifice. These can best be dealt with separately. They were separated in the later form of the ritual; for, when there was a central sanctuary, the lambs were slain there, and the blood sprinkled, as in other expiatory sacrifices, on the altar, while the domestic feast remained unaltered. The former was more especially meant to preserve the Israelites from the destruction of their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... around, gave a hazy, dubious, and as it were phantom-like appearance to the outlines of this singular apparition, The voice of the priestloud, clear, and sonorousnow recited, from the breviary which he held in his hand, those solemn words which the ritual of the Catholic church has consecrated to the rendering of dust to dust. Meanwhile, Dousterswivel, the place, the hour, and the surprise considered, still remained uncertain whether what he saw was substantial, or an unearthly representation ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... in January the Council and University of Wittemburg regulated the celebration of the Lord's Supper according to the new ritual. ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston

... and of the coast of Malabar, brought cages filled with birds, which they set at liberty upon her coffin. Thus did the loss of this amiable object affect the natives of different countries, and thus was the ritual of various religions breathed over the ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... and that the earthly life he is living is only a sacrament and emblem,—a type of the eternal life which infolds it, and of more lasting relations there. Whether, therefore, it be the silent grace and silent prayer of the Friends, or the form of prayer of ritual churches, or the extemporaneous outpouring of those whose habits and taste lead them to extempore prayer, in one of these ways there should be daily outward and visible acts ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... principle which should shape the Pharisees' relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had said long ago that God delighted more in 'mercy' than in 'sacrifice.' Kindly helpfulness to men is better worship than exact performance of any ritual. Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him, and imitation is the perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaks as all the prophets had spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke the mechanical formalism which in every age stiffens religion into ceremonies and neglects ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... last. "My—my wife's cousin, he is a Grass Sandal. He taught her the verses at home, for safety.—We mean no harm, now, we of the Triad. But there is another secret band, having many of our signs. It is said they ape our ritual. Fang the scholar heads their lodge. They are the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout

... Pentateuch, supposed formerly to have been drawn up by Moses, appears, as it now stands, to be a codification, made as late as the period of the Babylonian exile, under the influence of the hierarchical and ritual system, then crystallizing into the form familiar to us all. This codification, like its famous parallel in Roman history, the code of Justinian, collated the decisions and decrees already in existence from various periods, and reissued them as ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton

... triumphantly used them in his pow-wows. Geometric figures in a handful of sand or seeds would prophesy the fate of the ills—and do we not to this day tell our fortune in the geometric figures made by the dregs in our tea-cups? Paternosters, snatches of Latin hymns, bits of early Church ritual were used by quacks of the olden days for much the same reason as the geometric figures—because they were ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... preparations were interminable. If she follows such an elaborate ritual for the mere checking of an unsuccessful experiment no wonder she is taking years to get anywhere. My attention wandered and I started to leave the cabin when I noticed my hand still ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... world as a mere eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man was brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands. The stately Egyptian Ritual with its Book of the Dead, in which are traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim. Hear the cry of the Soul ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant

... strictly rectangular; other narrower streets ran parallel to these main thoroughfares. On the east side (F) was a small 'citadel'—arx or templum—with ditch, rampart and bridge of its own (G, H); in this were a trench and some pits (K) which seemed by their contents to be connected with ritual and religion. Outside the whole (L, M) were two cemeteries, platforms of urns set curiously like the village itself, and also a little burning ghat.[43] The population of the village is necessarily doubtful. A German writer, Nissen, ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield

... books and papers, making illiteracy, with its attendant vice, poverty, and superstition, universal; and when Dr. Jose Rizal urged his reforms in the church and civil service, he was shot, though not as a blasphemer, but because his secret order, the Katipunan, with its Masonic ritual and blood initiation, was thought to be dangerous to ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... out-of-doors. We saw them everywhere; rounded edifices of clay, raised on a foundation of logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof of boards. They looked like little family chapels—and so they were; shrines where the ritual of the good housewife was celebrated, and the gift of daily bread, having been honestly earned, was ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... latter, which now forms the State-religion of Persia, but there are several points in his doctrine which he held in common with the former (i.e. the Ishma'ilis). These are—'the successive incarnations of the Universal Reason, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and the symbolism of every ritual form and every natural phenomenon. [Footnote: NH, introd. p. xiii.] The doctrine of the impermanence of all that is not God, and that love between two human hearts is but a type of the love between God and ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... Absolutely true. It is precisely that which led me to formulate my theory in the first place. How else are we to explain that the Nipe, for all his tremendous technical knowledge, is nonetheless a member of a society that is still in the ancient ritual-taboo stage of development?" ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... whether the considerable problem of maintaining it as an organised civilisation will or will not be solved. All the conditions are so completely new, our whole machinery of government so thoroughly presupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strong attachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts at reorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we do answer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet even be ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we'd have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn't know what the men knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master's apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... e.g. on the second day of the Anthesteria, when masked revellers rode in wagons and assailed the bystanders with abusive language. Such ceremonial abuse was perhaps originally supposed to have power to avert evil, and occurs in primitive ritual all ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes

... days when throne and altar heard The wanton's wish, the bigot's word, And pomp of state and ritual show Scarce ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... aright— To-night's appearance of its Minister In the assembly of his long-time sway Is near his last, and themes to-night launched forth Will take a tincture from that memory, When me recall the scene and circumstance That hung about his pleadings.—But no more; The ritual of each party is rehearsed, Dislodging not one vote or prejudice; The ministers their ministries retain, And Ins as Ins, and ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the little boudoir it happened that Hyacinth was turning her back to him. It was usually a part of their ritual that she came to meet him. So this seemed to him an ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... being all of an equal length, about two hundred feet. In this place sacrifices were performed, according to directions read out of an old linen book, the priest being a very old man, called Ovius Paccius, who affirmed, that he took these ceremonials from the ancient ritual of the Samnites, being the same which their ancestors used, when they had formed the secret design of wresting Capua from the Etrurians. When the sacrifices were finished, the general ordered a beadle to summon every one of those who were most highly distinguished by their birth or conduct: ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... ROMAN RITES. Let us pause here a moment, and see, in anticipation, to what a depth of intellectual degradation this policy of paganization eventually led. Heathen rites were adopted, a pompous and splendid ritual, gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, processional services, lustrations, gold and silver vases, were introduced. The Roman lituus, the chief ensign of the augurs, became the crozier. Churches were built over the tombs of martyrs, and consecrated with rites borrowed from the ancient ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... number of the Massachusetts delegates, including those we have named, were informally inducted into the organization, in the parlor of B. F. Stevenson, who at the first national encampment a few weeks later was made provisional Commander-in-chief; the ritual and unwritten work was communicated to the new members, and they were fully empowered to organize posts in Massachusetts, General Devens being appointed provisional Grand Commander of the department. On returning from Pittsburg there was something of a rivalry for the organization ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... church today is not higher criticism, elaborate ritual, hair-splitting creeds, but fearless fighting for public health, for good government, for righteous labor conditions, for clean courts of justice. It was the leader of a darky revival who, when asked why he didn't sometimes read the Old Testament, ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell

... come out for a secret purpose that seemed to have to do with the abduction of a certain young white woman for reasons connected with their tribal statecraft or ritual, which is the kind of thing that happens not infrequently among obscure and ancient African tribes. Well, they had abducted their young woman and were in sight of safety and success in their objects, whatever these might be. For what possible reason, then, could they desire to risk ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... underneath all ecclesiastical and mediaeval revivals, and all vagaries of church tradition or of ritual, this feeling seems to be growing with a steady growth, that the real test of a man's religion is the evidence which his life affords of the Christ-like spirit. And this growing feeling gives an ever-fresh interest to the words and ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival

... galling to the Athenians: for it was during the celebration of the mysteries, on the twentieth day of the month Boedromion, that the garrison entered the city. On that day, Iacchus used to be carried in procession from Athens to Eleusis, but now the whole ritual was marred, and the Athenians sadly contrasted this celebration of the mysteries with those of former years. In earlier times,[646] when the city was powerful and flourishing, the splendid spectacle of the celebration of the mysteries used to strike awe and terror ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... sympathy in artistic type. Evolution of tone-language. French writer of 1835. Prince of Waldthurn, in 1690. Spencer's theory. Controversy and answer. Music of primeval man and early civilizations. The Vedas. Hebrew scriptures. Basis of scientific laws. Church ritual. Folk-music. Influence of crusades. Modern music architect of its own fortunes. Present musical vocabulary and literature. Counsel of Pythagoras. What Plato taught. Euripides on song. Auerbach. Martin Luther. Napoleon Bonaparte. Bain and Dr. Marx. Shakespeare, in Merchant of Venice. Wagner's ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... provide for the education of any body of men, we ought seriously to consider the particular functions they are to perform in life. A Roman Catholic clergyman is the minister of a very ritual religion, and by his profession subject to many restraints. His life is a life full of strict observances; and his duties are of a laborious nature towards himself, and of the highest possible trust towards others. The duty of confession alone is sufficient to set in the strongest ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... who came in the early days belonged to extreme dissenting sects believing in salvation through individual choice, based on personal judgments. Preaching was exalted at the expense of ritual; and by substituting new thinking for old habits in religion, the American settlers made it less difficult for other adjustments to be made, even in such a conservative matter as woman's position. It is through no accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians and the Salvation ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... the board with my sleeve, and breaking the wafer cake I was eating, I set down one central piece for the sun, and, "See here!" I said, "good fellow! This morsel shall stand for that sun you have just been welcoming back with quaint ritual. Now stretch your starry knowledge to the utmost, and put down that tankard for a moment. If this be yonder sun and this lesser crumb be the outermost one of our revolving system, and this the next ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... out in the pomp of Rome—the glory of her kingdom. I was taken to the churches on solemn occasions—days of fete and state; I was shown the Papal ritual and ceremonial. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... stability, tat, or a whip, khu. They are generally of wood, or vitrified earthenware. The name and quality of the deceased are found on all those in the same tomb, and thrown on the ground round the sarcophagus. They usually bear in hieroglyphics the sixth chapter of the funeral ritual. Some are found with a blank space left for the name of the deceased, which leads one to think that the relations and friends procured these figures from dealers; the funeral formula, with a list of the customary presentations of offerings for his soul to Osiris were already on them; ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... council. But the princess herself, so far from being willing to despoil religion of the few ornaments and ceremonies which remained in it, was rather inclined to bring the public worship still nearer to the Romish ritual;[*] and she thought that the reformation had already gone too far in shaking off those forms and observances, which, without distracting men of more refined apprehensions, tend, in a very innocent manner, to allure, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... whether reverend Rapp learn'd this in Germany Or no, 't is said his sect is rich and godly, Pious and pure, beyond what I can term any Of ours, although they propagate more broadly. My objection 's to his title, not his ritual, Although I wonder how it ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... which would have annoyed Jan Steen; on the tables is white American cloth; and curtains of coloured material and muslin, with bright ribbons, add to the vivacity of the occasion. To eat poffertjes and wafelen is no light matter: one must regard it as a ritual. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... arranging his most splendid court-dress; for, as in the court of Pekin, the change of ceremonial attire was a great part of the ritual observed at Constantinople. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... is valued primarily for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes as to ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... in forming themselves into a separate body was (1) for the maintenance of a strictly Calvinistic doctrine; (2) for the exercise of a vigorous and exclusive discipline; (3) for the practice of a literal scriptural ritual, especially in the matter of Baptism. In Church polity they follow the Independents. The Baptists hold that immersion is essential to the validity of the ordinance. Their leading idea is that the Church must consist of true Christians, and ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous

... hatchet-faced hollow-eyed ascetic, harsh and bigoted in the company of his equals whether clerical or lay, but with his flock tender and comprehending and patient. The only indulgence he accorded to his senses was in the forms and ceremonies of his ritual, the vestments and furniture of his church. His vicar was able to give him a free hand in the obscure squalor of Lima Street; the ecclesiastical battles he himself had to fight with bishops who were pained or with retired military men who were disgusted ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... exactly ten minutes. He took an old-fashioned hour-glass up into the pulpit with him, and when it ran out he concluded his discourse. Redmarley folk highly approved this ritual. When stray parsons came to preach, especially if they were dignitaries of the church, a body could never tell what they might be at, and the suspense was wearing. Why, the Dean of Garchester had been known to keep on for half ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker

... prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday needs,—turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra is, it seems to me, an ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... and this spirit seemed to her a veritable cult, a sort of religion, wherein the Old Maid was the priestess, the Spinster the officiating devotee, the thing worshipped the Great Unbeautiful, and the ritual unremitting, unrelenting Housework. She ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... the incense," he replied, "and was reciting the secret ritual. I cannot explain. But your shots were wasted. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... 15th there was a procession and service of the mass in the Cathedral; and, wishing to show my men a place of worship, I took them to the church, which now serves as the chief one of the see of Angola and Congo. There is an impression on some minds that a gorgeous ritual is better calculated to inspire devotional feelings than the simple forms of the Protestant worship. But here the frequent genuflexions, changing of positions, burning of incense, with the priests' back turned to the people, the laughing, talking, and manifest irreverence of the singers, with ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... Egypt were compelled to give up their messages, and the world hoped that we should know the secrets of life. That hope was disappointed; there was nothing in the records but superstition and useless ritual. But here we go back to the beginning; the antiquity of Egypt is nothing to the age of these signs—they date from unfathomable time. In them the sun has written his commands, and the wind inscribed deep thought. They were before superstition began; they were composed in the old, old world, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... Accordingly, in the spring and summer of 1838, a large scheme to give armed support to the republicans of Canada was secretly organized all along the northern boundary of the United States. It was a secret society of 'Hunters' Lodges,' with ritual, passwords, degrees. Each 'Lodge,' was an independent local body, but a band of organizers kept control of the whole series from New York to Detroit. The 'Hunters' are uniformly called 'brigands' and 'banditti' by the British regular ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan

... to be sent to these places also. He also dedicated the temple of Jupiter Tonans, concerning which event these two traditions survive,—that at the time thunder occurred during the ritual, and that later Augustus had a dream, which I shall proceed to describe. He thought that the throng had come to do reverence to the deity, partly attracted by the novelty of his name and form and partly because he had been put in place ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... own religious life we are ourselves often and notoriously wise in the penny and foolish in the pound. As, for instance, when we are so scrupulous and so conscientious about forms and ceremonies, about times and places, and so on. In short, the whole ritual that has risen up around spiritual religion in all our churches, from that of the Pope himself out to that of George Fox—it is all the penny rather than the pound. This rite and that ceremony; this habit and that tradition; this ancient and long-established usage, as well as that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... it were an established ritual. Had she been using her son's sick-room, Phyllis wondered, as a regular weeping-place? She could feel in Mrs. Harrington, even in this mortal sickness, the tremendous driving influence which is often ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer

... overcome this obstacle. We have frequent records of floods to the extent at times of causing the daily service to be suspended owing to the water actually being within the building itself; as late as 1763 there is an account of a specially high one thus interrupting the daily ritual. The whole valley of the Salisbury Avon to its sea-mouth at Christchurch, about twenty-nine miles distant is still under water for months at a time during ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White

... of the earliest and most widely spread of all human institutions. Behind the laws regulating sacrifice in the Old Testament there lies the long history of Shemitic ritual and religion. These sacrificial rites were not then introduced for the first time. They formed part of the inheritance of the Israelites from their far-off ancestors; an inheritance shared by them with ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... have viewed with indignation and sorrow. Prayers were ordered to be said at six o'clock in the evening, when a Roman Catholic clergyman entered the sacred edifice, and performed the service according to the ritual of his church.[141] ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... in all Rome, so said the priest, and this spot was the Temple of Isis. Here the seance was held, and no demon appeared, but a regular God of one of the first circles. So terrified was an onlooker that he crushed to death the living birds which he held in his hands for some ritual or ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang

... always declared, would have to be omitted when she stood at the altar. But as she had, in her maidenhood, a very strong liking for the handsome young Mr. Uhler, and, as she could not obtain so material a change in the church ritual, as the one needed to meet her case, she wisely made a virtue of necessity, and went to the altar with her lover. The difficulty was reconciled to her own ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur

... to be the form of Christianity most successful in proselytizing uncivilized races, which are impressed more through their eyes than their understanding. If the grandeur of the ritual, the magnificence of the processions, the lustre of the church vessels and the images themselves have never been understood by the masses in the strictly symbolic sense in which they appeal to us, at least they have had their influence in drawing millions to civilization and to a unique ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... are much alike in their ceremonial aspects; short or long, solemn-spoken ancient ritual or commonplace legal form, the essence of them all is that this man and this woman say, "I will." So it was in Walter Drury's study. And then the little group seated itself about the pastor; Marty with Alma Wetherell, soon to become Mrs. Marty; all the Shenks, the elder Farwells, John Wesley, ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... of my sailors, who had come to a determination to make an honest woman of Poll and an ass of himself, at one and the same time. The ceremony took place on the quarter-deck. "Who gives this woman away?" said I, with due emphasis, according to the ritual. "I do," cried the boatswain in a gruff voice, taking the said lady by the arm and shoving her towards me, as if he thought her not worth keeping. Every thing went on seriously, nevertheless. The happy pair were kneeling down on the union-jack, which had been folded on the deck in consideration ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... inspired hymns and odes to Nature's God. And then the checker'd history of the nation furnish'd allusions, illustrations, and subjects for epic display—the glory of the sanctuary, the offerings, the splendid ritual, the Holy City, and lov'd Palestine with its pleasant valleys and wild tracts." Dr. Mendes said "that rhyming was not a characteristic of Hebrew poetry at all. Metre was not a necessary mark of poetry. Great poets discarded it; the early Jewish poets knew ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... the greatest influence upon the negroes were those which relied least upon ritual and most upon exhilaration. The Baptist and Methodist were foremost, and the latter had the special advantage of the chain of camp meetings which extended throughout the inland regions. At each chosen spot the planters and farmers of the countryside would jointly erect a great ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... of fonts and their origin had qualified him in this particular subject. Fully conscious of the inexpediency of contests on minor ritual differences, he yet felt a sudden impulse towards a mild intellectual tournament with the eager old man—purely as an exercise of his wits in the defence of ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... outrage!—witness it ye fathers whose daughters do not always obey your high behests. Here was a call for the exercise of the highest qualities of authority!—bear witness to that, all you good people who have at one time or another dragged your wives out of churches because you did not like the ritual, or who have dragged them into churches because suitors armed with money-bags or aristocratic names or political influence, stood within and beckoned! Here was a necessity for proving what Judge Owen had only a day or two before so loudly asserted—his ascendency in his ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... strange farrago, this romantic drama with which the vast audience had replaced the Sabbath pieties, the home-keeping ritual of the Ghetto, in their swift transformation to American life. Confined entirely to Jewish characters, it had borrowed much from the heroes and heroines of the Western world, remaining psychologically true only in its minor characters, which were conceived and rendered with wonderful ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... contained which are not on the surface, and things which belong to the ritual, and not to belief. Points of faith may lie under the surface: points of observance need not be in Scripture at all. The consecrating power is a point of ritual, yet it is indirectly taught in Scripture, though not brought out, when Christ said, 'Do this,' for he spake to the apostles, who were priests, not to his disciples generally."—Tracts for the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... official ceremonial. In the Church of England this revival began some forty years earlier, and it has, in our day, changed the whole conduct of public worship. The revival of Roman Catholicism in England with its processions and solemn ritual has been equally significant. By gratifying the common human instinct for spectacle and drama the monarchy has gained the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... was gifted with a low and beautiful voice, and by the light of the moon he read the ritual of marriage so solemnly that even the villains who stood round ceased their jokes and sneers and were silent. All things were done in order, though Juanna made no reply to the usual questions. With much sham courtesy the loathsome Pereira presided over the ceremony—their hands were ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... composition—may be made the foundation of beauty, for the harmony weaving about that one basic tone produces a consistent, insistent quality not felt in pure variety of chord sequences. In like manner the intoning voice in a ritual may—though it rarely does—possess a solemn beauty. But the public speaker should shun the monotone as he ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... that such devotion would ensure a return of material prosperity. But the existence of such a belief is in itself an index to the people's character, and we may take it that the record faithfully represents the relations of the Sumerians to their gods, and the important place which worship and ritual occupied in the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... the ceremonial of the Jewish ritual as the law of Moses? It must be answered that Paul was a Jew. He was familiar with the Jewish scriptures. He had read the following passages and believed them, and was grounded in the truth which they declare, that "by the hand of Moses" they were ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard

... his pocket) 'is the book which was answered by my brother, John Davidson.' While Bancroft was stunned and silenced by the impetuosity of the attack, Melville went on to charge him with the chief responsibility for the Romish ritual that had been introduced into the English Church, and for the silencing of the Puritan ministers; and then taking him by the white sleeves of his rochet, he shook them 'in his maner frielie and roundlie, and called them Romish rags and the mark of the Beast.' The Primate was ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison

... showing that unwavering principles of order preside over all his proceedings. The world, the intelligent universe, must be prepared for such a stupendous event as the incarnation and death of the Son of God; prophecies, promises, types, and ritual institutions must gradually open the scheme, ere the final development could be suitably made. After forty centuries of preparation, Christ came; and yet years must pass away, before, in that order of events which God had ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark

... spectacle met the boys' eyes. Clustered about a sort of altar, which they had not noticed before, was a group of the cliff-dwellers who seemed to be deeply interested in something that was going forward. A loud sound of chanting and intoning of what seemed to be a solemn ritual was the first inkling the boys had of ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... study how these spirits can be managed, and so arises a priesthood; and the priests, or medicine men as they are called in their earliest forms, gradually, for their own ends, elaborate and wrap round their profession with ritual and mystery. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... orders of priests, endowed with lands, who kept up the elaborate liturgy and ritual of the temples, and also preserved whatever knowledge of astronomy, history, medicine, etc., had been handed ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs

... a matter of the utmost importance in Roman life, and in all the forms of it we find this importance marked by due solemnity of ritual. In two other forms, besides confarreatio, the bride could be brought under the hand of her husband, viz., coemptio and usus, with which we are not here specially concerned; for long before the last century of the Republic all three methods had become practically obsolete, or ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... noble 'doubter,' but speak the words of truth and soberness. Mr. Willcoxen was married privately, when and where I said, to a beautiful, fair-haired lady, whose name heard in the ritual was Marian. And my husband, Olly Murray, was the secret witness ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... wonderful thought, also mirrored in this piece of ancient ritual, that God delights in men's sacrifices and surrenders and services. 'If I were hungry, I would not tell thee,' said the Psalmist in God's name in regard to outward sacrifices; 'Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?' But he does 'eat' the better sacrifices that loving hearts ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... hurriedly constructed—a rude affair of planks and spars that could be disposed of in a very few moments if necessity arose—that supported a piano. A canvas screen, stretched between two stanchions behind the stage, did duty as scenery, and afforded the performers a "green-room"—for, of all the ritual connected with appearing upon a stage, the business of "making-up" lies nearest to the sailor's heart. Provide him with a lavish supply of grease-paint, wigs, and the contents of the chaplain's or the officer of his division's ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... perfectly, like a ritual There arrived the time when the Prince set down his tiny coffee-cup and leaned back detachedly, while the waiter with the bill went through his celebrated impersonation of a man receiving a favor. Together they passed out between the great glass doors ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... quite unable to resist the temptation of setting a Flemish psalm and preaching a Flemish sermon within the walls which had for so many centuries been vocal only to the Roman tongue and the Roman ritual. All that he would concede to the entreaties of his colleague and of the magistrate, was that his sermon should be short. In this, however, he had overrated his powers of retention, for the sermon not only became a long one, but he had preached another upon the afternoon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... standpoint of Moses is the legal. Jehovah stands related to his people as the Holy, as lawgiver and judge; and the true moral consecration to God is symbolically expressed in the ritual, especially in the sacrifice, while the relation of the people to God is based upon the mediation of the priests. Along with this, and out of Mosaism, after the time of Samuel, prophetism was developed, in which independent religious conviction, outside ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten

... morals are rooted in the minds so deeply, that their denial by any religion would be a justification of our quitting or rejecting it. If a pagan found his ecclesiastical polity essentially founded on lying and cheating, or his ritual essentially impure, or his moral code essentially unjust or cruel, we conceive this would be a sufficient reason for his renouncing it for one which was free from these hateful characteristics. Such again is the kind of private ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... the law of the Nazarite when the days of his separation were fulfilled. The first thing that strikes our notice is, "He shall be brought," not, he shall come. Why is this? and why is it that the law is so explicit as to every detail of ritual and service, scarcely leaving any room for voluntary action?—we say scarcely, because in the twenty-first verse there is one little clause, "Beside that that his hand shall get," which does leave room for additional ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor

... black-robed figures. He recognized the Winnebagos, clad in bathing suits and bathing caps, and covered with their ponchos, calmly having their Ceremonial Meeting in the pouring rain. The song over, they sat down in a circle and went through their ritual with the water streaming over their firelit faces. A play was enacted, which he made out to be a pantomime presentation of "Cinderella," and he recognized Nyoda in the guise of the fairy godmother. Hinpoha was the prince and Migwan ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey

... the honest Andrew, pastor of Crete, on the works of the most beatific father, John the Damascene. He is religious—unusually so! I used to lead him on, and he would sing to me with tears in his eyes: 'Come ye brethren, and we will give the last kiss to him who has gone to his rest...' From the ritual of the burial of laymen. No, just think: it is only in the Russian soul alone that ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... duplication of a butler's obsequiousness. He offered the overcoat to the old gentleman's arms with the same air. Then he held up the collar of the greatcoat with one hand and with the other reached under its skirts, and drew down the Captain's long day coat with little jerks, as if he were going through a ritual. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... left hand side of the Konigstrasse, east, stood an historical relic of the days when Austria, together with the small independent states, strove to shake off the Napoleonic yoke. In those days students formed secret societies; societies full of strange ritual, which pushed devotion to fanaticism, which stopped at nothing, not even assassination. To exterminate the French, to regain their ancestral privileges, to rescue their country from its prostrate humiliation, many sacrificed their ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... feeling his way towards a technique which would have approached that of the New Comedy or even the Elizabethan stage, and would perhaps have done without a Chorus altogether. In Aeschylus Greek tragedy had been a thing of traditional forms and clear-cut divisions; the religious ritual showed through, and the visible gods and the disguised dancers were allowed their full value. And Euripides in the matter of outward formalism went back to the Aeschylean type and even beyond it: prologue, chorus, messenger, visible god, all the traditional forms were left clear-cut and ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles

... and hailed with relief by Luther. But the instinctive doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate from any priestly ceremony, but which in those days seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where it was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex abhorrence, and later Christian ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... departeth."[167] Such are its few and simple directions for the ordinary form of public worship; and as if even these might fail to beget in the minds of some of the old priests a sense of their freedom from minute restrictions and a burdensome ritual, it is added: "It shall not be necessarie for the minister daylie to repeat all these things before mentioned; but, beginning with some maner of confession, to proceede to the sermon, which ended, he either useth the prayer for all estates before mentioned, or else prayeth ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell



Words linked to "Ritual" :   habit, practice, use, ritual dance, Holy Communion, solemnization, wedding, rite of passage, rite, celebration, usance, manduction, ablution, marriage, communion, usage, espousal, solemnisation, betrothal, marriage ceremony, ritualize, ceremonial dance, ritual killing, sacramental manduction, religious rite, custom, pattern



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