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More "Priestcraft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Marney, the worthy vicar had once warmed up into some ebullition of very low church zeal; there was some talk of an evening lecture, the schools were to be remodelled, certain tracts were actually distributed. But Lord Marney soon stopped all this. "No priestcraft at Marney," said this gentle proprietor ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... that the light of nature helps us a very little way in the knowledge of God. "Look at the heathen," it is said; "see their religious ignorance, their awful superstitions, their degrading worship of idols, and their subjection to priestcraft. This is your boasted light of nature, and these are its results—the Fetichism of Africa, the devil-worship of the North American Indians, the cannibalism of the Feejee Islands, the human sacrifices of Mexico and of the ancient Phoenicia." "Then," ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... than the man who does not believe? How is it with nations? Look at Spain, the last slave-holder in the civilized world; she's christian, she believes in the trinity! And Italy, the beggar of the world. Under the rule of priestcraft money streamed in from every land and yet she did not advance. Today she is reduced to a hand-organ. Take poor Ireland, groaning under the heel of British oppression; could she cast off her priests she would soon be one with America ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... him, which, after all, he executed, not without present tears and subsequent remorse. But he did play the part prescribed. He was brought forward in full procession, to declare to the convention, that the religion which he had taught so many years, was, in every respect, a piece of priestcraft, which had no foundation either in history or sacred truth. He disowned, in solemn and explicit terms, the existence of the Deity to whose worship he had been consecrated, and devoted himself in future to the homage of liberty, equality, virtue, and morality. He then laid on the table his episcopal ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... for belief in judicial astrology, and remarks on the dangerous character of popish priestcraft. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... effort, my dear Sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through. The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards not forwards for improvement: the President himself declaring in one of his ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... perfectly right, gentlemen. I myself noticed the discrepancy in our number some time ago—but I knew that you were all advanced thinkers, who had long since liberated yourselves from the trammels of superstitious observances, which are the result of priestcraft, and are now left solely to the vulgar. Therefore I said nothing. The silly notion of any misfortune attending the number thirteen arose, as you are aware, out of the story of the Last Supper, and children and women may possibly still give credence to the fancy that one out of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... right arm of priestcraft. The black militia of theology are the sworn foes of Free-thought. They represent it as the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness in this world or the next. When they speak of the Holy Ghost they mean themselves. Freethought ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... would say, fighting for the truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they thought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different. They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could be explained by "Wanderlust" ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his Henriade (1725), perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England we have his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... was introduced to the tablet. But she did not feel the same emotion as when she first visited the Fujinami house. Now, she had heard her father's authentic voice. She knew his scorn for pretentiousness of all kinds, for false conventions, for false emotions, his hatred of priestcraft, his condemnation of the family wealth, and his contempt for the little respectabilities of ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... that all men have an equal right to happiness? Nature made no other distinction than that of higher and lower degrees of power of mind and body. But what mysterious distribution of character has the craft of statesmen, more fatal than priestcraft, introduced? ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... advantage proposed by the abolishing of Christianity is, that it would very much enlarge and establish liberty of conscience, that great bulwark of our nation, and of the Protestant Religion, which is still too much limited by priestcraft, notwithstanding all the good intentions of the legislature, as we have lately found by a severe instance. For it is confidently reported, that two young gentlemen of real hopes, bright wit, and profound judgment, who upon a thorough examination ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... severity and fearless independence the vices of the monks and the priestcraft of the established religion, he is always elegant, amusing, and, what pleases and surprises most in a writer of so unpolished an age, strikingly delicate and chastised. I prefer him infinitely to Chaucer. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... has rendered you superstitious, Cornelius. I have no faith in the religious cant of the present day, in priests or priestcraft.' ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... have awed the ignorant multitude; as in sacred groves a tree might have been made to speak by the simple contrivance of a man concealed within the hollow stem, which to outward appearance would have been considered solid. The devices of priestcraft to bring grist to their mill are not yet obsolete, as will be seen in many ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... thank the Jesuits for the loss of all my great Hungarian estates. Father Kampmuller, the bosom friend of the Count Grashalkowitz, was confessor to the court of Vienna, and there was no possible kind of persecution I did not suffer from priestcraft. Far from being useful members of society, they take advantage of the prejudices of superstition, exist for themselves alone, and sacrifice every duty to the support of their own hierarchy, and found a power, on error and ignorance, which is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... except I'm at your elbow! Can't you dhrive all them palavers out o' your head? Didn't the sargint tell us, an' prove to us, the time we broke the guardhouse, an' took Frinch lave o' the ridgment for good, that the whole o' that, an' more along wid it, is all priestcraft?" ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... practice of its morals, the experiment has been made to arouse the attention and excite the enthusiasm of its followers by the adoption of ceremonies and processions; but these are declared to be only the innovations of priestcraft, and the Singhalese, whilst they unite in their celebration, are impatient to explain that such practices are less religious than secular, and that the Perrehera in particular, the chief of their annual festivals, was introduced, not in honour of Buddha, but as a tribute ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... and faith I believe he is; but I must look well before I leap, or consign my actions into such spiritual keeping. However, if the worst come to the worst, if I do make this compact, and am deceived,—if, above all, I am ever seduced, or led blindfold into one of those snares which priestcraft sometimes lays to the cost of honour,—why, I shall have a sword, which I shall never be at a loss to use, and it can find its way through a priest's gown as well as a ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... But pure monotheism existed only among the Jews. All other nations had a variety of gods and peculiar forms of worship. In most of the pagan religions there were elements of truth and beauty, but they lacked in ethical principles and in moral application to life. Most of their priestcraft was a vulgar imposition upon the ignorance and credulity of the common people. The prevailing philosophies—which, among the more enlightened, took the place of religion—were the Grecian, adopted also by the Romans, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... life. The spirit of the Roman religion was however originally, and before the substance of it was sacrificed to foreign ornament, quite different from that of the Grecian. The latter was yielding and flexible to the hand of art, the former immutable beneath the rigorous jealousy of priestcraft. The Roman faith, and the customs founded on it, were more serious, more moral, and pious, displaying more insight into nature, and more magical and mysterious, than the Greek religion, at least than that part of it which was extrinsecal to the mysteries. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... or God of the Tartars, is composed of such frail materials as mere mortality; contrived, however, by the power of priestcraft, to appear immortal; the succession of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... some intoxicating drug or powerful gas or vapour, or drinking some beverage which produced a temporary suspension of the reason, the mind of the enquirer was predisposed to feverish dreams:[21] if priestcraft were concerned in the interpretation of such dreams, or eliciting senses from the wild effusions of the disordered brain of the Pythoness, Science presided over the investigation of the causes of this phrenzy, and the advantages ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... mother of observation, and may here elucidate one phenomenon by another—the past by that which still exists. Oppression, insecurity, and the influence of a very rude priestcraft, are the powerful causes which operated on the Germans and Italians of the Middle Ages, as they now continue to operate on the Abyssinians of the present day. However these people may differ from us in their descent, their manners and their customs, the effects of the ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... insist on duties he had no inclination to practice, and condemn faults he did not like to renounce. It is no wonder, therefore, that Humphreys wrought himself into a most patriotic resolution, no longer to submit to tyranny and priestcraft, and to vow that the next time the Doctor admonished him, he would retort with "Ye take too much upon you, ye ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a Republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of clerks, arises; the might of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force embodied, as often before, as priestcraft—the strength of priests: craft meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue. This great force, too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes malignant. Priesthood works ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... designs of open-work spires, which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all hitherto existing. But it is worthy of note that at this period the purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men to the stars. "Gay ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... superstition. Their influence was to make men worse, not better; their tendency was to produce sensuality, cruelty, and universal degradation. They did not proceed, in any sense, from God; they were not even the work of good men, but rather of deliberate imposition and priestcraft. A supernatural religion had become necessary in order to counteract the fatal consequences of these debased and debasing superstitions. This is the view of the great natural religions of the world which was ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... counts the stars, numbers the planets, measures the length of their years and computes the number of their days, unless his observatory is illuminated by the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. No Luther thunders against priestcraft, shakes the thrones of tyrants, and wakes the nations to a new life and a new progress, save that Luther that finds a Bible in his cell. No Franklin calls down electricity from the clouds to carry messages across a continent swift as the lightning ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the landowner who is no longer powerful enough to; set the mantrap ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... not hesitated to assert that the tenets against which Lord John Russell protested in the Durham Letter were, in his judgment, of a kind which are 'destructive of all reasonable faith, and reduce worship to a mere belief in spells and priestcraft.' Cardinal Vaughan, it is needless to say, does not sympathise with such a view. He, however, has opinions on the subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address at Preston on September 10, 1894, on the ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... system of Pagan or Jewish origin, which crept in unawares, and was established on the ruins of the Apostolic faith by the episcopal confederation, which mainly depended on it for its own maintenance. In other words, it is considered by some persons to be a system of priestcraft, destructive of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... designed to secure and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and the French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... up, could thus darken and debauch the natural faculty, whose specific office it was to convey, like the eye, specific intelligence, it would not account for the first tendencies of man to disown its authority in favor of an absurd and uniform submission to the usurpations of tradition and priestcraft. The faculty is universally feeble against this influence; it staggers; whether from weakness or drunkenness little matters, except that the last is the viler infirmity of the two. If we find a river turbid, it is of no consequence whether it was so as it issued from its ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the World!" Gabriel finished. "And for this, and for what I know about its enemies, I stand here in this cell and may yet go to a living death. This is my crime, and nothing else—this battle for the freedom and the joy of the world—this struggle against the powers of ignorance and darkness, priestcraft and greed, lust, treachery and foulness, cruelty and hate and war! This, and this only. You have ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, and others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it is a problem; and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of the incident of Mr. Henry Ford of ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... examination of hieroglyphics of every age and variety, I never discovered anything bearing the remotest resemblance to it. Those who are conversant with the wonderful features of the Egyptian religion and priestcraft, will observe how eagerly they seized upon and deified anything symbolical of their mysterious tenets, and transmitted them to posterity, figured as hieroglyphics; and it is but natural to presume that this homely-looking flower, with its halo, so typical of glory and resurrection, would ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... truth; and those who asserted that, of a sudden, after a fashion so wholly unexpected as to be divine,—as great fires, great famines, and great wars are called divine,—a mighty hand had been stretched out to take away the remaining incubus of superstition, priestcraft, and bigotry under which England had hitherto been labouring. The proposed disestablishment of the State Church of England was, of course, the subject of this ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... like the stately columns of a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead branches that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must be removed—relics of monarchy or aristocracy, cunningly devised inventions of priestcraft or kingcraft, that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... satanic said, "Wags not his tail for me but for my bread. Brains rule to day as they have ruled for aye, And craft grown craftier in this modern day Still rides the fools, but in a craftier way; And priestcraft lingers and survives its use; What was a blessing once is now abuse: Grown fat and arrogant on power and pelf, The old-time shepherd has become a wolf And only feeds his flocks to feast himself. To clink of coin the pious juggler jumps, For still he thinks, as in the days of old, The key to holy ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... forms, in order to conceal its nakedness. Till now you have studied man merely in books and philosophical treatises; or, in other words, you have been thrashing empty straw. But the film will soon fall from your eyes. We will shortly quit this dirty country of yours, where priestcraft, pedantry, and oppression reign unmolested and undisturbed. I will usher you upon a stage where the passions have a freer scope, and where great energies are ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... they live. Since a period long preceding that time, bitter jealousy existed between the Spano-Mexican and Anglo-American races. This feeling had been planted by national animosity, and nursed and fomented by priestcraft. Events that have since taken place had already cast their shadows over the Mexican frontier; and Florida and Louisiana were regarded as but steps in the ladder of American aggrandisement; but the understanding ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... except Sandy, quite free from slaveholding priestcraft. It was in vain that we had been taught from the pulpit at St. Michael's, the duty of obedience to our masters; to recognize God as the author of our enslavement; to regard running away an offense, alike against God and man; to deem our enslavement ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... fortunate in England compared with the religious freedom or tolerance enjoyed by Protestants in Catholic countries—in Italy for instance, or in Spain. As for "bigotry," let him look only at Catholic France during the reign of priestcraft there, where an actor of the position of Talma, writing with reference to a proposed monument to his English brother, John Kemble, could add by way of shameful contrast, "Je serai trop heureux ici si les pretres me laissent une tombe ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... thought long before—viz., the Papistical religion of the Italian. Dr. Riccabocca was professedly a Roman Catholic. He so little obtruded that fact—and, indeed, had assented so readily to any animadversions upon the superstition and priestcraft which, according to Protestants, are the essential characteristics of Papistical communities—that it was not till the hymeneal torch, which brings all faults to light, was fairly illumined for the altar, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... lingering fear that the First Consul was about to play the part of Monk. The pomp of the Tuileries and the hated Concordat seemed to their crooked minds but the prelude to a recall of the Bourbons, whereupon priestcraft, tithes, and feudalism would be the order of the day. Now at last the tragedy of Vincennes threw a lurid light into the recesses of Napoleon's ambition; and they exclaimed, "He is one of us." It must thenceforth be war to the knife between ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers for John ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... things to come, is clear; first there was to be a period of virulent persecution of the apostles and the Church of which they would be in charge; then the destruction of Jerusalem, with all the horrors of merciless warfare was to follow; and this in turn was to be succeeded by a long period of priestcraft and apostasy with bitter sectarian dissension and cruel persecution of the righteous. The brief reference to the non-localized, universal phenomena, by which His advent is to be signalized, is a parenthetical demonstration of the false claims as to where Christ would be found; later the Lord ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... living body calls itself Protestant; the living body abjures Catholicism, flings off the name and the thing, hates the Church of Rome, laughs at sacramental power, despises the Fathers, is jealous of priestcraft, is a Protestant reality, is a Catholic sham. This existing reality, which is alive and no mistake, you wish to top with a filagree-work of screens, dorsals, pastoral staffs, croziers, mitres, and the like. Now most excellent Bateman, will ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... is straight-forward, frank but dry, blunt, and he has hitherto been ruder, more ignorant, more fond of quarrel and drinking, more given up to superstition and old things than others; for his land was the home of priestcraft and monkery. You may ever distinguish the national Bavarian by his nervous squat body, small round head, and beer-belly, immediately beneath which the trousers begin; hence the braces or belt is indispensible. The showy belt, is, as in the Tyrol, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... vestments—vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their political truncheons—to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy and Cunning go to form a word. Deadmanship, I call it."—To quote my uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!—"Parsons and princes are happy with the homage of this huge passive fleshpot class. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... legends they were. What gasconading rascals those saints must have been, if they first boasted these exploits or invented these miracles. These legends, however, were no more than monkish extravagances, over which one laughed inwardly; there were, besides, priestly matters, and the priestcraft of the book was far worse than its monkery. The ears burned on each side of my head as I listened, perforce, to tales of moral martyrdom inflicted by Rome; the dread boasts of confessors, who had wickedly abused their office, trampling to deep degradation high-born ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... divertisements; nor was any one to be obliged to worship the creative power, whether under the name of the Animus Mundi, or any other whatsoever. The interference of the Deity in the affairs of mankind he entirely disowned, having proved to his own satisfaction that the idea originated entirely in priestcraft. In short, with the shadowy metaphysical exception aforesaid, Mr. Joshua Bletson of Darlington, member for Littlefaith, came as near the predicament of an atheist, as it is perhaps possible for a man to do. But we say this with the necessary salvo; for we have known ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... as on the coast, the priests are usually the tyrants rather than the guardians of their flocks; and they would frequently be the objects of hatred and vengeance but for the deep-rooted and almost idolatrous reverence which the Indians cherish for priestcraft. It is disgusting to see the Peruvian priests, who usually treat the Indians like brutes, behaving with the most degrading servility when they want to get money from them. The love of the Indians for strong drinks is a vice which the priests turn to their own ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... degenerating effect which it has ever had on the purity and simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, turning men's minds from its great truths, as a religion of the heart, to the mere outward tinsel, to the forms and ceremonies on which priestcraft flourishes; when I see that at all times it has been made the instrument of the rich and powerful in oppressing the poor and weak, I cannot but reject it utterly as in direct hostility to the whole spirit ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... China, and, as I said above, over-shot him in his own Bow; for the mission being in danger by the Devil and the Chinese Emperor's joining together, of being wholly expell'd there too, as they had been in Japan, they cunningly fell in with the ecclesiasticks of the country, and joining the priestcraft of both religions together, they brought Jesus Christ and Confucius to be so reconcilable, that the Chinese and the Roman idolatry appeared capable of a confederacy, of going on hand in hand together, and consequently of ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... doctrines, as the peculiar appanage of their own class. They invented endless fables which gave rise to Mythology. They ruled the people by the might of superstition, and acquired wealth, honor, and power, for themselves.[17] We arrive then at nearly the culminating point of Egyptian priestcraft, the days of "wise men," "sorcerers," and "magicians."[18] Such men ever {20} have, and we presume ever will employ secrecy as the chief element of their clever jugglery. Mankind love to be deceived. Let an Adrian, Blitz, or Alexander—while they tell you, and you ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... opposite side of the dome, Ranjit Singh, in a plain white dress, is standing erect before his idol at his devotions, with his ministers behind him. On the other two sides he is at his favourite field sports. What strikes one most in all this is the entire absence of priestcraft. He wanted all his revenue for his soldiers; and his tutelary god seems, in consequence, to have been well pleased to dispense with the mediatory services of priests.[17] There are few temples anywhere ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... interesting, if nothing more, to consider the efforts of the priest to give it an attribute of sanctity, to call it a sacrament. In truth, marriage is the most artificial of the relations which exist in the social body. It is a device of man at his worst—a mixture of slavery, savage egotism and priestcraft. It is indicated by nothing in the physical constitution of either male or female. It is an anomaly; a contract which can be freely entered into by the most unfit, but which cannot be broken, though both parties wish it, though absolute unfitness be patent, though hell on earth be its result. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... for. No children nor wives cluttered the devil devil doctor's house. Several old women, a fly-flapping girl of eleven, and two young men who had graduated from the canoe house of the youths and who were studying priestcraft under the master, composed the household and waited upon Jerry. Food of the choicest was his. After Agno had eaten first-cut of pig, Jerry was served second. Even the two acolytes and the fly-flapping maid ate after him, leaving the debris for the several old women. And, unlike the mere ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... said: It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. The Church and State have been united, and it is well for us to see it so. We have had to bear the denunciations of these reverend (irreverend) clergymen, as in New York, of late. But if we look to their authority to see ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in the first place, that they are sincere, The ideas of diplomacy and priestcraft are of recent times. No false knight or lying priest ever prospered, I believe, in any age, but certainly not in the dark ones. Men prospered then, only in following openly-declared purposes, and preaching ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... babe dying unbaptised to be unfit for a higher existence, and some have even created a "limbo" expressly to domicile the innocents "of whom is the kingdom of Heaven." Here, if any where, the cloven foot shows itself and teaches us that the only solid stratum underlying priestcraft is one composed of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... prince as our Henry the Fifth would have been the idol of the North. The follies of his youth, the selfish ambition of his manhood, the Lollards roasted at slow fires the prisoners massacred on the field of battle, the expiring lease of priestcraft renewed for another century, the dreadful legacy of a causeless and hopeless war bequeathed to a people who had no interest in its event, everything is forgotten but the victory of Agincourt. Francis Sforza, on the other hand, was the model ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Moses appears to have been very fond of this particular miracle. It is mentioned as having been effective here at Taberah, and it was the supposed weapon employed to suppress Korah's rebellion. Moses was indeed a powerful enchanter. His relations with all the priestcraft of central Asia were intimate, and if the Magi had secrets which were likely to be of use to him in maintaining his position among the Jews, the inference is that he would certainly have used them to the utmost; as he did the brazen serpent, the ram's horns at Sinai, and the like. But in spite ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... are several Poems addressed to Sylvia; Naked Truth, from the second Book of Ovid's Fastorum; Heathen Priestcraft, from the first Book of Ovid's Fastorum; A Midsummer's Wish; and an Ode on Florinda, seen while she was Bathing. He is also author of a curious work, in one Volume Octavo, entitled Scripture Politics: being a view of the original constitution, and subsequent revolutions in the government ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... profess'd atheism; he denied God, Our Saviour; he blasphemed the adorable Trinity, and, as it was reported, wrote several discourses against it, affirming Our Saviour to be a deceiver, the sacred scriptures to contain nothing but idle stories, and all religion to be a device of policy and priestcraft; but Marloe came to a very untimely end, as some remarked, in consequence of his execrable blasphemies. It happened that he fell deeply in love with a low girl, and had for his rival a fellow in livery, who ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... afterwards effectually, so that there was no priestcraft used here; and I should have thought it one of the most unjustifiable frauds in the world to have had it so. But the effect upon Will Atkins is really not to be expressed; and there, we may be sure, was no delusion. Sure no man ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... if orthodox in these matters, he was daring in speculation. There was nothing he was not bold enough to question. He waged war after his peculiar fashion with every form of superstition. He worked under the foundations of priestcraft. But while serving the Reformed cause, he had no sympathy with Reformers. If they would but remain quiet, but keep their peculiar notions to themselves, France would rest! That a man should go to the stake for an opinion, was as incomprehensible ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects, became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all petrified shells, and only admitted them as lusus naturae, he entirely lost my confidence; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg plainly enough ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, in our lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin: just so far as we do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, we drive men to Rome. For if the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... are some singular papers among these fragments. One title of a work is "Priesthood without Priestcraft; or Superstition distinguished from Religion, Dominion from Order, and Bigotry from Reason, in the most principal Controversies about Church government, which at present divide and deform Christianity." He has composed "A Psalm before Sermon in praise ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... would you think I served it much, if I took as my motto, 'Religion is power?' Would not that be a base and sordid view of its advantages? And would you not say he who regards religion as a power, intends to abuse it as a priestcraft?" ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... feelings and do not consider that personal freedom and individual rights are articles for home use only. Since Frye wrote, the whole of Europe, excepting perhaps Russia, has reaped the benefits of the French Revolution, and reduced, if not suppressed, what the Major called "kingcraft and priestcraft." He did not attempt to divine the future, but the history of Europe in the nineteenth century has been largely in accordance with his desires and hopes. It is not a small merit for a writer, in the midst of one of the most rabid reactions that the world has known, to ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... not for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression from the educated few, but will inevitably sink into acquiescence to the will of intelligence, whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our institutions. They are worth preserving, because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest proportion of the population of any form ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... it, but they like to have the handling of the article for which they pay. As the descendants of Puritans and other godly Protestants, they will submit to religious teaching, but as republicans they will have no priestcraft. The French at their revolution had the latter feeling without the former, and were therefore consistent with themselves in abolishing all worship. The Americans desire to do the same thing politically, but infidelity ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... have to bring to your notice as President of the S.P.E. C.R.A. what I venture to assert is one of the most daring plots to subvert home and family life in the interests of priestcraft that has ever been discovered. In taking this step I am fully conscious of its seriousness, and if I ask your lordship to delay taking any measures for publicity until the unhappy principal is upon the high seas in the ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... the truth; they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they thought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different. They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could be explained by "Wanderlust" was current about twenty years ago among ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... in the early part of the sixteenth century Belgium was famous for designs of open-work spires, which, if erected, would have surpassed in height and richness all hitherto existing. But it is worthy of note that at this period the purity of the Church had become so sullied with priestcraft and the plenitude of Papal power, that it no longer possessed within its violated bosom those sacred impulses of piety which whilom sent up the simple spire, like a pure messenger, to whisper the aspirations of men to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... men; whom he called their Oowookakee, that is, as I made him explain it to me, their religious, or clergy; and that they went to say O! (so he called saying prayers,) and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said. By this I observed, that there is priestcraft even amongst the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all religious in the world, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... embrace, no matter what the wrong may have been. If you say this is dangerous doctrine, I say it is here. What other meaning can you give to it? At the same time I am astonished to find it here, astonished that priestcraft and the enemy of souls should not have erased it. Sacred truth! Is it not moving to think of all the millions of men who for eighteen hundred years have read this parable, philosophers and peasants, in every climate, and now are we reading it to-day! Is it not moving—nay, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter the fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical perversion of the facts of life, and a preparation of the mind for the seeds of Priestcraft. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pursued thee, many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... mistake to talk, as some do, of the power of the Russian Church, or of "priestcraft." The Church has little political power or social prestige. It is the power of religion, not that of ecclesiastical institutions, which is the arresting fact about modern Russia. It is not so much that Russia has a church, as that she is a church. In England we have narrowed religion ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... focused her round eyes at Mr. Charlton, smiled her deprecating smile, and replied: "I do think, Mr. Charlton, that in this day of lax views on one side and priestcraft on the other, I respect a man who thinks enough of ee-vangelical truth to make a stand against any enemy of the ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... fate which Hartmut had pictured so beautifully, yet so vividly. Will was fully determined to transfer the lesson which Arivana had taught him to Burgsdorf. Surely the punishment invoked by the furious priestcraft, would be no worse than the vial ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... steeped in the rhetoric and the commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust, vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... you have studied man merely in books and philosophical treatises; or, in other words, you have been thrashing empty straw. But the film will soon fall from your eyes. We will shortly quit this dirty country of yours, where priestcraft, pedantry, and oppression reign unmolested and undisturbed. I will usher you upon a stage where the passions have a freer scope, and where great energies ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... father," he said, "was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." The taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days," "Snow-Bound," "Ramoth Hill," and "Telling the Bees." It was a chance copy of Burns ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... little: "Yes, that is just it. Sta. Catarina is really haunted; and much as my reason revolts against the idea as superstitious and savouring of priestcraft, yet I must acknowledge I see no way of avoiding the admission. I do not presume to offer any explanations, I only state the fact; and the fact is that to-night one or other of you will, in all human—or unhuman—probability, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... (normal Christians and Infidels alike) into a common and highly intellectual and spiritual faith, opposed to which will be the less advanced people under the leadership of the Roman Catholic church, representing the temporal power of Christian priestcraft and the mythological superstitions which have attached themselves to the precepts and teachings of the Christ man ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... think I served it much, if I took as my motto, 'Religion is power?' Would not that be a base and sordid view of its advantages? And would you not say he who regards religion as a power, intends to abuse it as a priestcraft?" ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... time, would modify his views. The truth about the mines, given in clear and simple language, would have a great effect. Education is fighting for the Union. Time is all the Loyalists require. The National Schools must, in the long run, be fatal to political priestcraft and ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... palavers out o' your head? Didn't the sargint tell us, an' prove to us, the time we broke the guardhouse, an' took Frinch lave o' the ridgment for good, that the whole o' that, an' more along wid it, is all priestcraft?" ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... the stations announced by porters on the Underground Railway. He predicted that if women did get the franchise, Mr. Bradlaugh's "Temple" would be shut up in six months, as well as those of Messrs. Voysey and Conway and Dr. Perfitt. The ladies, he said, were swayed by Conventionalism and Priestcraft, and until you educated them, you could not safely give ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... swallow's nest in a mud-bank, once the receptacle for holy water,—when we had descended the stony pathway, for it was so worn as scarcely to merit the name of staircase,—when, standing once more on the chapel-pavement, with minds excited by the thought of those monkish days when priestcraft ruled the land,—our eyes naturally fell on the old oak chest. What further revelation might not this disclose! What sacred relics, what curious church-plate, what vellum manuscript, might not be hidden beneath this heavy lid! Would she rise and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... father on the earth; for one is your Father in heaven." How the mind might expatiate here in making historic disclosures of the times and ways in which this plain command of our Lord has been violated! Hearing the Word preached, and the hearer not able to discern truth from falsehood, has given to priestcraft nearly all of its power; because priestcraft, unsupported by the common people, could never have risen into power. If the common people had been wise enough to take heed how they hear, they never would have suffered themselves to be imposed upon ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... abstractedly in corroboration of his former statement, "Colombia is absolutely stagnant, due to Jesuitical politics, the bane of all good Catholic countries. If she could shake off priestcraft she'd have a chance—provided she didn't ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... adornment is that of Nature—it is the decoration of another and a strange element: the roots are in the air; the boughs which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their helplessness with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical—the native product of that ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... In fact, the condition of the Texans touched him on its religious side very keenly. For the fight was quite as much a fight for religious as for political freedom. Never in old Spain itself had priestcraft wielded a greater power than the Roman priesthood in Texas. They hated and feared an emigration of Americans, for they knew them to be men opposed to tyranny of all kinds, men who thought for themselves, and who would not be dictated to by monks and priests. It was, without doubt, ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... finish it when we'd begun," the clerk said. "Still, since the feelings of your holy priestcraft wouldn't let ye, the couple must put ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... above, A hand to relieve keen distress. Poverty smiled on his birth, And gave what all riches exceeds, Wit, honesty, wisdom, and worth; A soul to effect noble needs. Legitimates bow at his shrine; Unfetter'd he sprung into life; When vigour with love doth combine To free nature from priestcraft and strife. No ancient escutcheon he claim'd, Crimson'd with rapine and blood; He titles and baubles disdain'd, Yet his pedigree traced from the flood. Ennobled by all that is bright In the wreath of terrestrial fame, Genius ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of a different kind whether the sacerdotal spirit which has of late years so largely spread in the English Church can extend without producing a violent disruption. To cut the tap roots of priestcraft was one of the main aims and objects of the Reformation, and, for reasons I have already stated, I do not believe that the party which would re-establish it has by any means the strength that has been attributed ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... disgust with which I wade Thro' the foul juggling of this holy trade— This mud profound of mystery where the feet At every step sink deeper in deceit. Oh! many a time, when, mid the Temple's blaze, O'er prostrate fools the sacred cist I raise, Did I not keep still proudly in my mind The power this priestcraft gives me o'er mankind— A lever, of more might, in skilful hand, To move this world, than Archimede e'er planned— I should in vengeance of the shame I feel At my own mockery crush the slaves that kneel Besotted round; and—like that kindred breed ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... not go so far as that, where is the religion whose confessors do not consider prayers, songs of praise, and various kinds of devotional exercise, at any rate, a partial substitute for moral conduct? Look at England, for instance, where the audacious priestcraft has mendaciously identified the Christian Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath, in spite of the fact that it was ordained by Constantine the Great in opposition to the Jewish Sabbath, and even took its name, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of all his shrewd calculations as to what would win this woman, fell back upon the inner genius of that priestcraft which so often surpassed his ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Secondly, it might hurt the Methodistic connection very much, which I for one would not like to injure. They have their faults, and are peculiarly liable to those of hypocrisy, and spiritual ambition, and priestcraft. On the other hand, they do infinite good, carrying religion into classes in society where it would scarce be found to penetrate, did it rely merely upon proof of its doctrines, upon calm reasoning, and upon rational argument. Methodists add a powerful appeal to ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... delirium, and when inhaling the fumes of some intoxicating drug or powerful gas or vapour, or drinking some beverage which produced a temporary suspension of the reason, the mind of the enquirer was predisposed to feverish dreams:[21] if priestcraft were concerned in the interpretation of such dreams, or eliciting senses from the wild effusions of the disordered brain of the Pythoness, Science presided over the investigation of the causes of this phrenzy, and the advantages which the Thaumaturgists ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... for this, and for what I know about its enemies, I stand here in this cell and may yet go to a living death. This is my crime, and nothing else—this battle for the freedom and the joy of the world—this struggle against the powers of ignorance and darkness, priestcraft and greed, lust, treachery and foulness, cruelty and hate and war! This, and this only. You have ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Kingsley could no more understand the nature of Newman's intelligence than a subaltern in a line regiment can understand a Brahmin of Benares. Kingsley was a stout Protestant, whose hatred of Popery was, at bottom, simply ethical—an honest, instinctive horror of the practices of priestcraft and the habits of superstition; and it was only natural that he should see in those innumerable delicate distinctions which Newman was perpetually drawing, and which he himself had not only never thought of, but could not even grasp, simply another manifestation of the inherent falsehood ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... those peculiar trials which called forth the mighty energies of Bunyan's mind, unless we are acquainted with the times in which he lived. The trammels of statecraft and priestcraft had been suddenly removed from religion, and men were left to form their own opinions as to rites and ceremonies. In this state of abrupt liberty, some wild enthusiasts ran into singular errors; and Bunyan's first work on "Gospel ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... commonly said that the light of nature helps us a very little way in the knowledge of God. "Look at the heathen," it is said; "see their religious ignorance, their awful superstitions, their degrading worship of idols, and their subjection to priestcraft. This is your boasted light of nature, and these are its results—the Fetichism of Africa, the devil-worship of the North American Indians, the cannibalism of the Feejee Islands, the human sacrifices of Mexico and of the ancient Phoenicia." "Then," it is ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... records the life of this flying wonder, this masterpiece of Spanish priestcraft; no mural tablet—in this land of commemorative stones—has been erected to perpetuate the glory of his signal achievements; no street is called after him. It is as if he had never existed. On the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... still call this Religion, and cast aside the crucifix for the sword, the gun and the firebrand. The Inferno has never yet been portrayed or even outlined. Its name is Priestcraft and Intolerance under ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... stars, numbers the planets, measures the length of their years and computes the number of their days, unless his observatory is illuminated by the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. No Luther thunders against priestcraft, shakes the thrones of tyrants, and wakes the nations to a new life and a new progress, save that Luther that finds a Bible in his cell. No Franklin calls down electricity from the clouds to carry messages across a continent swift as the lightning flashes through the sky, save that ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already ... the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight.... Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft." ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Leonard, are you in sympathy with the priestcraft that would keep people virtuous through ignorance?" said the minister, laughing. "Alf must learn to do right, knowing all the facts. I don't believe he will shy a stone at a bird this coming year unless it ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... talented singer who took the part of the high-priest, and explained to him how to understand and interpret this character from the dialogue (in recitative) between him and Haruspex. He told him that he must understand that the whole thing was based upon priestcraft and superstition. Pontifex must make it clear that he does not fear his antagonist at the head of the Roman army, because, should the worst come to the worst, he has his machines ready, which, if necessary, will miraculously rekindle the dead fire of Vesta. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... of man, as the child of God, and made in the divine image; and this belief has had the sanction of all ages. Cheered and strengthened by such a belief, men have struggled bravely and steadily against priestcraft and kingcraft, against the absolutism of power in every form. The magnificent ideal of a government which the masses of mankind should themselves establish and uphold, has been the quickening life of all republics since time began. It is the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sublimity of its language, or in the facility with which it treats the most abtruse and difficult subjects. It is, without exception, the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced, in the investigation of morals and theology—in the destruction of priestcraft and superstition —and in developing the sources of all those passions and prejudices which have proved so fatal to ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... amazing life mask looks down "with its Egyptian power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism." These are Yanagi's silent friends. His less quiet friends of the flesh have felt that this room was a sanctuary and Yanagi a priest of eternal things, but a priest without priestcraft, a priest living joyously in the world. Above his desk is inscribed ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... horrible tribunal of irresponsible power, combined with the most remorseless priestcraft, was the Inquisition; for it not merely punished men for obeying their own consciences, but tried them in defiance of every principle of enquiry. It not only made a law contradictory of every other law, but it established a tribunal subversive of every mode by which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... Romans; the ideal is more above us, and the aspiration after good has often lent a strange power to evil. And sometimes, as at the Reformation, or French Revolution, when the upper classes of a so-called Christian country have become corrupted by priestcraft, by casuistry, by licentiousness, by despotism, the lower have risen up and re-asserted the natural sense of ...
— Philebus • Plato
... not feel the same emotion as when she first visited the Fujinami house. Now, she had heard her father's authentic voice. She knew his scorn for pretentiousness of all kinds, for false conventions, for false emotions, his hatred of priestcraft, his condemnation of the family wealth, and his contempt for the little respectabilities of ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... fine and very easily-quoted things of the same kind, which, at the present moment, are admitted as truths by many, and esteemed as unanswerable explanations of the phenomenon. According to this opinion, therefore, the southern races were more ignorant, less civilized, more readily duped by priestcraft and kingcraft; above all, readier to bow to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... insincere, because a pagan (as Swinburne was) could have committed suicide had he really felt these things. Swinburne, like most modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating God. Chesterton's note is truer. He knows that the pagan has all the good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan knows ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... coast, and many of our Sundays were lost entirely to us. The Catholics on shore do not, as a general thing, do regular trading or make journeys on Sunday, but the American has no national religion, and likes to show his independence of priestcraft by doing as he chooses on the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... than before, that there was evil here, I could not endure that my master should be deceived; that one like him, so pure and noble, should respect what, if my suspicions were true, was worse than the ordinary deceptions of priestcraft. I could not tell how far he might be led to countenance, and otherwise support their doings, before he should find cause to repent bitterly of his error. I watched the new procession yet more keenly, if possible, than the former. This time, the ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... Scotch? Surely not. This circumstance has of late been used as an argument against reform. It proves nothing against reform. It proves only this, that laws have no magical, no supernatural, virtue; that laws do not act like Aladdin's lamp or Prince Ahmed's apple; that priestcraft, that ignorance, that the rage of contending factions, may make good institutions useless; that intelligence, sobriety, industry, moral freedom, firm union, may supply in a great measure the defects ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it make him more just? Is the man that believes any better than the man who does not believe? How is it with nations? Look at Spain, the last slave-holder in the civilized world; she's christian, she believes in the trinity! And Italy, the beggar of the world. Under the rule of priestcraft money streamed in from every land and yet she did not advance. Today she is reduced to a hand-organ. Take poor Ireland, groaning under the heel of British oppression; could she cast off her priests she would soon be one ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... citizenship—of that common origin, back of both the Puritan and the Cavalier, to which all of us owe our being. Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its martyrs, not by its savage hatreds, darkened alike by kingcraft and priestcraft—let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present and the future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the lessons they teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to see, the light to reveal. Blessed be tolerance, sitting ever on the right hand of God to guide the way ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... philological, and philosophical {733} theology of Erasmus because they were conscious of an essential opposition. Luther's sole concern was with assurance of salvation, and this could only be won at the cost of a miracle, not any longer the old, outward magic of saints and priestcraft, but the wonder of faith occurring in the inmost center of personal life. "The sensuous sacramental miracle is done away, and in its stead appears the miracle of faith, that man, in his sin and weakness, can grasp and confidently ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Christian babe dying unbaptised to be unfit for a higher existence, and some have even created a "limbo" expressly to domicile the innocents "of whom is the kingdom of Heaven." Here, if any where, the cloven foot shows itself and teaches us that the only solid stratum underlying priestcraft is one ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Christian merchants; but the day will come when he will feel the necessity of making friends of the upholders of the Mohamedan religion, and then the good opinion of such a man as I, who am beloved by my people, will be of consequence to him. I had some thoughts, I confess, of relinquishing priestcraft, and becoming a merchant; but, all things considered, I shall continue to follow my original destiny. I have now an opportunity of setting up for a martyr, and that, now I recollect it, is worth more than the loss of my worldly goods, my house, my furniture, my ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... exception. What an effort, my dear Sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through. The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards not forwards for ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... ko, li—answering to our do, re, mi[304]—was soon in everybody's mouth. From the first it was evidently destined to enact a role different from that of the old cantillation; none the less the musical ideas that came in with it, the air of freedom from tabu and priestcraft it breathed, and the diatonic scale, the highway along which it marched to conquest, soon produced a noticeable reaction in all the musical efforts of the people. This new seed, when it had become ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... sacrifice to Fortune. This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... has rolled through France with the same assertion, 'Discussion cannot be tolerated'; and what has been the result? Simply this,—that all the intellectual force of the country is arrayed against priestcraft;— and the spirit of an insolent, witty, domineering atheism and materialism rules us all. Even young children can be found by the score who laugh at the very idea of a God, and who fling a jeer at the story of the Crucifixion of Christ,—while vice and crime are ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of Philip that he was nothing if not religious, for Nero even was not a more indefatigable murderer, nor a more diabolical specimen of cruelty and superstition. The very thought of the wretch tempts one to revolt at human piety, at any rate where priestcraft and its fabrications are at the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... own class. They invented endless fables which gave rise to Mythology. They ruled the people by the might of superstition, and acquired wealth, honor, and power, for themselves.[17] We arrive then at nearly the culminating point of Egyptian priestcraft, the days of "wise men," "sorcerers," and "magicians."[18] Such men ever {20} have, and we presume ever will employ secrecy as the chief element of their clever jugglery. Mankind love to be deceived. Let an Adrian, Blitz, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... passion straighten and confine; And, as a stream, when art constrains its course, Pours its fierce torrent with augmented force, So passion, narrowed to one channel small, Unlike the former,—does not flow at all. For Love then only flaps his purple wings When uncontrolled by priestcraft or by kings. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... wonderful dignity and power. He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful lines, and met the old poet as one man meets another; and lo! there arose before him a new, untrodden and wholly human world, free from priestcraft and pedantry, near to nature and unspeakably alluring ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... corruption of the gods. And if matters don't go quite so far as that, where is the religion whose adherents don't consider prayers, praise and manifold acts of devotion, a substitute, at least in part, for moral conduct? Look at England, where by an audacious piece of priestcraft, the Christian Sunday, introduced by Constantine the Great as a subject for the Jewish Sabbath, is in a mendacious way identified with it, and takes its name,—and this in order that the commands of Jehovah for the Sabbath (that is, the day on which the Almighty ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... insurgents are triumphant everywhere, the king left the capital at four o'clock, a provisional government was proclaimed this morning," and suchlike, what do we care for the sonorous periods in which official priestcraft chants the downfall ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the experiment has been made to arouse the attention and excite the enthusiasm of its followers by the adoption of ceremonies and processions; but these are declared to be only the innovations of priestcraft, and the Singhalese, whilst they unite in their celebration, are impatient to explain that such practices are less religious than secular, and that the Perrehera in particular, the chief of their annual festivals, was introduced, not ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... party have shifted their ground and changed their tactics since the era of the first French Revolution; and how utterly inconsistent are the arguments of M. Comte and the Positive School with those of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. Formerly, Religion was wont to be ascribed to priestcraft; it was supposed to have been invented by fraud, supported by falsehood, and professed in hypocrisy; and the Church, but especially the hierarchy of Rome, was the object of incessant ridicule or malignant abuse. But now, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... It happened very unfortunately for Reeves that he fell, when young, into the acquaintance of some sceptical persons who made a jest of all religion and treated both its precepts and its mysteries as inventions subservient to priestcraft. Such notions are too easily imbibed by those who are desirous to indulge their vicious inclinations, and Reeves being of this stamp, greedily listened to all discourses of ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... proceedings there, Watt and Dr. Priestly being present. A few months later the revolution broke out. Young Harry Priestley, a son of the Doctor's, one evening burst into the drawing-room, waving his hat and crying, "Hurrah! Liberty, Reason, Brotherly Love forever! Down with kingcraft and priestcraft! The majesty of the people forever! France is free!" Dr. Priestley was deeply stirred and became the most prominent of all in the cause of the rights of man. He hailed the acts of the National Assembly abolishing monarchy, nobility and church. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... reign has not hesitated to assert that the tenets against which Lord John Russell protested in the Durham Letter were, in his judgment, of a kind which are 'destructive of all reasonable faith, and reduce worship to a mere belief in spells and priestcraft.' Cardinal Vaughan, it is needless to say, does not sympathise with such a view. He, however, has opinions on the subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address at Preston on September 10, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... the government seemed to become conscious of the great number of beggars in Rome, and of the reproach they offered to the wise and paternal regulations of the priestcraft. Accordingly, for a short time, they carried on a move in the right direction, which had been begun by the Triumvirate of 1849, during their short career. Some hundreds of the beggars were hired at the rate of a few baiocchi a day to carry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... stronger repulsion than his puerile hostility to Shakespeare. Even here, however, there is something to be pleaded for Voltaire. Much of his irreligion doubtless arose from a defective and unimpassioned nature, but part of it was noble, and rested upon his intolerance of cruelty, of bigotry, and of priestcraft—but still more of these qualities not germinating spontaneously, but assumed fraudulently as masques. But very little Coleridge had troubled himself to investigate Voltaire's views, even where he was supposing himself to be ranged ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... which he ought to have thought long before—viz., the Papistical religion of the Italian. Dr. Riccabocca was professedly a Roman Catholic. He so little obtruded that fact—and, indeed, had assented so readily to any animadversions upon the superstition and priestcraft which, according to Protestants, are the essential characteristics of Papistical communities—that it was not till the hymeneal torch, which brings all faults to light, was fairly illumined for the altar, that the remembrance of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Saviour in His human life to those who have never understood Him; to save the perishing, and bind them as with golden chains to the feet of God. They are battling with error, and breaking up the iron systems of priestcraft, inhumanity, and wrong, which have enslaved men for ages, and have shut off from them the light and love of their Heavenly Father. They are staying the progress of crime; they lay the hand of law on the slaveholder; they appeal to the drunkard; they clear out the dens ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... had ascended the throne established by his victorious father, no longer believing in the power of his idols, and weary of the restraints of the old religion, at one stroke broke through the hitherto sacred taboo and the entire system of priestcraft. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... for home use only. Since Frye wrote, the whole of Europe, excepting perhaps Russia, has reaped the benefits of the French Revolution, and reduced, if not suppressed, what the Major called "kingcraft and priestcraft." He did not attempt to divine the future, but the history of Europe in the nineteenth century has been largely in accordance with his desires and hopes. It is not a small merit for a writer, in the midst of one of the most rabid reactions that ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... great, though half its greatness was not dreamed of, that was to pour in through this gate which to-day's work was to open. For, not only that fear and hatred of Popery which marked his age, but, already, that American love of liberty, to which priestcraft is so inimical, burned within him. A touch of Winkelried's fervor kindled his eye. If into his breast, and into the breasts of his comrades, the bayonets of the enemy were to be planted, yet should a way be ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... severe upon me. But do you count it no merit, no service to mankind, to deliver them from the frauds and fetters of priestcraft, from the deliriums of fanaticism, and from the terrors and follies of superstition? Consider how much mischief these have done to the world! Even in the last age what massacres, what civil wars, what convulsions of government, what ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... of those men of iron who preferred a life-or-death struggle with misery on the bleak and wintry coast of New England to submission to priestcraft and kingcraft; you, the offspring of those hardy pioneers who set their faces against all the dangers and difficulties that surround the early settler's life; you, who subdued the forces of wild nature, cleared away the primeval forest, covered the end less prairie with ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... other nations had a variety of gods and peculiar forms of worship. In most of the pagan religions there were elements of truth and beauty, but they lacked in ethical principles and in moral application to life. Most of their priestcraft was a vulgar imposition upon the ignorance and credulity of the common people. The prevailing philosophies—which, among the more enlightened, took the place of religion—were the Grecian, adopted also by the Romans, and the oriental, with numerous followers ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it possible that the woman question should ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... done: with a strange indifference, our Economists, nigh buried under Tables for minor Branches of Industry, have altogether overlooked the grand all-overtopping Hypocrisy Branch; as if our whole arts of Puffery, of Quackery, Priestcraft, Kingcraft, and the innumerable other crafts and mysteries of that genus, had not ranked in Productive Industry at all! Can any one, for example, so much as say, What moneys, in Literature and Shoeblacking, are realized by actual Instruction ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
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