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Pagan   Listen
noun
Pagan  n.  One who worships false gods; an idolater; a heathen; one who is neither a Christian, a Mohammedan, nor a Jew. "Neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man."
Synonyms: Gentile; heathen; idolater. Pagan, Gentile, Heathen. Gentile was applied to the other nations of the earth as distinguished from the Jews. Pagan was the name given to idolaters in the early Christian church, because the villagers, being most remote from the centers of instruction, remained for a long time unconverted. Heathen has the same origin. Pagan is now more properly applied to rude and uncivilized idolaters, while heathen embraces all who practice idolatry.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books



... quarrel, give his life for a sentimental moment, pour every farthing of his possessions into the lap of a friend, incur debts which he would not pay, quarrel wildly with a man about a rouble, remember things that you would expect him to forget, forget everything that he should remember—a pagan, a saint, a blackguard, a hero—anything you please so long as you ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... 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, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... admire, considered purely as art, the Pagan temples of the Greeks and Romans, we must confess that they are lacking in those high ideals and those sustained and inspired motives which seem to penetrate and permeate the buildings and churches of the Christian ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath

... Chapter XII. Immortality And The Resurrection. 1. Orthodox Doctrine. 2. The Doctrine of Immortality as taught by Reason, the Instinctive Consciousness, and Scripture. 3. The Three Principal Views of Death—the Pagan, Jewish, and Christian. 4. Eternal Life, as taught in the New Testament, not endless Future Existence, but present Spiritual Life. 5. Resurrection, and its real Meaning, as a Rising up, and not ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... think that you were a little foolish in taking such a view?" said Geoffrey. "Have you not been amused, sometimes, to read about the early Christians?—how the lead would not boil the martyr, or the lion would not eat him, or the rain from a blue sky put out the fire, and how the pagan king at once was converted and accepted a great many difficult doctrines without further delay. The Athanasian Creed was not necessarily true because the fire would not light or the sword would not cut, nor, excuse me, were ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... could be found than that of master-morality and the morality of Christian valuations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (—The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky), the master-morality ("Roman," "pagan," "classical," "Renaissance"), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, of ascending life, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-morality affirms just as instinctively as Christian morality denies ("God," "Beyond," "self-denial,"—all of them negations). ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... the consciousness of ignorance. If it suggests anything positive, it is the Idea of Good, as the ultimate end of affection. The subject is one of special interest in ancient Ethics, as being one of the aspects of Benevolent sentiment in the Pagan world. In Aristotle we first find a definite handling ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... in nature like the prophets of the Old Testament, or, more correctly speaking, like the old wise men and teachers of the pagan world, and point us to a greatness high above that in which we, the children of the valleys and the plains, have our being. For these pyramids are not the pleasantest things upon earth, they are not the fragrance of the flowers, not the singing of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... shores they haply steer, Where, HOWARD, thy cold dust reposes near, Whilst o'er the wave the silken pennants stream, And seen far off the golden crescents gleam, Amid the pomp of war, the swelling breast Shall feel a still unwonted awe impressed, 120 And the relenting Pagan turn aside To think—on yonder shore the Christian died! But thou, O Briton! doomed perhaps to roam An exile many a year and far from home, If ever fortune thy lone footsteps leads To the wild Nieper's banks, and whispering reeds, O'er HOWARD's grave thou shalt impassioned bend, As if to hold sad ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... thousand miles north of my Philadelphia starting-point (by way of Montreal and Quebec) in the midst of regions that go to a further extreme of grimness, wildness of beauty, and a sort of still and pagan scaredness, while yet Christian, inhabitable, and partially fertile, than perhaps any other on earth. The weather remains perfect; some might call it a little cool, but I wear my old gray overcoat and find it just right. The days are full of sunbeams and oxygen. Most of the forenoons ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... strange monster in those days, and the sight put both horse and man into amazement. Some said it was a great crabshell brought out of China, and some imagined it to be one of the pagan temples, in which the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... the positive, 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 enthusiasms and inconvenient heresies. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... the pagan in every natural boy, and to give him too much to reverence taxes his powers until they are worn and impotent by the time he reaches manhood. Under Miss Hester's tutelage too many things became sacred to Fred Brent. It was wicked to cough in church, as it was a sacrilege to play ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... "Midsummer Night's Dream," and Ben Jonson's "Masque of Witches" to be defended. For immaterial substances, we are authorised by Scripture in their description: and herein the text accommodates itself to vulgar apprehension, in giving angels the likeness of beautiful young men. Thus, after the pagan divinity, has Homer drawn his gods with human faces: and thus we have notions of things above us, by describing them like other ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... hands and drive the chariot of the sun? It is as great a crime to be a young man to-day as it was in the days of Pitt. Nothing can redeem the stigma and the shame but success. Of course, all this sounds very pagan, and I am not identifying myself with it. I believe with that dear barefooted philosopher, St. Francis, who is to me more than fifty Aristotles, as a Kempis is more than fifty Platos, that a man is just ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... 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 minister ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... poetry, eloquence, literature,—sanctifies it, and dedicates it to the Lord; not for the pride of priests, but for the improvement of humanity. Civilization may exist with Paganism, but only performs its highest uses when tributary to Christianity. And Christianity accepts the tribute which even Pagan civilization offers for the adornment of our race,—expelled from Paradise, and doomed to hard and bitter toils,—without abdicating her more glorious office of raising ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... have been facilitated by the assumption, on the part of Christian powers, of the exemption of their subjects from local jurisdiction in Mohammedan and pagan countries. A factory or a mission is established, which, from the outset, is an imperium in imperio, and becomes a permanent conspiracy which soon finds causes of complaint against the government of the land in which, without invitation, its members have become domiciled. Essentially ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... what is man, to pretend to infallibility! His heart, be he pope or pagan, is 'deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.' Pope Sixtus V in 1589 issued his infallible Bible; but the edition of Clement VIII, in 1592, differs much from that of 1589. Infallibles ought never to differ with each other; but how often ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE. Character of the testimony regarding miracles Connection of mediaeval with pagan miracles Their basis of fact Various kinds of miraculous cures Atmosphere of supernaturalism thrown about all cures Influence of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... statement of a melancholy fact. The average state school, high or low, is absolutely colorless as to religion. Even the morality that is taught is not the morality of the Christian religion, but of philosophical ethics that differ but little from the ethics of the pagan. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... their brief time with our friends while they were pushing toward the Pacific, heard of that new religion which was professed not only by Deerfoot the Shawanoe, but by his companions. It was so different from the pagan belief that the couple, upon their return to the village, took care to make no mention of it; better to leave that until the arrival of Deerfoot. At the same time the two Blackfeet trembled when they ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... such resilient temperament, one who gamboled through life like a faun, argument was difficult. Bob Wharton was pagan in his joyous inconsequence; his romping spirits could not be damped; he bubbled with the optimism of a Robin Goodfellow. Ahead of him he saw nothing but dancing sunshine, heard nothing but the Pandean pipes. The girl ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... more delicate sensibility; it is not excessive and disordered as in the north, and yet it is not satisfied with the grave simplicity, the robust nudity of antique architecture. It is the daughter of the pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more womanly than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... all their hearts, and just as you like to see hanging in your room the picture of the Good Shepherd with the little lamb, so they began to long for pictures from their Bible. Every heathen Roman had his house decorated with pictures and carvings from his pagan religion, but it was in the dim underground galleries that the first Bible ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff

... that bordered madness. Ridgway had observed that neither Aline Harley nor Virginia was present, and a note from the latter had just reached him to the effect that Aline was ill with the strain of the long trial. Afterward Ridgway could never thank his pagan gods enough that she ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. This sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like springing flowers— For this, for everything, we are out of tune. It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... older woman fixed on Corinna the stare with which she would have attempted the conversion of an undraped pagan if she had ever encountered one. Though she was unconscious of the fact as she sat there, suffering yet unbending, in the Florentine chair, she represented the logical result of the conservative principle in nature, of the spirit that forgets nothing and learns nothing, of the instinct ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... which Mr. Collins, in his little volume on Cicero, in the Ancient Classics for English Readers, says that they "contained under this veil whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an enlightened pagan." In this Mr. Collins is fully justified by what Cicero himself has said although the character thus given to these mysteries is very different from that which was attributed to them by early Christian writers. They were to those ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... with nervous, grey eyes, reminded Owen of a Roman bust. "A young Roman emperor," he said to himself, and he seemed to understand Evelyn's love of Ulick. Would that she had continued to love this young pagan! Far better than to have been duped by that grey, skinny Christian. And he listened to Ulick, admiring his independent ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... enough, he'd found it," said Barlow holding a forgotten match over his pipe. "If there's any truth in it three priests, way back in the fifteen hundreds, stumbled onto enough pagan swag to make a man cry to think about it. Held it accursed, I guess. And didn't need it just then in their business, any way. Just what is it? I don't know. Juarez himself didn't know; Captain Escobar let him get just so far and decided to hog the whole thing and ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... particular credit for having remembered that there were no wolves in England, and having accordingly excised a passage in which Alexis prophesied that those animals would grow milder as they listened to the strains of his favourite nymph. When a man has got so far as to bring to England all the pagan deities, and rival shepherds contending for bowls and lambs in alternate strophes, these niceties seem a little out of place. After swallowing such a camel of an anachronism as is contained in the following ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... was for the bitter trial, since had he not the certain hope of another life, and of meeting his beloved in the spaces of endless felicity? Surely then he should be able to bear his sorrow with as great a fortitude as the pagan poets, who looked forward to nothing but the dust; to whom the fabled dim country beyond the Styx was a cheerless dream, and to whom a living dog upon the earth was more worthy of envy than the King of all Elysium. He must ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... were no sooner out of his mouth than I fell at his Grace's feet, quite overwhelmed with gratitude. I embraced his elliptical legs with almost pagan idolatry, and considered myself as a man on the high-road to a very handsome fortune. "Yes, my child," resumed the archbishop, whose speech had been cut short by the rapidity of my prostration, "I mean to make you the receiver-general ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us. The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again exercising a strong ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... purpose of testing the accuracy of the above catalogue of gradations seriatim and in order of time; but to satisfy ourselves on the question, whether the invocation of saints and angels prevailed from the first in the Christian Church; or whether it was an innovation introduced after pagan superstition had begun to mingle its poisonous corruptions with the pure worship of {70} Almighty God. And here, I conceive, few persons will be disposed to doubt, that if the primitive believers were taught by the Apostles to address ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler

... Wherefore this place precisely doth she choose? Why hither always doth she drive her flock? For hours together I have seen her sit In dreamy musing 'neath the Druid tree, Which every happy creature shuns with awe. For 'tis not holy there; an evil spirit Hath since the fearful pagan days of old Beneath its branches fixed his dread abode. The oldest of our villagers relate Strange tales of horror of the Druid tree; Mysterious voices of unearthly sound From its unhallowed shade oft meet the ear. Myself, when in the gloomy twilight hour My path once chanced ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... at your father kissing Marka! Aren't they a pair of devils? No shame, and no conscience. Why don't you get away from them, Mitia—away from these Pagan ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshipers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... the novels to be true stories, and was especially impressed with "Glenarvon."[15] It is reported that he became jealous of Byron on the appearance of the poem of "Manfred." If he were not, it is at least certain that the pagan patriarch never could sympathize with the new ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... makes of poetic fables in his treatise on Monarchy, and in the very arguments which he puts into the mouths of saints and apostles. There are lingering feelings to this effect even now among the peasantry of Italy; where, the reader need not be told, Pagan customs of all sorts, including religious and most reverend ones, are existing under the sanction of other names;—heathenisms christened. A Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native poets, concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... wide, with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the landscape to any expression ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... mostly prevailed, for it best suited an epoch of relative decadence in culture. It suited admirably the Middle Age, offering at once an excuse for the new-born Christian art, and for those works of classical or pagan art which yet survived. Specimens of this view abound all through the Middle Age. We find it, for instance, in the criticism of Virgil, to whose work were attributed four distinct meanings: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic. For Dante poetry was nihil aliud quam fictio rhetorica in musicaque ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... home of the spirits, but knew nothing of the Christian's heaven. There are still, in his nation, 700 pagans who sacrifice the white dog to the spirits, and are ever travelling towards the land of the setting sun. He hopes the pagan children will be taught about Jesus. He is so touched by the care taken of these little ones and by the work of the Christian lady who saves them. The Chief says he is very thankful I brought him here to-day. The circle on the grass reminds him of how the Indian children sit to sacrifice ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe

... to their fathers; and both were succeeded by pagan sons. London and the East Saxon province or kingdom—let us say Middlesex and Essex, with perhaps Herts—seem to have been ruled by the three sons of Sabert in commission, who, disregarding whatever thin veneer of Christianity they had found it convenient to adopt ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... at the lop of the nave, are five different fresco, paintings which represent different acts relative to the life of the patron of the church. One represents the consecration of Saint-Romain as bishop; in another, he overthrows the pagan temples; farther on, is the miracle of the dragon or Gargouille; next to it, is the procession of the shrine to obtain the deliverance of a prisoner, a ceremony which was instituted after the miracle of which we have already spoken. The ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet

... thee?"—"I am going to free my son from Oh."—"How so?"—Then the man told the old white father how he had hired out his son to Oh and under what conditions.—"Aye, aye!" said the old white father, "'tis a vile pagan thou hast to deal with; he will lead thee about by the nose for a long time."—"Yes," said the man, "I perceive that he is a vile pagan; but I know not what in the world to do with him. Canst thou not tell me then, dear father, how I may recover my son?"—"Yes, I can," said the old man.—"Then ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous

... that Se-quo-yah was a believer in, or practiced, the old Indian religious rites. Christianity had, indeed, done little more for him than to unsettle the pagan idea, ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown

... evening—there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and 'This indeed,' said I to ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... into our own power because we can perceive it in the great masters. According to the Apostle, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." "Their vigour is of the fire and their origin is celestial," says the pagan. The coelestis origo is unpurchasable. Nevertheless, even for the ordinary being who aspires himself to write, there is this practical benefit to be derived from an insight into the truth—that he will know in what the supreme gift does consist. He will not delude himself into fancying ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... the clash of arms in this remarkable poem. 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 undutifulness to their more religiously ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... 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 ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier

... everything that showed reverence and godly fear—he cordialized wherever and in whomsoever it was found,—Pagan or Christian, Romanist or Protestant, bond or free; and while he disliked, and had indeed a positive antipathy to intellectual mysticism, he had a great knowledge of and relish for such writers as Dr. Henry ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... Bad." They were prayers or praise, all addressed to the Great Spirit, or the Great Father, and it gave Rolf an entirely new idea of the red man, and a startling light on himself. Here was the Indian, whom no one considered anything but a hopeless pagan, praying to God for guidance at each step in life, while he himself, supposed to be a Christian, had not prayed regularly for months—was in ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... occasionally lighter treatment of semi-sacred subjects, and it is impossible to convey an accurate idea of the spirit prevailing at this hamlet of sanctuary without attuning oneself somewhat to the more pagan character of the place. Of irreverence, in the sense of a desire to laugh at things that are of high and serious import, there is not a trace, but at the same time there is a certain unbending of the bow at Montrigone which is not ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... of the ancient world. And I go sometimes alone with a book to the Borghese or to the Capitoline and there let my imagination wander in re-creation of the visions of life and the soul that came as interpretations to the ancients. I have lately been reading a book on the cult of Orpheus, the Pagan Christ, one of the loveliest figures of the Greeks. It made me believe somehow that Christ never lived, that he is only a creation of the anonymous imagination of a hungering world. For surely Orpheus did not live, and how closely ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... of a horse, Paltocks, short coats, Parage, descent, Pareil, like, Passing, surpassingly, Paynim, pagan, Pensel, pennon, Perclos, partition, Perdy, par Dieu, Perigot, falcon, Perish, destroy, Peron, tombstone, Pight, pitched, Pike, steal away, Piked, stole, Pillers, plunderers, Pilling, plundering, Pleasaunce, pleasure, Plenour, complete, Plump, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... communion with Ram, any more than we refuse to find it within the Christian's description of his personal converse with Christ. We must not discredit the assurance which comes to the devout Buddhist who faithfully follows the Middle Way, or deny that Pagan sacramentalism was to its initiates a channel of grace. For all these are children of tradition, occupy a given place in the stream of history; and commonly they are better, not worse, for accepting this fact with all that it involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see when we ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... thronged 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 ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... 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 and of ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize; the latter to vilify than to discriminate. The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both; and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, but ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... had, from the beginning, excited such animosity between the British and Romish priests, that, instead of concurring in their endeavours to convert the idolatrous Saxons, they refused all communion together, and each regarded his opponent as no better than a pagan [a]. The dispute lasted more than a century, and was at last finished, not by men's discovering the folly of it, which would have been too great an effort for human reason to accomplish, but by the entire prevalence of the Romish ritual ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... hearts and narrow sensibilities; a verdict, in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of writers, many of them eminent for wit or learning, than were ever before congregated upon any inquest relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient [Endnote: 21] or modern, Pagan or Christian. It was a most witty saying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher, who made a trade of insulting the memories of deceased authors by forged writings, that he was "among the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... Yet, though the streets were covered with the unburied; though every wall and trench was teeming; though six hundred thousand corpses lay flung over the ramparts, and naked to the sun—pestilence came not. But the abomination of desolation, the pagan standard, was fixed; where it was to remain until the plough passed over the ruins ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... 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 was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions:—But this is by ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe

... Before the Christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the Divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us, there was very little said of the love of God. The followers of Plato have something of it, and only something; the other writers of pagan antiquity, whether poets or philosophers, nothing at all. And they who consider with what infinite attention, by what a disregard of every perishable object, through what long habits of piety and contemplation it is that any man is able to attain ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... doctrine, taught in the Mysteries, that though slight and ordinary offences could be expiated by penances, repentance, acts of beneficence, and prayers, grave crimes were mortal sins, beyond the reach of all such remedies. Eleusis closed her gates against Nero: and the Pagan Priests told Constantine that among all their modes of expiation there was none so potent as could wash from his soul the dark spots left by the murder of his wife, and his ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... man hath served in his Prince's cause and be thus. Signior, let me derive a small piece of silver from you, it shall not be given in the course of time, by this good ground, I was fain to pawn my rapier last night for a poor supper, I am a Pagan else: ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson

... sublime doctrine which commands us to love our enemies and affect those who despitefully entreat us is in perilous proximity to the ridiculous; at any rate it is a vain and futile rule of life which the general never thinks of obeying. It contrasts poorly with the common sense of the pagan—Fiat Justitia, ruat coelum; and the heathenish and old- Adamical sentiment of the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... less real. There are warriors who meet their death with a song and a gay smile; there are others who meet it with stern and sober resolve. But courage calls both her children. Christian Europe has been kinder and juster to Seneca than was pagan Rome. Rome while she copied, abused him. Neither as Spaniard nor as Roman can he claim the name of sage. The higher philosophy is denied to both these nations. But in brilliancy of touch, in delicious abandon of sparkling chat, all the more delightful because it does us good in genial ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... is now regarded as an invention of later times. It seems much more probable that the library bad been largely scattered before the coming of the Moslems. Indeed, it has even been suggested that the Christians of an earlier day removed the records of pagan thought. Be that as it may, the famous Alexandrian library had disappeared long before the revival of interest in classical learning. Meanwhile, as we have said, the Arabs, far from destroying the western literature, were its chief preservers. Partly at least because of their regard for ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Bavarian infantry went by, in all the pomp and circumstance of martial array and the joyous swing of rapid rhythmic movement. The street echoed and throbbed in the Englishman's ears with the exultant pulse of youth and mastery set to loud Pagan music. A group of lads from the tea-shop clustered on the pavement and watched the troops go by, staring at a phase of life in which they had no share. The martial trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and barracks, the hard discipline ...
— When William Came • Saki

... come to town to head it. Her ladyship laid trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions, into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening the grand official. Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and the flying torch-furies are extinct? Error of Christians! We have relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire squib-trail, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... that he was different. So different; there was the horror. She was the sinner; not he. He belonged to the bright, ardent life, the life without social bond or scruple, the life of sunny, tolerant hotels and pagan forests; but she did not belong to it. The things that had seemed external things, barriers and shackles, were the realest things, were in fact the inner things, were her very self. In yielding to her heart she had destroyed herself, there was no life to be lived henceforth ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... the neighboring kingdoms, impeding trade, commerce, and free passage, and disturbing the peace on the seas. He likewise compels the Portuguese Christians to sail on the said ships for the purpose of robbery. He is a pirate and thief, and a pagan who, in accordance with the teachings of his idolatry, has two hundred men killed, in order to bathe in their bile; and those by whom he has himself washed must be virgins. There is also a diabolical custom that, when a chief dies, they burn his body; his wife ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair

... Good, at the time also King of Denmark, won a decisive victory here in 1043 over a much larger invading army of Wends. (See also Note 23.) Trnder, one from the region about Trondhjem. Haakon from Hjrungavaag. Haakon Jarl (970-995) was the last pagan King in Norway. His defeat in 986 of the Jomsborg vikings, allies of King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, in a naval engagement at Hjrungavaag, a bay in western Norway, was the greatest naval battle ever fought in that country. Valhall, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... something magical in such superstitious rites, and that thereby people consulted demons about things future or secret. Moloch was the principal idol of the Ammonites, but other nations took the same idol for their chief god; for it appears from Pagan records, that the different nations were so very accommodating with their gods that they lent them to one another. Moloch seems to have been the same as Baal, both names signifying dominion, or more particularly the sun, the prince ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... our time recounting to each other the Gothic tales and romances that have taken root in Rheims. Our memories and sometimes our imaginations, clubbed together. Each of us furnished his legend. Rheims is one of the most impossible towns in the geography of story. Pagan lords have lived there, one of whom gave as a dower to his daughter the strips of land in Borysthenes called the "race-courses of Achilles." The Duke de Guyenne, in the fabliaux, passes through Rheims on his way to besiege Babylon; Babylon, moreover, which is very ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... pagan with the heart of Christ, I go bewildered from thine altar place, These brooding boughs and grey-lit forest wings, Nor know if thou deniest My destiny and race, Man's goalward falterings, To sing the perfect joy that lay Along the path we missed somewhere, That led thee to thy ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan

... tenet of his faith. The cheerful and generally innocent excursions of other men assumed in his mind the proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned certain views of his, saying; "There's more education—soul education, if you will have it—in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that—more ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... to, then, is a certain result of the eternally pagan influence of the sun. For, say what you will, the sun is pagan. It says "Yea" to life. In its glorious rays it is ridiculously easy to forget the alleged beauties of another world. Under its scorching heat the snaky sinuousness ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... us to occasionally survey the dark arena where men have played their part, in lonely gloom, without a Savior and without a God. Pagan morality, being without the motives and restraints of revealed religion, and guided wholly by the passions and the lights of reason and nature, is grossly defective. It has no settled standard of right and wrong. It is vain to look, ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880

... cartoon popular—he was hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When he converted the king or chief, and he always directed his sacred ammunition at the upper classes, he took advantage of every inch of spiritual and governmental club put in his hand, and smote the pagan hip and thigh. His sole effort was to make the South Seas safe for theocracy, and ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, The Curtis Publishing Company, Harper & Brothers, The Metropolitan Magazine Company, The Atlantic Monthly Company, The Crowell Publishing Company, The International Magazine Company, The Pagan Publishing Company, The Stratford Journal, and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... conduct of the Peking Government, proposed to make terms with the court at Nanking. The French minister refused to cooeperate, partly because the rebels had not been careful to distinguish between the images in Roman Catholic chapels and those in pagan temples, but chiefly from an objection to the ascendency of Protestant influence, coupled with a fear of losing the power that comes from a protectorate of Roman Catholic missions. How different would have been [Page 162] the future of China had the allied powers backed ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... life. Mr Pater can join hands with Gautier in saying—je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu. And I too join issue; I too love the great pagan world, its bloodshed, its slaves, its injustice, its loathing of all that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... dying glow of the sunset. Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)

... of appeal to written laws, with which the Pagan natives are necessarily unacquainted, has given rise in their palavers to (what I little expected to find in Africa) professional advocates, or expounders of the law, who are allowed to appear and to plead ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... knew absolutely nothing. Passing to our own literature, it is certain that Addison was profoundly ignorant of Chaucer and of Spenser. Milton only,—and why? simply because he was a brilliant scholar, and stands like a bridge between the Christian literature and the Pagan,—Addison had read and esteemed. There was also in the very constitution of Milton's mind, in the majestic regularity and planetary solemnity of its epic movements, something which he could understand and appreciate. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... wrote four or five leaves, but begin to get aground for want of Indian localities. Colonel Ferguson's absence is unlucky, and half-a-dozen Qui Hi's besides, willing to write chits,[22] eat tiffin, and vent all their Pagan jargon when one does not want to hear it; and now that I want a touch of their slang, lo! there is not one near me. Mr. Adolphus, son of the celebrated counsel, and author of a work on the Waverley Novels,[23] came to make me a visit. He is a modest as well as an able man, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere, for the past eighteen hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century; the same causes render him the same as in the times of Augustus and Tiberius, that is to say voluptuous and cruel: he abuses himself and victimizes others; a brutal, calculating egoism resumes its ascendancy, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... Eternal. I understood these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; for "thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... that the word Norman means man of the north, that it is a Scandinavian, and not a French word, that it originated in the invasions of the followers of Rollo and and other Norwegians, and that just as part of England was overrun by Pagan buccaneers called Danes, part of France was occupied by similar Northmen, we see the likelihood of certain Norse words finding their way into the French language, where they would be superadded to its original Celtic ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... end of the verse is, "Yet both are readers of the Book. So with like words say they (the pagan Arabs) ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... into the open plain before the castle and called on her dear name three times. Then Perion, naked to his enemies, and at the disposal of the first pagan archer that chose to shoot him down, sang cheerily the waking-song which Melicent had heard a mimic Amphitryon make in Dame Alcmena's honour, very long ago, when people laughed and Melicent was young and ignorant ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... he said:—'I insist upon it, that no government, not Roman Catholic, ought to tolerate men of the Roman Catholic persuasion. They ought not to be tolerated by any government, Protestant, Mahometan, or Pagan.' To this the Rev. Arthur O'Leary replied with great wit and force, in a pamphlet entitled, Remarks on the Rev. Mr. Wesley's Letters. Dublin, 1780. Wesley (Journal, iv. 365) mentions meeting O'Leary, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... in the strength of this I rode, Shattering all evil customs everywhere, And past thro' Pagan realms, and made them mine, And clash'd with Pagan hordes, and bore them down, And broke thro' all, and in the strength ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... the Creator's praises. The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible noise, uproar, and confusion, more worthy of some pagan bacchanalia than a procession of Christian people. All the country-folk from five or six leagues around Aix pour into the town on that day to do honour to God. It is the only occasion of the kind, and the clergy, either knavish ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... flippantly perhaps, and frequently very severely dealt with; in some cases you will be surprised to see my opinions of certain men, some of whom, in many respects, I may perhaps think differently of now. Gibbon said of certain Pagan philosophers, that 'their lives were spent in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.' I cannot boast of having passed my life in the practice of virtue, but I may venture to say that I have always pursued truth; and you will ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... in his report of the case to define democracy for the benefit of his enemies as "a fiend more horrible than any that the imagination of the classical poets ever conjured up from the vasty deep of their Pagan Hell." ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... As we pass out into the bleak street, the first faint flush of dawn is in the east. The waesserer are washing off the cabs; a helmeted hauptmann salutes lazily as we pass, and we drive home full of the intoxications of that pagan gaiety which the Viennese, more than any other people, have preserved in all its innocence, its sensuous splendour, its ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... nothing but a maze of impossibilities and trouble. One might as well have fallen in love with one of the Roman maidens in the Temple of Vesta. She is a white slave. She is a sacrifice to the monstrous theories of that bloodless old pagan, her father. And then she is courted and flattered on all sides; she lives in a smoke of incense: do you think, even supposing that all other difficulties were removed—that she cared for no one else, that she were to care for me, that the influence of her father was gone—do you think she ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... article; the pillars were brought direct from Tripoli; the Ranger of the day (for they were added after the Cumberland era) liked to have them there, and thought that the beauty of English woodlands was enhanced by a pagan altar and Greek porticoes. Northern rains and northern ivy have done their work, and "the ruins" remain—capitals, columns, and pedestals shouting a thousand Cockney scribbles, tumbled ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... Within a week after her miserable experience she became as utter a sceptic in regard to human love, and happiness flowing from it, as her father had taught her to be respecting God and the joy of believing. Though seemingly a fair young girl, her father had made her worse than a pagan. She believed in nothing save art and her father's wisdom. He seemed to embody the culture and worldly philosophy that now became, in her judgment, the only things worth living for. To gain his confidence became ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... are possessed of beautiful beech woods, and corn and clover fields: they resemble gardens on a great scale. Upon one of these green islands, Funen, stands Odense, the place of my birth. Odense is called after the pagan god Odin, who, as tradition states, lived here: this place is the capital of the province, and lies ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... could not bear any good fruit, for from above is every good gift. Far from it. Any such notion of man's unassisted strength is wholly detestable, contrary to the very first principles of all true religion, whether Jewish, Christian, or even Pagan. We are miserably fallen creatures, we are by nature corrupt,—we dare not talk even of children being naturally pleasing in God's sight. And if we wait till children are in a condition to bring something to ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... no doubt, bled his patients and customers on the public streets of Persian towns, for the benefit of their healths, when we pinned our pagan faith on Druidical incantations and mystic rites and ceremonies; his Mussulman descendants were doing the same thing when we at length arrived at the same stage of enlightenment, and the Persian wielder of razor and tweezers to-day performs the same ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... and 'garner'; 'captain' (capitaneus) and 'chieftain'; 'tradition' and 'treason'; 'abyss' and 'abysm'; 'regal' and 'royal'; 'legal' and 'loyal'; 'cadence' and 'chance'; 'balsam' and 'balm'; 'hospital' and 'hotel'; 'digit' and 'doit'{23}; 'pagan' and 'paynim'; 'captive' and 'caitiff'; 'persecute' and 'pursue'; 'superficies' and 'surface'; 'faction' and 'fashion'; 'particle' and 'parcel'; 'redemption' and 'ransom'; 'probe' and 'prove'; 'abbreviate' and 'abridge'; 'dormitory' and 'dortoir' or 'dorter' (this last ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... resemblance with modern masonic ritual[322] which may here be discerned can be a mere matter of coincidence, yet it would be equally unreasonable to trace the origins of Freemasonry to the Vehmgerichts. Clearly both derived from a common source, either the old pagan traditions on which the early Vehms were founded or the system of the Templars. The latter seems the more probable for two reasons: firstly, on account of the resemblance between the methods of the Vehmgerichts ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... an Indian, Manikawan, and the world would have called you a pagan and a savage. But you have pointed out to me the way to a nobler and ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace

... killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan Christmas of ours is ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... so that their remains may mark ecclesiastical sites. There are reasons for believing that in various places, such as St. Paul's, London, St. Peter's, Cambridge, and St. Mary's, Ribchester, Christian worship did actually thus succeed Pagan ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... himself that he had outgrown every graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, which the best minds of Pagan civilization found no difficulty in pronouncing a delusion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; and while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, POPE and PAGAN, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, and ashes, &c., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learnt ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan

... it caught the sun for them and threw it back in millions and millions of living, rainbowed diamonds. The world was all gold and blue and tremulous with clean salt winds. It seemed ridiculous that one could be unhappy on such a day. Dorothea danced pagan-like at the wave edge while Jennie watched demurely from ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... he summed up his situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it closely. It had its elegance of outline, but depended on spiritual ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... and looking over a wide expanse of level country. Long ranges of empty book-shelves fenced in with broken wire-work ran round the walls. The painted ceiling represented, as usual, the heavens and some pagan divinities. A dumb old time-piece, originally constructed to tell the months, the days of the year, and the hours, stood on a massive corner bracket near the door. Long antique mirrors in heavy black frames reached from floor to ceiling between each of the windows; and in the centre ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten; while the ominous words of Dandie - heard, not heeded, and still remembered - had lent to her thoughts, or rather to her mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea of Fate - a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure, lawless, and august - moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian men. Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare and seems so simple and violent, like a disruption of life's tissue, may be decomposed ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... so peculiar in style that they remained in manuscript long after his death, and the general public are still unfamiliar with that which is probably the greatest, though no doubt the strangest of them all: the "Pagan Fantasia," after the first reading of which Kashkine and Balakirev, who were alone together, looked angrily from each other to the fire, from which nothing but the memory of their friend's dead face saved that composition which afterwards came ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... torments is asserted in this confession of faith; and care is also taken to inculcate, not only that no heathen, how virtuous soever, can escape an endless state of the most exquisite misery, but also that every one who presumes to maintain that any pagan can possibly be saved, is himself exposed to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... The Pagan schools of medicine came to an untimely, although in some cases a lingering, end. "The introduction of Christianity," says a medical writer, "had an undoubted influence on the course of medical science; for the Christian ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... The lines on Spring, from the words 'Now spring returns' to the close, form a continuous stream of pensive loveliness. How sweetly he sings in the shadow of death! Nor let us too severely blame his allusion to the old Pagan ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... tell no lie? Because you are my countryman, and so forth; and a good fellow is a good fellow, though he have never a penny in his purse.[88] We had but even pot-luck—little to moisten our lips and no more. That same Sol is a pagan and a proselyte: he shined so bright all summer, that he burnt more grapes than his beams were worth, were every beam as big as a weaver's beam. A fabis abstinendum; faith, he should have abstained, for what is flesh and blood without ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... Apollyon; the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with its evil sights and doleful sounds, where one of the wicked ones whispers into his ear thoughts of blasphemy which he cannot distinguish from the suggestions of his own mind; the cave at the valley's mouth, in which, Giant Pagan having been dead this many a day, his brother, Giant Pope, now sits alone, grinning at pilgrims as they pass by, and biting his nails because he cannot get at them; Vanity Fair, the picture of the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... with the Roman doctors against those of the Reformation, and yet if he did not acknowledge the Pope as Christ's vicar, and held salvation possible in any other Church, he is himself excluded from salvation! Without this great distinction Lady Ann Lindsey might have replied to Baxter:—"So might a Pagan orator have said to a convert from Paganism in the first ages of Christianity; so indeed the advocates of the old religion did argue. What! can you bear to believe that Numa, Camillus, Fabricius, the Scipios, the Catos, that Cicero, Seneca, that Titus and the Antonini, are in the flames ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... accepted convention; nor did she seem to see anything in her blood or station to render her inferior to other women. She questioned him tirelessly about his sister, and he was glad of this, for it placed no constraint between them. So that, as he explored her many quaint beliefs and pagan superstitions, the delight of being with her grew, and he ceased to reason whither ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... hours after the King's public entry, the second of December was appointed to be the day of thanksgiving for the peace. The Chapter of Saint Paul's resolved that, on that day, their noble Cathedral, which had been long slowly rising on the ruins of a succession of pagan and Christian temples, should be opened for public worship. William announced his intention of being one of the congregation. But it was represented to him that, if he persisted in that intention, three hundred thousand people would assemble to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... think I am presuming to have written this on the strength of a childish acquaintance. I wish you all honors that can come to you on such a quest as yours, and I had almost said all good luck, only that that word sounds too frivolous and pagan for such a serious matter; so I will say all safety for a swift accomplishment of your task and a swift homecoming. I used to think when I was a little child that nothing could ever hurt you or make you afraid, and I cannot help feeling ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill

... by a new invasion of the Par'thians. His approach compelling the enemy to peace, he pursued his travels without molestation. He visited the famous city of Athens; there making a considerable stay, he was initiated into the Eleusin'ian mysteries, which were accounted the most sacred in the Pagan mythology, and took upon him the office of archon or chief magistrate. 20. In this place, also, he remitted the severity of the Christian persecution. He was even so far reconciled to their sect, as to think of introducing Christ among the number of the gods. 21. From thence ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... I think I don't. I think I'd rather hold him in my mind as he is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it's foolish to seek definitions for him. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... prayed for all the world And all its motley crew, For pagan, Hindoo, sinners, Turk, And unbelieving Jew,— Though the congregation doubtless thought That the cowboys as a race Were a kind of moral outlaw With ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... death; but instead he was carefully and tenderly nursed back to health. Waking from his delirium, he found at his bedside Lygia—Lygia, whom he had most injured, watching alone, while the others had gone to rest. Gradually in his pagan head the idea began to hatch with difficulty that at the side of naked beauty, confident and proud of Greek and Roman symmetry, there is another in the world, new, immensely pure, in which a soul resides. As the days went by, Vinicius was thrilled ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... have separated from the Church of Christ have in this respect fallen into greater than pagan error. They may be said to form an exception to the concordant voice of a whole world, always and every where; they break in upon the unanimous suffrage of mankind, and determine, at least by their ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... the ancient Jewess, and in her person to have exhibited charms of the most imposing character; whilst the chasteness of its arrangement was only equalled by its almost magic beauty. Nor was this luxuriance, and this attention to the hair, confined to the gentler sex, for among the pagan Orientals the hair and beards of the males were not less sedulously attended to. Among the males of Judah and Israel, long flowing ringlets appear to have been regarded as highly desirable and attractive. The reputed beauty and the prodigious length and weight of the hair of Absalom, the son of David, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous

... which is for ever assembled, though invisible to mortal eyes, pronounced the like sentence on those famous conquerors, on those heroes of the pagan world, who, like Nebuchadnezzar, considered themselves as the sole authors of their exalted fortune; as independent on authority of every kind, and as not holding of a ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... of her capabilities to-day and began to realize that she was as changeable as a chameleon. One moment she could be like the sirocco in warmth and languor, the next as sparkling as the sunlit ocean. Again she could be steeped in a dreamy abstraction or alive with a pagan joy of life. She might have been sixteen or thirty, as her mood chanced to affect her. Of all the crossed strains that go to make up the Sicilian race she had inherited more of the Oriental than the Greek or Roman. Somewhere back in the ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... Latin, means lovable, and Walter, a Germanic name, means "rule army" (Modern Ger. walten and Heer), but the discussion of such meanings lies outside our subject. It is, in fact, sometimes difficult to distinguish between the personal name and the nickname. Thus Pagan, whence Payn, with its diminutives Pannell, Pennell, etc., Gold, Good, German, whence Jermyn, Jarman, and many other apparent nicknames, occur as personal names in the earliest records. Their etymological origin is in any case the same ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... pad : sxvelajxo, pufo; remburi. pagan : idol'isto, -ano. page : pagxo; (boy) lakeeto; (noble) pagxio. pail : sitelo. pain : dolor'o, -i; igi. "take—s," peni. paint : pentri, kolori; "-brush," peniko. pair : paro. pale : pala; malhela. paling : palisaro. palm : palmo, manplato. palpitation : korbatado. pan : tervazo. "sauce-", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... possessed him. The process by which this had been achieved he could not explain, but the result was undeniable, and it was due, he knew, to an influence the source of which he frankly acknowledged to be external to himself. The words of the beaten and confounded pagan magic-workers came to him, "This is the finger of God." He could not deny it. Why should he wish to hide it? It became clear to him, in these few minutes of intense soul activity, that there was a demand being made upon him as a man of truth and honour, and as ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... people's life and thought, and the nobler the life, the more enlightened the thought, the more valuable will the expression be; and since there is greater knowledge, wisdom, freedom, justice, mercy, goodness, power, in Christendom now than ever existed in the pagan world, it would certainly be an anomaly if modern literature were inferior to the classical. The ancients, indeed, excel us in the sense for form and symmetry. There is also a freshness in their words, a joyousness in their life, a certain heroic temper in their thinking and acting, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding



Words linked to "Pagan" :   paganize, heathenish, man-about-town, paynim, idol worshiper, Wiccan, sensualist, ethnic, religious person, corinthian, playboy, irreligious, idoliser, heathen, pleasure seeker, idolater, pagan religion, nonreligious person



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