"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... without delight of that sweet saint, Cecilia. What an example she gives us! In the midst of a pagan world, in the very heart of danger, at the moment when she was to be united to a man whose love was so utterly of earth, it seems to me as if she should have wept and trembled with fear. But instead, "during the music ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... practical inhabitants of Venice, in Padua, which had been subject to her since 1405, speculative thought and ideal studies were in full swing. There was no re-birth in Venice, whose tradition was unbroken and where "men were too genuinely pagan to care about the echo of a paganism in the remote past." St. Mark was the deity of Venice, and "the other twelve Apostles" were only obscurely connected with her religious life, which was strong and orthodox, but untroubled by metaphysical ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... speaking German, were of less pure German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population, Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... morality, but is forced to construct a mythology which outrages all moral considerations. Taken as a serious statement of fact, the anthropomorphism of the vulgar belief was open to the objections which Socrates brought against the Pagan mythology. The supreme ruler was virtually represented as arbitrary, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... determining the gender. Of most of the passions and moral qualities of man the ancients formed deities, as they did of various other things: and, when these are personified, they are usually made male or female, according as they were gods or goddesses in the pagan mythology. The same rule applies in other cases: and thus the planet Jupiter will be masculine; Venus, feminine: the ocean, Oceanus, masculine: rivers, months, and winds, the same: the names of places, countries, and islands, feminine."—Churchill's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... They steeped themselves in antiquity, and they put to the greatest value it has ever received the name of poet; they demanded that the poet should be a kind of king, or seer. Half seriously, half as a product of mere scholarship, the pagan conception of the muse ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... clearly foresaw the conflicts and trials that awaited him; and in near communion with God, he yielded himself up as an entire self-sacrifice, anticipating the blessed recompense of the reward. In the early Pagan persecutions, the church was sometimes symbolically represented by an ox with a plough on the one side, and an altar on the other, with the inscription, "Ready for either"—prepared for work or slaughter. Such was the spirit of Renwick, as he ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... interesting to know how the name of Simon came to be bestowed upon the Simon Turrald who fled to Cornwall after Bosworth. The name is Biblical—not Norman. The Normans were pagan, worshipping Woden and Thor, though supposed to be Christianized after Charles the Simple ceded ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the border, one who sallies from his haunt in the fen and roams over the country near by. This probably pagan nuisance is now furnished with biblical credentials as a fiend or devil in good standing, so that all Christian Englishmen might read about him. "Grendel" may mean one who grinds ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... first time that FERAMORZ had ever ventured upon so much prose before FADLADEEN and it may easily be conceived what effect such prose as this must have produced upon that most orthodox and most pagan- hating personage. He sat for some minutes aghast, ejaculating only at intervals, "Bigoted conquerors!—sympathy with Fire-worshippers!"[191]— while FERAMORZ happy to take advantage of this almost speechless horror of the Chamberlain ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... is a divine rite and husband and wife are equal.—Nothing like this teaching had been practiced in the pagan world. Woman was simply the servant, the creature, of man. She was to do his bidding, and might be divorced for trivial cause, or for none. Man was supreme and his will was law. The home in the Christian sense did not exist, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... sea. "I wonder..." she began, and her voice trailed off into silence. Betty began slowly to repack the basket. "Sometimes I pray," said Eileen Cavendish, "when I want things to happen very much. And sometimes I just hold my thumbs like a pagan. Sometimes I do both. Let's ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... But elsewhere there is, in rather narrow and usual limits, a good deal else. Charlemagne's daughter, and the daughters of peers and paladins, figure: and their characteristics are not very different from those of the pagan damsels. It is, indeed, unnecessary to convert them,—a process to which their miscreant sisters usually submit with great goodwill,—and they are also relieved from the necessity of showing the extreme ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the battle with his right arm bare."—"Pray, sir," quoth Sancho, "why are these two great men going together by the ears?"—"The occasion of their quarrel is this," answered Don Quixote: "Alifanfaron, a strong Pagan, is in love with Pentapolin's daughter, a very beautiful lady and a Christian; now her father refuses to give her in marriage to the heathen prince, unless he abjure his false belief and embrace the Christian religion."—"Burn ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... the altar of Our Lady of La Salette, offering to the adoration of the people the most coarse and revolting of impostures. And in the course of the service, an image of the Virgin, from which the taste of a Greek Pagan would have recoiled, was borne round the aisles in procession, manifestly the favorite object of worship in a church nominally devoted to the worship of God. An educated man in France, even one of the best character and naturally religious, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... peace was made with Spain, and the children of Cromwell's Puritan soldiers were beginning to grow rich by importing slaves for Roman-Catholic Spaniards, the Maroons still held their own wild empire in the mountains, and, being sturdy heathens every one, practised Obeah rites in approved pagan fashion. ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Originally a pagan temple, built by the Catieuchlans for the Mogons, ancient English gods, it became a palace for Ethelwolf and a fortress for Edward the Confessor; then it was elevated to the dignity of a prison, in 1199, by John Lackland. Such was Southwark Jail. This jail, at first intersected ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of London having beene destroyed and brent by the Danes and other pagan ennemies about the yere of Christ 839, was by Alfred King of the West Saxons, in the yere 886, repayred and honorably restored and made ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... faith the different religions of the earth. [3] Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power and immortality, it was universally confessed, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... civilized. Pedantry and learning of the most minute sort existed side by side with the most violent excesses of medieval barbarism. The Church had undertaken the gigantic task of subduing and enlightening the semi-pagan peoples of France and Germany ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... candles, drums that were used to summon the people to religious ceremonies, and various other articles connected with their mysterious beliefs, and the Committee of the Exhibition awarded them a medal for "a collection of invaluable objects for the study of the pagan religion of the Tcheremis." ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... lovely statue of Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through sin to a conception of the necessity of atonement, we feel, that, while we looked to be entertained with the airiest of fictions, we were dealing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... during the Christian Era, is known as the "Eclipse of Phlegon," from the fact that we are indebted for the account to a pagan writer of that name. This eclipse took place in A.D. 29, and the total phase was visible a little to the north of Palestine. It has sometimes been confounded with the "darkness of the Crucifixion," which event took place near the date in question; but ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... girl, nurtured in a Christian land, a regular attendant upon church, was a pagan and belonged to a pagan family. Not one of her household worshipped God. Mr. and Mrs. Marsden would have been exceedingly shocked and angered if they had been told they were heathens. But at the time when Paul found among the multitudinous ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... the streets on their way to the amphitheatre to see the gladiatorial fight; when there was feasting and revelry in every house; when merchants were exulting in the midst of thriving trade; when the pagan temples were hung with garlands and filled with gifts; when the slaves were at work in the mills, the kitchens, and the baths; when the gladiators were fighting the wild beasts of the arena—then it was that a swift destruction swept over the city ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... Caere revered them when the republic was broken, as readily as when it flourished". Thus is the word ceremony associated at once with the devotion of Albinus, with the Gaulish invasion of the Capitol, and with Caere, one of the twelve cities of Etruria, now called Cervetri or Caere vetus[1]. The Pagan Romans derived their religious rites from Etruria, and in particular from Caere on account of its proximity to Rome: this may be another reason for the adoption of the term ceremony, which was afterwards applied to ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard it claimed for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent judge. At least, in a merely human character, Haddo comes off not wholly amiss in the matter of these Traquairs: not that he showed any graces of the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan decency, which might almost tempt one to be concerned about his sudden, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... To restore or to spare. Let the hope be your own, Be the memory mine. "Once of yore, when for man Faith yet lived, ere this age of the sluggard began, Men aroused to the knowledge of evil, fled far From the fading rose-gardens of sense, to the war With the Pagan, the cave in the desert, and sought Not repose, but employment in action or thought, Life's strong earnest, in all things! oh, think not of me, But yourself! for I plead for your own destiny: I plead for your life, with its duties ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... began with Greek pagan cults, but passed on to Christian hagiology, and discussed the legend of St. Mark with a fair measure of agreement. Then, when the coffee had come in, and they had I become friends at ease and amity, the Bishop told ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... very tolerant and hopeful. Many of them have changed their beliefs in the last few years. They are changing every day. Those who will not change will die! We always have this assurance, and in this battle for independence, many a woman has found comfort in poor Swinburne's pagan hymn of thanksgiving: ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... attendants. The suttee is still thought no wrong. There is habit of thought that justifies habit of deed. Southey, in his History of the Brazils, tells a sad tale of a dying converted Indian. In her dying moments, cannibalism prevailed over Christian conscience; and was the Pagan conscience silent? She was asked by those standing about her, if they could do any thing for her. She replied, that she thought she could pick the bones of a little child's hand, but that she had no one now who would go and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... of burying the dead in the floor of dwelling-houses, is prevalent on the Gold Coast of Africa, as far as that country is known to Europeans. The ceremony is purely Pagan, and without any form, except that of the females of the family of the deceased and their friends making a mournful lamentation; and in some instances they work their feelings up to such a degree of apparent sorrow, that their conduct has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... the shameless villain Saladin, the cause of the commotion, thrusting his slender nose into my hand to beg pardon and make up! 'Oh wickedest of soldans! Most iniquitous pagan! Soul of a Turk!'—but there is no resisting the good-humoured creature's penitence. I must pat him. 'There! there! Now we will go to the copse; I am sure we shall find no worse malefactors than ourselves—shall ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... both in the drama and in hymns. Her play, 'Vivia Perpetua' (1841), tells of the author's rapt aspiration after an ideal, symbolized in a pagan's conversion to Christianity. She published also 'The Royal Progress,' a ballad (1845), on the giving tip of the feudal privileges of the Isle of Wight to Edward I.; and poems upon the humanitarian interests which the Anti-Corn-Law League endeavored ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... She was "on the other side," and was now preparing to make love in the enemy's camp. Nothing pleased her more than to mingle art with love, linking the intelligence of her brain with the emotion, such as it was, of her thoroughly pagan heart. And the feeling that she was a sort of traitress to her beloved Jacques and Henriette was quite enchanting. One thing more gave a very feminine zest to her pursuit—the thought of Charmian, who knew nothing about it, but who, no doubt, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... loitered away the time which ought to have been devoted to good Mother Hubbard, in her fit of lumbago, and returned without having set eyes on that afflicted Christian, to amaze his worthy sister with poetic babblings about wood-nymphs and such pagan impieties,' ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... in ethics a Christian; Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll. Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan. Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair. Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat; I, child of the abolitionist idealism— ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... food; and, supported on blocks of stones, rails in his lands. He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of the wood, and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same hard material. In Pagan Tahiti, a coco-nut branch was the symbol of regal authority. Laid upon the sacrifice in the temple, it made the offering sacred; and with it the priests chastised and put to flight the evil spirits which assailed them. The supreme majesty ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Epicureans, that sublime indifference and unbroken repose are the only states of being worthy of the gods. Viewed in the light of true philosophy, no less than of Christianity, how base and grovelling does this conception appear! The sublime description of the pagan poet becomes the fitting expression and defence of the very theory it was ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... which, while the rulers were Christian in name, and the land was mapped out into sees ruled by Christian bishops, and monasteries were springing up to teach {44} the young and to set an example of religious life, the general atmosphere was almost avowedly pagan. Men said, tells Gregory, that "if a man has to pass between pagan altars and God's church there is no harm in his paying homage to both," and the lives of such men showed that it is impossible to serve God ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... Agriculture production remains Sudan's most important sector, employing 80% of the work force and contributing 39% of GDP, but most farms remain rain-fed and susceptible to drought. Chronic instability - including the long-standing civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian/pagan south, the ethnic purges in Darfur, adverse weather, and weak world agricultural prices - ensure that much of the population will remain at or below the poverty line ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... told that the sentimental love of our day was unknown to the pagan world, he would not cite last the two lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, and the will of the powerful Roman general, in which he expressed the desire, wherever he might die, to be buried beside the woman whom he loved to his latest hour. His wish was fulfilled, and the love-life of these ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ecclesiastics at last quitting the church, got into carts filled with mud and filth, amusing themselves with flinging it upon the crowds who followed them in such streets as were wide enough for a cart to pass. It is conjectured that these festivities, with their nonsensical ceremonies, were of pagan origin, and probably the celebration of the Carnival is derived from the same source; many attempts were made to abolish so disgraceful a custom as the continuance of the Fetes des Fous, with the absurdities incidental to its revelries, but it was not until the Parisians became more enlightened ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... condition. Thus, the admirable nature of Justice, and the happiness of the Just man, are a proper theme to be extolled with all the power of eloquence. It has been so with every civilized people, pagan as well as Christian. In the dialogues of Plato, justice is a prominent subject, and is adorned with the full splendour of his genius. Aristotle, in one of the few moments when he rises to poetry, pronounces justice "greater than the evening-star or the morning-star". ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... dramatic association, acting every other Sunday; and two club-houses for balls and concerts. A printing office and a newspaper, published weekly or oftener, are, in such towns, establishments of course. Wyborg, the most ancient town in Jutland, the capital in the time of the pagan kings, and once a great city, with twelve parish churches and six monasteries, but now containing no remains of its former grandeur, and only about 3000 inhabitants, has its newspaper three times a week, its classical school, its burger school, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... the traces of ancient barrows. It is advisable that the position of all such mounds should be carefully noted and recorded, and where possible excavations made which may help in settling many vexed questions, and enable us to understand more fully the condition of the pagan Saxon, ere the light of Christianity had dawned ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... view in Rev. 9, all are agreed in applying to the Saracens and Turks. The dragon of Rev. 12, is the acknowledged symbol of Pagan Rome. The leopard beast of Rev. 13 can be shown to be identical with the eleventh horn of the fourth beast of Dan. 7, and hence to symbolize the papacy. The scarlet beast and woman of Rev. 17, as evidently apply also to Rome under papal rule, the symbols having especial reference to the distinction ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... I do not well understand. It is easy to see, that what is called by distinction society and fashion, has good laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its character. "I overheard Jove,[453] one day," said Silenus,[454] "talking of destroying the earth; he said, it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the "romantic school," of which the aesthetic poetry is an afterthought, mark a transition not so much from the pagan to the medieval ideal, as from a lower to a higher degree of passion in literature. The end of the eighteenth century, swept by vast disturbing currents, experienced an excitement of spirit of which one note was a reaction against an outworn classicism ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the way of 'Baetyli' of pagan antiquity, which were of round form; they were supposed to be animated, by means of magical incantations, with a portion of the Deity; they were consulted on occasions of great and pressing emergency as a kind of divine oracle, and were suspended either round the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... license is the one that can serve the cosmogony best. In the next he rather surprises the reader by exhibiting himself as the eulogist and expounder of Jesus Christ,—but not after the manner of Saint Paul. No doubt, the secular and semi-pagan tone of this dissertation will jar against the orthodoxy of a great many readers,—to whom, however, it will be interesting as a literary curiosity. But it is meant to show the character of Shelley in a more amiable light ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Discharg'd from hospitable Tree; I did to Planter's Booth repair, And there at Breakfast nobly Fare On rashier broil'd of infant Bear: I thought the Cub delicious Meat, Which ne'er did ought but Chesnuts eat; Nor was young Orsin's flesh the worse, Because he sucked a Pagan Nurse. Our Breakfast done, my Landlord stout, Handed a Glass of Rum about; Pleas'd with the Treatment I did find, I took my leave of Oast so kind; Who to oblige me, did provide, His eldest son to ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... incantations, and of a forgotten speech. Attempts have been made to interpret, for instance, the familiar 'Down, down, derry down,' as a Celtic invocation to assemble at the hill of sacrifice—a survival of pagan times when the altars smoked with human victims. It need only be said that these ingenious theorists have not yet proved their case; and that the origin of the refrain is a subject involved in still greater obscurity than that of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... The old pagan looked evil and cruel in her fury of loyalty to that house which begat her beloved Dea. Her eyes glistened as those of a cat waiting to fall upon its prey; her wrinkled hands looked like claws that were ready to tear the very flesh and sinew from the traitor's breast. Her voice, always ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of the opera has to do with the conflict between Christian and Pagan, Galician and Gipsy, so the music takes its color now from the folk-song and dance of Mr. Paderewski's own people, and anon from the Gipsies who frequent the mountainous scenes in which the opera plays. The use of an Oriental interval, beloved ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Wisdom of Solomon, which was probably written at Alexandria during the first century B.C.E., is marked by the same spirit. There again we meet with the glorification of the one true God of Israel, and the denunciation of pagan idolatry; and while the author writes in Greek and shows the influence of Greek ideas, he makes the Psalms and the Proverbs his models of literary form. "Love righteousness," he begins, "ye that be judges of the earth; think ye of the Lord with a good mind and in singleness ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... characteristic collection; a volume full of the poetry of simple people and humble souls. Although she has called herself "a back-door sort of bard," she is particularly effective in the old ballad measure and in her quaint portrayal of Irish peasants rather than of Gaelic kings and pagan heroes. She has also written three novels, five books for children, a later volume of Poems of the War and, during the conflict, served as a nurse at ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the woman once was woo'd; Forth leapt the savage from his lair, And fell'd her, and to nuptials rude He dragg'd her, bleeding, by the hair. From that to Chloe's dainty wiles And Portia's dignified consent, What distance! Bat these Pagan styles How far below Time's fair intent! Siegfried sued Kriemhild. Sweeter life Could Love's self covet? Yet 'tis snug In what rough sort he chid his wife For want of curb upon her tongue! Shall Love, where last I leave him, halt? Nay; none can fancy or forsee To ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... and water. At such times my Macassar boys would put a minute fragment of rice and meat or fish on a leaf, and lay it on a stone or stump as an offering to the deity of the spot; for though nominal Mahometans the Macassar people retain many pagan superstitions, and are but lax in their religious observances. Pork, it is true, they hold in abhorrence, but will not refuse wine when offered them, and consume immense quantities of "sagueir," or palm-wine, which is about as intoxicating as ordinary beer or cider. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... monarch was not a Hebrew but a Gentile, and a very wicked one. He once invited eleven famous doctors of the holy nation to supper. They were received in the most magnificent style, and were then invited, under pain of death, either to eat pork, to accept a pagan mistress, or to drink wine consecrated to idols. After long consultation, the doctors, in great tribulation, agreed to save their heads by accepting the last alternative, since the first and second were forbidden by Moses, and the last only by the Rabbins. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... he bathed before he dressed. A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes! You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed: His wife and himself ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Hyndsville used to say that Hynds House never should have come to Freeman Hynds, Mrs. Scarlett's father; but to Richard Hynds, his elder brother—that same Richard whose initials are cut in the base of the statue he brought in his pagan godlessness from Italy, and which his brother afterward buried, wishing to remove all trace of him and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... were written in Greek. A number of them are historical, and of great value as illustrating the spirit and thought of the age to which they refer. The other class of writers includes the work of Christian authors. Greek and Latin writings wholly different from Pagan literature, began to appear soon after the first century, and their purifying and ennobling influence was more and more felt as time passed. The primitive Christians held these writings of the Greek and Latin fathers in great esteem, and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his Diary, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of English writers. Not merely his themes {242} but his whole way of thinking was pagan and antique. He composed, indifferently, in English or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus portions of his narrative poem, Gebir, 1798, were written originally in Latin, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... if I had not heard a good deal of it before. You are chronically devoted to one or other of us, my beloved Pagan! That's the root of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... tremendous task of rightly training her children, will need to exercise herself daily in all the Christian virtues—and if there are any Pagan ones not included under faith, hope, charity, patience, and humility, to exercise those also. With these virtues to support her, she will be able to use whatever knowledge she may acquire. Without ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... to abolish the noisy bacchanalian festivals of the pagan times, but it has changed the names. That which it has given to these "days of liberty" announces the ending of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow; carn-ival means, literally, "farewell to flesh!" It ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... basilei, chamai pese daidalos aula; ouketi Phoibos echei kaluban, ou mantida daphnen, ou pagan ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI., who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of Love and ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... I answer, 'lots of people,' and especially those who worship the pagan divinities of literature. The same thing happens—but their fury is more excusable, because they have less natural intelligence—with the lovers of music. Instead of being sorry for the poor folks who have 'no ear,' ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... about to say the pagan poet—quickly recognized, to a degree, that he was not among a group of barbarians; and I remember the marked respect with which he observed my father's noble head and countenance, and the attention with which he listened ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... God," he said. "I'm a pagan sometimes in the sun, but never on a night like this. Then one knows things one isn't sure of at other times. Why, I suppose there isn't really a world at all! God is simply thinking of these things, and ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... few. These Indians had originally been assembled around Ville Marie but were removed to the Fort des Messieurs where Montreal College stands in 1662, and thence, towards the beginning of the 18th century, to Sault-au-Recollet and in 1717 to Oka. The method of burial, also, is not Christian, but pagan, and similar in every respect to early ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall
... (ob. 217 A.D.), a Christian writer whose education had been pagan, is an instance of this, "God has not forbidden us to rest from good deeds when keeping the sabbath. He permits those who can grasp them to share in the divine mysteries and in the sacred light. He has not revealed ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... beliefs and practices of our immediate forefathers, we may, I think, profitably occupy a short time in gaining some general idea of the prominent features of ancient Pagan religions, for without doubt much of the mythology and superstitious practice of our forefathers had a Pagan origin. I shall not attempt any exhaustive treatise on this subject, for the task is beyond me, but a slight notice of ancient theology may not here be irrelevant. The late George ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... the haste with which the army moved, and very impatient were the warriors; for the whole of France lay between them and fair Italy, and they knew that weeks of weary marching must be endured, ere they could meet their Pagan foe in battle, and drive him out of ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... of a better, I can with patience embrace this life," says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet in my best meditations do I often desire death. For a pagan there may be some motive to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma—that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come." We are now of the earth; but all the high reason ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... romances, but from the Bible or rabbinical writings, and actually interprets them also in this new and unorthodox way. So bold a departure from traditional usage proves the independence and originality of the young painter. These two little pictures thus become historically the first-fruits of the neo-pagan spirit which was gradually supplanting the older ecclesiastical thought, and Giorgione, once having cast conventionalism aside, readily turns to classical mythology to find subjects for the free play of fancy. The "Adrastus and Hypsipyle" ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... ours: Great Carle, the Emperor who rules Sweet France Comes to this land to 'whelm us with his might. To give him battle I no army have, Nor people to array against his host: Your counsel give me, Lords, as my wise men, And so defend your King from death and shame;" But answer none a single Pagan gave, Save Blancandrin del Castel ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the Protestant fold there ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and Phallic orgies Whirl around me; and the marges Of the wood are torn and rifted With lascivious laugh and shout. And barbarian there again,— Shameless with the shameless rout, Bacchus lusting in each vein,— With her pagan lips on mine, Like a god made drunk with wine, On I reel; and, in the revels, Her loose hair, the dance dishevels, Blows, and 'thwart my vision swims All the ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... not to say Handelian, is this attitude towards the Pagan tendencies which, it is clear, predominated at the festa of St. Mary of the Snow. In old days a feast was meant to be a time of actual merriment—a praising "with mirth, high cheer, and wine." {26} Milton felt this a little, and Handel much. To them an opportunity ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... almost super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And the great ghost in "Hamlet," when you read of him, how shadowy real! Dante's representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too palpable, not ghostly enough, not ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the national arms is now sufficiently ascertained, sure as I am of the righteousness of our cause and its consequent claim on the blessing of God, (for I would not show a faith inferiour to that of the pagan historian with his Facile evenit quod Dis cordi est,) it seems to me a suitable occasion to withdraw our minds a moment from the confusing din of battle to objects of peaceful and permanent interest. Let us not neglect the monuments of preterite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... were enabled, by the assistance of the charitable, to sail for Africa, and take with them many of the implements of civilized life. They arrived in safety at Sierre Leone, and were allowed once more to mingle with their friends, and enjoy God's gift of freedom, in a Pagan land—having fortunately escaped from a cruel and life-long bondage, in the ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... prayers to the age-old Mother Goddess of all Mediterranean peoples, while calling her Mary, the Mother of Christ. Eusebius studied the subject, somewhat superficially, in his Praeparatio Evangelica, in which he argued that much old pagan belief was to be explained as an imperfect preparation for the full light of the Gospel. And it is certainly striking how the Anatolian peoples, among whom the seed of the early Church was chiefly sown, could never, in spite of Jewish monotheism, give up the beloved Mother Goddess for whom ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Plassans, which is wrecked by the doings of a certain Abbe Faujas and his relatives. Serge Mouret grows up, is called by an instinctive vocation to the priesthood, and becomes parish priest of Les Artaud, a well-nigh pagan hamlet in one of those bare, burning stretches of country with which Provence abounds. And here it is that 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' opens in the old ruinous church, perched upon a hillock in full view of the squalid village, the arid fields, and the great belts ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... propriety to the entire habitable globe; for the arbitrary rites and opinions of every pagan nation bear so close a resemblance to each other, that such a coincidence can only have been produced by their having had a common origin. Barbarism itself has not been able to efface the strong primeval impression. ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... we met the Indians in a large store-house of the Hudson's Bay Company, and asked them to present their Chiefs and head men. We found that there were two distinct bands of Indians, the Christian Indians of Norway House, and the Wood or Pagan Indians of Cross Lake. Each elected their Chiefs by popular vote in a most business-like manner, and the Chiefs, after consulting the bands, selected the head men. We then accepted the Chiefs, and I made an explanation of the object of our visit in ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... Captain James Cook, the great mariner of these seas. The only lighthouse on Tahiti is there. On that spot Cook and his astronomers had observed the transit of Venus in 1769, and it was there the first English missionaries landed from the ship Duff to convert the pagan Tahitians. Cook has a pillar, with a plate of commemoration, in a grove of purau-trees, cocoanuts, pandanus, and the red oleander; Cook who is an immortal, and was loved ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... I bet he never saw the boss when she rode off this A.M. Yes, sir; that poor benighted pagan must think she's still in the house—prob'ly watching him out of the east winder this ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... tended the olives and the vines on sunny lake sides, and who in earlier days had mingled in Dionysian revels with Roman maidens with curled locks and painted cheeks. Strange their tales of the white pagan temples, and all the glories of the imperial cities left smouldering in ashes after the Teuton hordes had worked their will. The arduous pioneer life of their predecessors and the task of clearing and cultivating ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... his big boots! Thus, naked to the waist, he displayed a torso almost as hairy as that of a bear, which gave him a very strange appearance indeed. Once in his animal dress, as he called it, General Macard, sabre in hand, hurled himself at the enemy horsemen, swearing like a pagan; but it so happened that he rarely reached any of them, for at the unexpected and terrible sight of this kind of giant, half naked and covered in hair rushing toward them uttering the most fearsome yells the enemy often fled in all directions, not knowing ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... pointed out of which the same thing might be said, but which are not similarly observed. The real cause of the phenomenon I take to be that this population is—as it was of old, and as it always has been through all outward changes—pagan. I put it crudely for the sake of putting it shortly, for this is not the place to trouble the readers of a few paragraphs of "Gossip" with a dissertation in support of the assertion. The innate paganism of these people, born of the beauty of the climate and of all external Nature, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... determined that you shall hear all about it. Far down a narrow street you listen to a long-drawn, melancholy howl—the voice as of one hired to cry in the most mournful tones for whole generations of old pagan Romans who died unconverted; poor devils who worshiped wine and women, and knew nothing better in this world. And who is their mourner? A great, brawny, tawny, steeple-crowned hat, blue-breeched, two-fisted fish-huckster; and he is trying to sell, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for us means victory for religion. And they could not tolerate that. The world is too small to provide adequate "living room" for both Hitler and God. In proof of that, the Nazis have now announced their plan for enforcing their new German, pagan religion all over the world—a plan by which the Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy would be displaced by Mein Kampf and the swastika and the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... is organized on chastity and continence prior to marriage, purity and constancy after marriage. That noble ideal has never been realized; the stories of Pagan times, of the Middle Ages and of the present day, as well as everyday human experience, show that the male certainly has not lived up to his part of the bargain. Legalized prostitution in most countries, illegal prostitution in the United ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... ancient point of view, concerned only with this world and its assets, leads us directly to the observation that such advantages are conceivable only in a pagan mind. That confidence in oneself, that activity in the present, the pure worship of the gods as ancestors and the admiration of them quasi as artistic creations only, resignation to an all-powerful fate, the yearning for future fame, itself dependent upon activities in this world—all these ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... considered the most propitious month for marriage; but with the Anglo-Saxons October has always been a favorite and auspicious season. We find that the festival has always been observed in very much the same way, whether druidical, pagan, or Christian. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... until that memory possesses us and we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by the magical rites of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... was, as she should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... an evil and malignant demon which controlled him, for the words but struck a pagan madness to his heart, and he sprang ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... The immense mass of dedicatory epigrams written in the Alexandrian and Roman periods are in the main literary exercises, though they were also the supply of a real and living demand. The fashion outlived the belief; even after the suppression of pagan worship scholars continued to turn out imitations of the old models. One book of the Anthology of Agathias[4] consisted entirely of contemporary epigrams of this sort, "as though dedicated to former gods." But of epigrams dealing with religion ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... we have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm. And ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we part to meet no more This side the misty Stygian river, Be sure of this: On yonder shore Sweet cheer awaiteth such as we— A Sabine pagan's heaven, O friend— And fellowship that knows ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... minority of all the people, (not more than five or six percent,) and in order to win, they were forced to refuse all compromise. The old gods must be destroyed. For a short spell the emperor Julian, a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save the pagan Gods from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds during a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established the church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the ancient temples were then closed. Then came the emperor Justinian ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... was enraptured. He would gladly have encouraged these pagan deliverances on the part of the converted Prince, but the Colonel was scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of hearts not ill-satisfied at the evidence of the skin-deep Christianity of a man delivered over to the corrupt teaching ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... clover, or shamrock, as the Irish call it. The legend of the conversion of Ireland says that St. Patrick was preaching on the hillside, and wishing to illustrate from nature the sublime doctrine of the Trinity to his pagan hearers, he bent down and plucked a piece of shamrock at his feet, and held it up to show how what was three, in one sense, might be ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... subject let us add (and our young readers will come to know it if they are spared to see many years) that civilisation alone will never improve the heart. Let history speak and it will tell you that deeds of darkest hue have been perpetrated in so-called civilised, though pagan lands. Civilisation is like the polish that beautifies inferior furniture, which water will wash off if it be but hot enough. Christianity resembles dye, which permeates every fibre of the fabric, and ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... purely Christian. The ancient world knew of a few great women who transcended the conditions of society in those days and helped, each one her country, in some extraordinary way. Thus Deborah helped the people of God in a time of terrible difficulty. And even the Pagan world was not without its Semiramis and its Portia. When mercy came into the world with Christianity the dispensation of it was largely committed to the gentle hands of women, for since men have believed that God has taken a woman to ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... Mr. BERNARD SHAW, who personated CATO of Utica, wore hygienic sandals, a white toga and a brown felt Jaeger pileus. Mr. HAROLD BEGBIE as MARCELLUS, the best boy of ancient Rome, formed an agreeable contrast to the numerous Messalinas, Poppaeas and Cleopatras who lent a regrettably Pagan element to the assembly. But Lady ASTOR as CORNELIA, mother of the GRACCHI, was an austere and dignified figure in her panniered Botticelli stola, with pearl-embroidered red wings, and a flabellum (or fan) of albatross feathers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this, sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's grocery store ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... itself in the broken spaces of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir; a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine. Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... general nature. Such was the universal belief in spells, of which some traces may yet remain in the wild parts of the country. These were common in the time of the learned Bishop Nicolson, who derives them from the time of the Pagan Danes. "This conceit was the more heightened, by reflecting upon the natural superstition of our borderers at this day, who were much better acquainted with, and do more firmly believe, their old legendary stories, of fairies ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... visible sign through which the appeal came. I have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank and family might have savoured of snobbishness ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of Empedocles. The number was sacred to Hermes, and lay at the root of the physical philosophy of Pythagoras. The quotation in the text is from the "Golden Verses," given in Passow's lexicon under the word tetraktys: nai ma ton hametera psycha paradonta tetraktyn, pagan aenaou physeos. "The most sacred of all things," said this famous teacher, "is Number; and next to it, that which gives Names;" a truth that the lapse of three thousand years is just enabling us ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... which tenderness dwelt, and the strangely tall and lithe figure was emphasized by the conventional pose—that pose of arm and thigh which the Greeks never wearied of. Seeing him, the mind turned from the reserve of the Christian world towards the frank enjoyment of the Pagan; and John's solid, rhythmless form was as symbolic of dogma as Mike's of the grace ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... that the spirit is stronger than all the forces of Government, and that things may really come by fasting and prayer. Even the window-breaking, though a perilous approach to the methods of the Pagan male, was only a damage to insensitive material for which the window-breakers were prepared to pay in conscious suffering. But once the injury was done to flesh and blood, the injurer would only be paying tooth for tooth and eye for eye; and all the sympathy would go, not to the assailant, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... that evoked such delight and interest within Brother Ambrose's complicated brain was one that had been penned in the early ages of the Church by a lay-brother who had concerned himself with pagan magic. In it, he had described the fiendish habits and activities of werewolves and had actually even presented a formula. Ut Fiat Homo Lupinus it was entitled, which purported to give the secret words and ritual necessary to achieve ...
— G-r-r-r...! • Roger Arcot
... Father in the Church, hitherto unknown, has been discovered and published by the librarian of the National Assembly—so M. Villemain announced at a recent meeting of the Academie des Belles Lettres at Paris. The work traces the heresies of the third century to the writings of the Pagan Philosophers, and throws new light upon ancient ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... are several classes of interpreters, as follows (1) The Praeterist, who thinks it has been fulfilled in its primary sense. He makes all the prophesies and visions refer to Jewish history down to the fall of Jerusalem, and to the history of Pagan Rome. (2) The Futurist, who interprets literally and thinks all the events of the book are to come just before or just after the second coming of Christ. (3) The Historical or Continuous School. These think some have been fulfilled, ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... of the men whom he lashes in his satire. The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, which Pope attempts to imitate, is, as Mr. Courthope observes, 'incapable of imitation. Its humour, no less than its philosophy, belongs entirely to the Pagan World.' In a general sense it is also true that Horace's style, whether of language or of thought, will not bear transplanting. Indeed, whatever is most characteristic and most exquisite in a poet's work is ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... was not altogether disappointed. The religious history carved on the choir stalls at Ulm contained Greek philosophers as well as Hebrew prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood the discoverer of music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then I was startled, forgetting for the moment the religious revolutions of south Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as he affixed his thesis on the door at Wittenberg, the picture shining clear ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Long be the sultan bless'd with happy love! My zeal marks gladness dawning on thy cheek, With raptures, such as fire the pagan crowds, When, pale and anxious for their years to come, They see the sun surmount the dark eclipse, And ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... if he were of my own colour and race. Neither his colour, nor any peculiarities of physiognomy should debar him with me from any rights he could fairly claim as a man. "Have these men—these black savages from pagan Africa," I asked myself, "the qualities which make man loveable among his fellows? Can these men—these barbarians—appreciate kindness or feel resentment like myself?" was my mental question as I travelled through their quarters ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... manuscripts or illustrating books of prayer. Having to observe silence, he wrote the name of the book to give to the librarian, and if it were a Christian work, he stretched out his hand, making motions with his fingers as if turning over the leaves; but if it were by a pagan author, the monk who asked for it was required to scratch his ear as a dog does, to show his contempt, because, the regulations said, an unbeliever might well be compared to that animal[1]. Taking the book, he copied it ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... creep up in her throat and choke her at thought of those whips and the women who were driven, for her voice trembled into silence, and she stood there swallowing, her head bent, and her hands crossed over her breast, and clasped firmly there was the crucifix she had found in the guest room. Little pagan that she was, she regarded it entirely as a fetish of much potency with white people, and surely she needed help of all gods when she spoke for the whole pueblo to this man who had power over ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... exception of the chef d'oeuvres of the English and German poets, the Colonel's library, which was an extensive one, almost wholly consisted of such books as immediately related to military subjects, or might be able to bear on some branch of science connected with military warfare. Pagan, and his follower Vauban, and the more matured treatises of Cormontaigne, were backed by the works of that boast of the Low Countries, Coehorn; and by the ingenious theories, as yet but theories, of Napoleon's ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Christian nations; the first of us all to feel The fire of infidel hatred, the weight of the pagan heel; Faithfullest down the ages tending the light that burned, Tortured and trodden therefore, spat on and slain and spurned; Branded for others' vices, robbed of your rightful fame, Clinging to Truth in a truthless land in the name of the ancient Name; Generous, courteous, gentle, patient under ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... off. This belief had taken full possession of Mather's mind, and fired his imagination. In comparison with the approaching contest, all other wars, even that for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, paled their light. It was the great crusade, in which hostile powers, Moslem, Papal, and Pagan, of every kind, on earth and from Hell, were to go down; and he aspired to be its St. Bernard. It was because he entertained these ideas, that he was on the watch to hear, and prompt and glad to meet, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... martyr along the bloody way from Ephesus to the Circus at Rome was formalized by degrees into philosophy: the faith of future ages was settled by compromises, by manipulation, by bribery in Councils of the Church which resembled modern political conventions, and in which pagan Emperors did not hesitate to exert their influence over the metaphysical bishops of the factions. Recriminations, executions, murders—so the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is a cruel mistress. She exacts a yearly tribute of flesh and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology." ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... in this sense; but an inquiry dealing with the history of religion could not start from a definition of that kind. It would have to keep in view, not the philosophical notion of God, but the conceptions of the gods as they appear in the religion of antiquity. Hence I came to define atheism in Pagan antiquity as the point of view which denies the existence of the ancient gods. It is in this sense that the word will be used in ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... populous; for they assured us that they were the foundations of particular buildings set apart for those Indians only, who had engaged in some religious vow; and monastic institutions are often to be met with in many Pagan nations. However, if these ruins were originally the bases of the common dwelling-houses of the natives, their numbers must have been considerable; for in many parts of the island they are extremely thick planted, and sufficiently evince the great plenty of former inhabitants. But to return ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the same—always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled," said Stangrave,—he was given to half-mystic utterances, and hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret Fuller Ossoli,—"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human personality, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... taken every precaution to prevent intemperate indulgence in wine, his banquet revealed the essential difference between Jewish and pagan festivities. When Jews are gathered about a festal board, they discuss a Halakah, or a Haggadah, or, at the least, a simple verse from the Scriptures. Ahasuerus and his boon companions rounded out ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... feeling, nor like God at all, although a ready pagan representation of him. There is much of the pagan ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... due to the fact that the emperor is aware of the old Scandinavian custom, from which it originates, and which still subsists among the peasantry of the west coast of France. In the Pagan days of Scandinavia, the hardy Norsemen were accustomed at all their banquets to invite the spirit of the last of their male relatives or friends to participate in the feast, and the food that he would have eaten and the mead that ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the Gipsies to have been heathens before they came into this country, their separation from pagan degradation and cruelty, has been attended with many advantages to themselves. They have seen neither the superstitions of idolatry, nor the unnatural cruelties of heathenism. They are not destitute of those ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... had neither Art, nor Nature, nor even Probability, in them;'[10] and in the passage in Hints of Prefaces[11] of which this is a condensation, he attempts to make out a case for the second part of Pamela as a realistic study of married life. Clarissa is stated to be superior to pagan tragedies because it dispenses with the old ideas of poetic justice and takes into account the continuance of life after death. (Richardson has his cake while eating it, however, for he points out that 'the notion of Poetical Justice founded on the ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... and lawgiver; they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion for it, for me: it was remarkable too, I had but three subjects, and they were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father a Pagan and a cannibal; and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions: but this ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... narrative of the Deluge, was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as that described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character of the narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to account for its origin, by producing a form of those ancient legends of pagan Chaldaea, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly derived. I have yet to learn that the main propositions of this essay ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... sentiment, ma'am, from a pagan poet . . . If I were Jove, that stag should sleep to-night under the waves on a coral bed. ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... after God," and has printed parallel passages from Saint Paul and Seneca which, for many, seem to show that the men were in communication with each other. Every ethical maxim of Christianity was expressed by this "noble pagan," and his influence was always directed toward that which he thought was right. His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in another place refers ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... argument herself, and that in the Irish tongue. She saved herself, however, by resorting to that temper of which she had boasted, and hurled at the two a torrent of words which sounded to them like the most horrible pagan blasphemy, and from which they fled in genuine horror. In reality it was the names of all the places in France that Patsy could recall ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer |
