"Paganism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Great, had some competitors at first for the throne.—Among the rest was Maxen'tius, who was at that time in possession of Rome, and a stedfast assertor of Paganism. 15. It was in Constantine's march against that usurper, we are told, that he was converted to Christianity, by a very extraordinary appearance. 16. One evening, the army being on its march towards Rome, Constantine was intent ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... ancient of Greek writers, and the most celebrated theologian of Paganism, relates several apparitions both of gods and heroes, and also of the dead. In the Odyssey,[77] he represents Ulysses going to consult the sorcerer Tiresias; and this diviner having prepared a grave or trench full of blood to evoke the manes, Ulysses draws his sword to prevent them from ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most cold-blooded cruelty is linked ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... a bleak unsheltered eminence—stands the chapel of Notre Dame de la Haine! Our Lady of HATRED! The most fiendish of human passions is supposed to be under the protection of Christ's religion! What is this but a fragment of pure and unmixed Paganism, unchanged except in the appellation of its idol, which has remained among these lineal descendants of the Armorican Druids for more than a thousand years after Christianity has become the professed religion of the country! Altars, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... a young Church, just delivered from paganism. Like lambs in the midst of wolves, they stood amongst bitter enemies, their teacher had left them alone, and their raw convictions needed to be consolidated and matured in the face of much opposition. No wonder then that over and over again, in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... did this squadron guide, That in his youth from Christ's true faith and light To the blind lore of Paganism did slide, That Clement late, now Emireno, hight; Yet to his king he faithful was, and tried True in all causes, his in wrong and right: A cunning leader and a soldier bold, For strength and courage, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... can compete with men in the domain of lighter labor, in several of the professions, and in not a few of the useful arts. The impression of her as a pawn, a property or a plaything, came down from paganism to Christianity and was too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as significance. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Christian age, the Middle Ages, and modern times, with their innumerable churches, monasteries, and massive solemn palaces. Christianity built on the ruins of paganism. Ancient and modern times are inextricably mixed. Up there on the Capitoline hill rides a Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in bronze. Look round, and there on the farther bank of the Tiber another horseman looks over ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... between: a quotation here and there from the Fathers; two or three legends; Venus reappearing; the persecutions of Apollo in Styria; Proserpina going, in Chaucer, to reign over the fairies; a few obscure religious persecutions in the Middle Ages on the score of Paganism; some strange rites practiced till lately in the depths of a Breton forest near Lannion.... As to Tannhaeuser, he was a real knight, and a sorry one, and a real Minnesinger not of the best. Your Excellency will find some ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... to be allowed to blind us to the truly spiritual and holy developments of historical Christianity,—much less, make us revert to the old Paganism or Pantheism which it supplanted.—The great doctrine on which all practical religion depends,—the doctrine which nursed the infancy and youth of human nature,—is, "the sympathy of God with the perfection ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... having been instructed by this speech, were converted to the Christian faith. They received baptism together with their young freedwoman, Caelia Avitella, who was dearer to them than the light of their eyes. All their tenants renounced paganism and were baptized on ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... outward success, and to ascribe a magical virtue to signs and ceremonies. His whole family was swayed by religious sentiment, which manifested itself in very different forms, in the devout pilgrimages of his Helena, the fanatical Arianism of Constantia and Constantius, and the fanatical paganism of Julian. Constantine adopted Christianity first as a superstition, and put it by the side of his heathen superstition, till finally in his conviction the Christian vanquished the pagan, though without itself developing into ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... portions of the holy Cross, had been of no more use than the palladium which lay buried then, as now, under the great column which Constantine had built. The rough energy of the Westerns had disregarded the talismans of the Greek Church as completely as those of paganism. In vain had the believers in these charms destroyed during the siege the statues which were believed to be of ill omen or unlucky. The invaders had a superstition as deep as their own, but with the difference that they could not believe that a people in schism could have the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... need. Nobody questions their constitutional and legal right to do this, and to do it by denouncing the public schools. Sectarians have a lawful right to say that these schools are "a relict of paganism—that they are Godless," and that "the secular school system is a social cancer." But when having thus succeeded in dividing the schools, they make that a ground for abolishing school taxation, dividing ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... also a grand argument in favor of the genuineness of our religion, which is in the fact that it was in deathly opposition to both Judaism and Paganism, its success being the destruction of both. If Christianity was an imposition, its success during the first three centuries of our era ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... these cardinal doctrines to the minor dogmas and ceremonies of Christianity, we shall still discover it to be nothing but a survival of Paganism. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... he drew back sad and hopeless. For he knew now what he wanted. Paganism would not suffice. He wanted—he hungered after—God. The God of his fathers. The three thousand years of belief could not be shaken off. It was atavism that gave him those sudden strange intuitions of God at the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... vanishes away. They had lost their love for each other, they had lost Catherine. But her soul, though it was given to Mark Sirrett, had not lost their impress. Both the Puritanism of her mother and the paganism of her father were destined to play their parts in the guidance of her strange and ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... as honest a man as his father, I could forgive all the rest," said Mr. Fenwick slowly, meaning to imply that he was not there now to complain of church observances neglected, or of small irregularities of life. The paganism of the old miller had often been the subject of converse between the parson and Mrs. Brattle, it being a matter on which she had many an unhappy thought. He, groping darkly among subjects which he hardly dared to touch ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... population. The repeal of an unjust law is seldom carried until a certain number of those who are labouring for the reform have experienced in their own persons the hardships of fine and imprisonment. Christianity itself would never have triumphed over the Paganism of ancient Rome had the early Christians not been enabled to testify from the dungeon and the arena as to the sincerity and serenity of soul with which they could confront their persecutors, and from that time down to the successful struggles of our people ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... his marvellous ode, La Lyre et La Harpe brings Paganism and Christianity face to face. Each speaks in turn, and the poet in his last stanza seems to acknowledge that both are right, but that does not prevent the ode from being a masterpiece. That would not be possible in prose, but in the poem the poetry ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... had been a prisoner of the Greeks and was baptized by them. His adherence to Christianity was announced in a treaty with the Greek Emperor, Michael III. Some of King Boris's subjects kept their affection for paganism and objected to the conversion of their king. Following the customs of the time they were all massacred, and Bulgaria became thus a ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... principal classes, the Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic, and the Scandinavian, bearing the same relation to each other as do the different Greek alphabets. Their likeness to each other is so great that a common origin may be ascribed to all. They date from the dim twilight of paganism, but were for a time employed in the service of Christianity, when after being imported into this country where they were first used in pagan inscriptions cut into the surface of rocks, or on sticks for casting lots, or for divination, they were at last made to express ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... only been to strengthen the Christians in their faith. His methods were different. Privileges were granted to the pagans which were denied to the Church; the Galileans, as Julian called the Christians, were ridiculed, and paganism was praised as the only religion worthy of ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... to the country, or the turn of thought of the speculator, the suggestion that all living things arose from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval imaginations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... naturally claims our attention is the religion of ancient Egypt. But I can show only the main features and characteristics of this form of paganism, avoiding the complications of their system and their perplexing names as much as possible. I wish to present what is ascertained and intelligible rather than what ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... worship in France, and had restored to its destination the church of the Invalides, which was for a time metamorphosed into the Temple of Mars, foresaw that a Temple of Glory would give birth to a sort of paganism incompatible with ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... some observation regarding his paganism, but held my peace, knowing that any reference to it wounded his susceptibilities. In everything except his belief in the fetish and his trust in the justice of the Crocodile-god, he was my equal; and I knew that, on more than one occasion, he had been ashamed to practise his savage rites ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... the inhabitants of this country. The pool is formed by the eddying of the stream round a rock. Its waves were many years since consecrated by Fillan, one of the saints who converted the ancient inhabitants of Caledonia from paganism to the belief of Christianity. It has ever since been distinguished by his name, and esteemed of sovereign virtue in curing madness. About two hundred persons afflicted in this way are annually brought to try the benefits ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Caliph. They believe Hakem to be the tenth, last, and most important incarnation of God, and render him divine honors. They have ever taken great pains to conceal their tenets, which seem to be compounded from Mohammedanism and Paganism, and it is only a portion of themselves that know what the tenets are. Those are called the Akkal, or initiated; the others are the Jebal, or uninitiated. Four centuries and a half after the death of the founder of the sect, it became powerful under a single chief. Inhabiting the ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... a word without an idea?" asked Carlton. "We are taught by Butler that there is an analogy between nature and grace; else you might parallel paganism to nature, and where paganism is contrary to nature, say that it is supernatural. The Wesleyan convulsions ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... to Greece, and the Greeks identified her with their Artemis. (Compare Book VI., 93.) (19) The horror of the Druidical groves is again alluded to in Book III., lines 462-489. Dean Merivale remarks (chapter li.) on this passage, that in the despair of another life which pervaded Paganism at the time, the Roman was exasperated at the Druids' assertion of the transmigration of souls. But the passage seems also to betray a lingering suspicion that the doctrine may in some shape be true, however horrible were the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... religion, supplanting the material and external paganism, makes its way to the heart of the ancient society, kills it, and deposits, in that corpse of a decrepit civilization, the germ of modern civilization. This religion as complete, because it is true; between its dogma and its cult, it embraces ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation to attack ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... noble bench being allotted to the noblest among the guests. The nobler bench was on ordinary occasions the bench for the chief and the household. The less noble for the guests. In front of the chiefs high-seat were the high-seat-poles which in the early ages of Paganism in the North were objects of much veneration, and must always accompany the chief if he moved his abode, and point out his new homestead, if he fared for it over sea, by the spot where they drifted ashore, as, when land was sighted, they were thrown overboard. In front of the seat-rows ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... her husband, Lieutenant James, once intercepted a tender passage between herself and a rajah. Further embroideries assert that Lola's father was the son of a Lady Gilbert, and that her mother was the daughter of a "Moorish warrior who abjured paganism." To this rigmarole he adds that she was sent to a boarding-school at Bath, kept by a Mrs. Olridge, where she had an early liaison ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the peculiar form of which has given rise to such singular conjectures and commentaries, leading to suspicions that this celebrated fraternity of Christian knights were embodied under the foulest symbols of paganism. ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... years. Assuming the genuineness of the tradition, which perhaps rests on no very good authority, its form is obviously due to Mohammedan influence. But the belief in this miraculous sleep is traceable beyond Christian and Mohammedan legends into the Paganism of classical antiquity. Pliny, writing in the first century of our era, alludes to a story told of the Cretan poet Epimenides, who, when a boy, fell asleep in a cave, and continued in that state for fifty-seven years. On waking he was greatly ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the chosen sites of their temples— the habitual ceremonies of their worship. It was to the east that the supplicator turned his face, and he was sprinkled, as a necessary purification, with the holy water often alluded to by sacred writers as well as profane—a typical rite entailed from Paganism on the greater proportion of existing Christendom. Nor was any oblation duly prepared until it was mingled with salt—that homely and immemorial offering, ordained not only by the priests of the heathen idols, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gladiatorial shows, he holds the place of a moral pioneer, the more honourable, since none of those before him, except Cicero, had had largeness of heart enough to recognise these truths. By his fierce attacks on paganism, [53] for which (not being a born Roman) he has no sympathy and no mercy, he did good service to the pure creed that was to follow. By his contempt of science, [54] in which he asserts we can never be more ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... picture, dear? Have you aught of doubt or fear? Have you any criticism Of my neo-Paganism? If not, dearie, let us fly To that passion-ripening sky, Where our souls may have their fling, And our every care ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... mountainous region are a race apart. Their religion is a mixture of paganism and Buddhism, and, though reputed to be kind and honest, they are an ignorant, uncouth, uncultured people. They dwell en famille in large square houses without windows, in isolated kampongs on the ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... demi-god, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-god became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance, the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but always survived, in which the hero drove desperate ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... great undergrowth of superstition is as apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual disease is the sad fact that confronts every lover of his fellow-men. This paganism is more ancient and universal than any one of the religions founded on writing or teachers of name and fame. Even the applied science and the wonderful inventions imported from the West, so far from eradicating it, only serve as the iron-clad man-of-war in warm salt ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... crown the climax in a grand ascent of calamities; it is the last of curses; and yet, by the noblest of Romans, it was treated as the first of blessings. In that difference, most readers will see little more than the difference between Christianity and Paganism. But there I hesitate. The Christian church may be right in its estimate of sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life—as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, with penitential ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... and Christian Paganism there is small choice—all State religions are very much alike. Caesar was Pope: and no State religion since his time has been an ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... restore the Catholic worship, was very ill received by his colleagues, but every where else it is read with avidity and applause; for, exclusive of its merit as a composition, the subject is of general interest, and there are few who do not wish to have the present puerile imitations of Paganism replaced by Christianity. The Assembly listened to this tolerating oration with impatience, passed to the order of the day, and called loudly for Decades, with celebrations in honour of "the liberty of the world, posterity, stoicism, the republic, and the hatred of tyrants!" But the people, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the mission field alloted to this or to that denomination. The position is quite different when common action is confined to merely social work. But "social service," stripped of all its Christian principles and reduced to pure philanthropy, is not Christianity; it is mere naturalism or neo-paganism. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... piquant because no one would suspect it, as, I suppose, few do; probably, indeed, a consensus would declare him the last man in London of whom that is true. No one would seem to take more seriously the beau monde of modern paganism, with its hundred gospels of La Nuance; no one, assuredly, were more blase than he, with his languors of pose, and face of so wan a flame. The Oscar Wilde of modern legend were not more as a dweller in Nirvana. But Narcissus maintained that all this was ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... sentiment and beauty, hollow in its pretense and dreary in its desolation. She only saw in it a chief altar for the glorification of this girl who had absorbed even the pure worship of her companion, and converted and degraded his sublime paganism to her petty creed. With a woman's withering contempt for her own art displayed in another woman, she thought how she herself could have touched him with the peace that the majesty of their woodland aisles—so unlike this pillared sham—had ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... 1000, so long as the people made their own saints and legends, their daily life was not to them uninteresting. Their nightly Sabbaths were only a slight relic of paganism. They held in fear and honour the Moon, so powerful over the good things of earth. Her chief worshippers, the old women, burn small candles to Dianom—the Diana of yore, whose other names were Luna and Hecate. The Lupercal (or wolf-man) ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... having been dug up in St. Paul's Churchyard, the monks, ever eager to discover traces of that Paganism with which they amalgamated Christianity, conjectured that a temple of Diana once stood on the site of St. Paul's. A stone altar, with a rude figure of the amazon goddess sculptured upon it, was indeed discovered in making the foundations for Goldsmiths' Hall, Cheapside; but this was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of the people whose homes can be reached only by bridle-paths. They lack schools, roads and railroads. Seventy-six per cent of the children and youth are unable to read and write. In Spain, Mexico and South America, Romanism has proven itself to be, but little more than a pious form of paganism, an oppressive and widespread relic ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Martins, are expressions believed more than amply sufficient to cover the whole field of "thimble-rigging." They are terms of contempt, and used generally only in reference to the dross and residues of the Dark Ages and its preceding aeons of paganism. Therefore have we no terms in the English tongue to define and shade the difference between such abnormal powers, or the sciences that lead to the acquisition of them, with the nicety possible in the ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... Zayla and Berberah; eastwards it is bounded by the sea, and westwards by the Gallas around Harar. It derives itself from Dirr and Aydur, without, however, knowing aught beyond the ancestral names, and is twitted with paganism by its enemies. This tribe, said to number 100,000 shields, is divided into numerous clans [47]: these again split up into minor septs [48] which plunder, and sometimes murder, one another in time ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went further, and plunged into Paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... cruel forms of worship, among this amazing variety of manners and customs, you will everywhere find the same ideas of right and justice; everywhere the same principles of morality, the same ideas of good and evil. The old paganism gave birth to abominable gods who would have been punished as scoundrels here below, gods who merely offered, as a picture of supreme happiness, crimes to be committed and lust to be gratified. But in vain did vice descend from the abode of the gods armed with their ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... [19] Paganism has, long since, attained its maximum in agricultural industry, and the introduction of Christian civilization, into India, can, alone, lead to an increase ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... has taken little pains to connect with the former more interesting moral impersonated in the titular hero and heroine of the drama. But I am half inclined to believe, that Shakespeare's main object, or shall I rather say his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the not less rude, but more intellectually vigorous, and more featurely, warriors of Christian chivalry,—and to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama;—in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... and L. Bonnemere in 1882, [Footnote: Hist. des Gaulois sous Vercingetorix. Paris, 1882.] reproduced by M. Louis Bousrez in 1894, [Footnote: Les monu- ments Megalithiques de la Touraine. Tours, 1894.] which, if true, would show that a lingering paganism is to be found among these people. It is to this effect: "What is unknown to most is that at the present day there exist adepts of the worship (of the Celts) as practised before the Roman invasion, with the sole exception of human sacrifices, which they have been forcibly obliged ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... herself with Priscilla. Nurse Barton had a great dislike to Mrs. Broad, although she attended Mr. Broad's ministrations at Tanner's Lane. She was not a member of the church, and never could be got to propose herself for membership. There was, in fact, a slight flavour of Paganism about her. She was considered to belong to the "world," and it was only her age and undoubted skill which saved her practice amongst the Tanner's Lane ladies. There was a rival in the town; but she was a younger woman, and never ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... Church, and a day on which all Christians who hold to ancient forms commemorate the noble doings of the holy dead. But the All-hallow's frolics you will see this evening have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. They are relics of old paganism, of the days when 'millions of spiritual creatures' were supposed to be allowed that night 'to walk the earth'—ghosts, fairy folk, witches, gnomes, and brownies, all creatures of the fancy whose home ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... don't know why I say "but"; he is quite typical of the world's art-training: Christianity may get hold of the names and dictate the subjects, but the artist-breed carries a fairly level head through it all, and, like Pater's Mona Lisa, draws Christianity and Paganism into one: at least, wherever it reaches perfect expression it has done so. Some of the distinctly primitives are different; their works inclose a charm which is not artistic. Fra Angelico, after being a great disappointment to me in ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... Brahmanism indifferently. One king would sometimes patronize both religions. And this continued to be the case till Buddhism faded out, replaced by that Hinduism which owed its origin partly to native un-Aryan influence (paganism), partly to this century-long fusion of ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... made up their Paganism for themselves, out of all pleasant things they knew; their fancy has brooded upon it; and the very details that make us laugh, the details coming direct from the Middle Ages, the spirit in glaring opposition occasionally to that of Antiquity, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... family were so kind as to quiet me by returning my original letter and syllabus. By this you will be sensible how much interest I take in keeping myself clear of religious disputes before the public; and especially of seeing my syllabus disembowelled by the Aruspices of the modern Paganism. Yet I enclose it to you with entire confidence, free to be perused by yourself and Mrs. Adams, but by no one else; and to be returned ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... A Random Itinerary has chosen as his subject the very poem which I have mentioned as out of harmony with the book; and I must protest that the vilely sensual faces in Mr. Beardsley's frontispiece to these Plays are hopelessly out of keeping with the sunny paganism of Scaramouch in Naxos. There is nothing Greek about Mr. Beardsley's figures: their only relationship with the Olympians is derived through the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism. They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious reformation possible ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... history in another and more serious respect. In Sogdiana and Khorasan, they had become converts to the Mahometan faith. You will not suppose I am going to praise a religious imposture, but no Catholic need deny that it is, considered in itself, a great improvement upon Paganism. Paganism has no rule of right and wrong, no supreme and immutable judge, no intelligible revelation, no fixed dogma whatever; on the other hand, the being of one God, the fact of His revelation, His faithfulness to His promises, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... in nature, of the nature and destination of the two sexes, of the ethical nature and the ethical primitive history of man,—it will especially have to acknowledge in the Biblical account of creation, in spite of all points of collision with the cosmogonies of paganism, such an elevation above them, such an exemption from all theogony, with which heathen cosmogonies are always mixed up, that we are perfectly right in perceiving in these records the full and unmistakable elements of a pure and genuine stream of ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... Christianity supplied by Paganism, of which Krishna "burnishing the head of the serpent" is a striking example, may be easily accounted for, and their source pointed out. As a corruption of the earliest revelation, Paganism contains, as might be expected, a portion of truth blended with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... Pagan wife of Ahab, king of Israel. Jezebel stands for the union of Paganism and Judaism. But Jezebel here represents a professed church of Christ. In Jezebel, therefore, you have a professed church of Christ in which there is a combination of Paganism and Judaism. This symbolic Jezebel teaches the servants of Christ to commit fornication—that is, not only identification ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... of this sanguinary metaphor is drawn really from the Pagan rites of Mithra, where the neophyte was actually placed under a bull at the ceremony of the TAUROBOLIUM, and was drenched, through a grating, with the blood of the slaughtered animal. Such reminiscences of the more brutal side of Paganism are not helpful to the thoughtful and sensitive modern mind. But what is always fresh and always useful and always beautiful, is the memory of the sweet Spirit who wandered on the hillsides of Galilee; who gathered the children ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... kingdoms-Serbia, Montenegro, Rumania, Bulgaria. The Turks were again to enter upon a war of invasion. Greece once more was to tremble under the sword. Even Egypt and Persia and Jerusalem itself, the battle grounds of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Trojans, the bloody fields of paganism and early Christianity, were all to be awakened by the modern ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... may not be something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary mediaevalism or paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Irish were right in not accepting from Europe what is known as the "revival of learning;" at least, as carried almost to the excess of modern paganism ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... bowing, or kneeling, or signs and symbols, in Christian worship, because it is pagan." Yes, all this is pagan indeed, but it is Christian too if we wish it to be. The Latin language was pagan, but now it is Christian too. The English language was a vehicle of Paganism as well, now it is a vehicle of Christianity. The human body was itself pagan too, but the Eternal Christ, God's Holy Wisdom, entered it and filled it with a new spirit, and it ceased to be pagan. We ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... histories and re-edit the Bible stories to the same purpose. And for some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever their form, to serve a defensive purpose. But later they took the offensive against the paganism and immorality of the peoples about them, and the missionary spirit became predominant. Alexander Polyhistor, who lived in the first century, included in his "History of the Jews" fragments of these early Jewish ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Would it come in as 'statuary'? Somehow that don't seem exactly the thing. I was going to assess it under the head of 'idols,' but the idiots who got up this law haven't got a word in in reference to idols. Think of that, will you? Why, we might have paganism raging all over this country, and we couldn't get a cent out of them. I'd a put that Indian under 'graven images,' only they ain't mentioned, either. I s'pose I could tax the bundle of wooden cigars in his fist as ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... 'Chaque lettre repond a la saison ou elle est ecrite.... l'idee et l'image s'identifient dans un fait supreme, dans un cri; il se fait entre l'emotion intime et l'impression du dehors une sorte de fusion.' And despite Goethe's Greek paganism and pantheism, he declares: 'Le nom de Goethe marque une de ces grandes dates, une de ces grandes revolutions de la poesie—la plus grande, nous le croyons, depuis Homer.' ... 'Goethe est la plus haut expression poetique des tendances de notre siecle vers le monde exterieur ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... you know anything about it? Your log cabin was your capitol. Your little family was your council of state. Even the rest of us, proud of our university culture, were too blind, in those late Victorian days, to see the looming menace of Prussian paganism and the conquer-lust of the Hohenzollerns, which has plunged the whole ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... the substance of Morality itself, or the things actually imposed. The code under Christianity has varied both from Judaism and from Paganism. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... of human thought when civilization had reached its lowest depths. Morality had evaporated to the dregs. Rome was become the world's harlot. A few years more, and Nero would drag his vulpine immorality across the stage. Paganism was virtue in comparison with the lust of men in that dark hour. And yet, in the very midst of it, appeared the most venerated, the most beloved man in all history, bearing the Christ-message like ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the night before last, had liked it much better than anything he had done, Harding had said that he must not cover it with draperies, that he must keep it for himself, a naked girl playing with a baby, a piece of paganism. The girl's head was not modelled when Harding had seen it. It was the conventional Virgin's head, but Harding had said that he must send for his model and put his model's head upon it. He had taken Harding's advice and had sent for Lucy, and had put her pretty, ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... encouraged by his education, which, like that of all well-born Romans, even in the sixth century after Christ, had savoured much more of paganism than of Christianity. Like his ancestors, before the age of Constantine, he had been taught grammar and rhetoric; grammar which was supposed to include all sciences, meaning practically a comment on a few classical texts, and rhetoric ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and there was none in paganism. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... labours, however, was among the Slavs of Moravia, and the Bulgars were evangelized by their disciples. Boris, finding himself surrounded by Christian states, decided from political motives to abandon paganism. He was baptized in 864, the emperor Michael III. acting as his sponsor. It was at this time that the controversies broke out which ended in the schism between the Churches of the East and West. Boris long wavered between Constantinople and Rome, but the refusal of the pope to recognize an autocephalous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ignorance had raised them above the anecdote, and they had become epics, whether by intensity of religious belief—as in the case of the monk of Fiesole—or by being given sublime artistic form—for paganism was not yet dead in the world to witness Leonardo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. To these painters Biblical subjects were a mere pretext for representing man in all his attributes; and when the same subjects were treated by the Venetians, they were transformed in a pomp of colour, and by an absence ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... of particular nations, existed through all Europe. It seems to have been founded originally on feelings incident to the human heart, or diseases to which the human frame is liable—to have been largely augmented by what classic superstitions survived the ruins of paganism—and to have received new contributions from the opinions collected among the barbarous nations, whether of the east or of the west. It is now necessary to enter more minutely into the question, and endeavour to trace from what especial sources the people ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... son of Koyuwo, King of India, a religions high priest from Siaka (the author of that Eastern paganism about a thousand years before the Christian era), coming to China, to teach the way of happiness, lived a most austere life, passing his days in continual mortification, and retiring by night to solitudes, in which he fed only upon the leaves of trees and other vegetable ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... important branch of civilization, and which has most strenuously been extolled by the zealous and pious fathers of the Roman Church, is the introduction of the Christian faith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire horror, to behold these savages tumbling among the dark mountains of paganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance of religion. It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded; they were sober, frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; but though they acted right habitually, it was all in vain, unless they acted so from ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... California the same policy which has distinguished her in her other possessions such as Cuba, the Philippines and other colonies, steeped in idolatry until the Spanish Missionary, whose zeal is proverbial, wrested their countless inhabitants from the cymmerian gloom of paganism. Thus as soon as San Carlos Mission was founded, the glorious march of El Camino ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... I have often said—that I never yet heard a word from one of that way of thinking, which even touched anything I hold. One of my earliest recollections is of beginning to be at strife with the false system here assailed. Such paganism I scorn as heartily in the name of Christ, as I scorn it in the name of righteousness. Rather than believe a single point involving its spirit, even with the assurance thereby of such salvation as the system ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Napos is a mixture of Paganism and Christianity. In common with all the other orient tribes, they believe in good and evil principles, and in metempsychosis. They swear in the name of the devil. They bury their dead horizontally, in a coffin made of a part of a canoe, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... find the throne of the Virgin adorned with classical ornaments and bas-reliefs from the antique remains; as, for instance, the hunt of Theseus and Hippolyta. We must then suppose her throned on the ruins of paganism, an idea suggested by the old legends, which represent the temples and statues of the heathen gods as falling into ruin on the approach of the Virgin and her Child; and a more picturesque application of this idea afterwards became common in other subjects. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the return to paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous dwarf who set himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers. Good Father Charlevoix thinks that 'ce petit-monstre',* despairing of being thought a man, had no resource but to ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... to these sayings of Mannhardt; or, if he has not, no author is obliged to mention everybody who disagrees with him. Mannhardt's method was mainly that of folklore, not of philology. He examined peasant customs and rites as 'survivals' of the oldest paganism. Mr. Frazer applies Mannhardt's rich lore to the explanation of Greek and other rites in The Golden Bough, that entrancing book. Such was Mannhardt's position (as I shall prove at large) when he was writing ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... ever reflected, either of you," she observed, "that we know nothing of this great land of ours? That we sing of loving 'thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills'—although the word 'templed' savors of paganism and does not belong in a national hymn? And that it is ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all Christian workers in every possible department. Hosts of the living God, march on! march on! His Spirit will bless you. His shield will defend you. His sword will strike for you. March on! march on! The despotism will fall, and paganism will burn its idols, and Mohammedanism will give up its false prophet, and Judaism will confess the true Messiah, and the great walls of superstition will come down in thunder and wreck at the long, loud blast of the Gospel trumpet. March on! march on! The besiegement ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... locality had its war-chants, its songs of defiance. Today only a few fragments survive. Wars were waged mostly on account of the ambitions of princes, as to-day in Europe and Asia. But the effort of Christianity to oust paganism in Tahiti brought about many sanguinary conflicts, and plainly God was with the missionaries, who caused the battles. In 1815 the Battle of Feipi gave Tahiti to Pomare the Great, and to the Protestant ministers, who were his backers. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... will make him squirm for that!" the Etheling vowed. "I will tell him that your paganism has made spells over me so that I cannot tell a holy relique from an ale-skin; and a bedridden woman looks to me like two strapping yeomen. I will, I ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... utterly fallen away from its pristine ideals. It had served a great purpose. Born as it was when the world was just emerging from paganism, and the Roman civilisation was being engulfed in the flood of barbarian invasion, the men and women who withdrew from the desperate turmoil without to the sheltering walls of the monastery or the convent, invested with a sacrosanct character ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... have been wrought out, first, by continual assimilations of Christianity to paganism,1 both in doctrine and ceremony, to win over the heathen; and, secondly, by modifications and growths to meet the exigencies of doctrinal consistency and practical efficiency, exigencies repeatedly arising from philosophical discussion and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... are sublimity of thought, beauty of sentiment, aptness of expression, unction of form. In these matters the Breviary hymns are not inferior to the classic poetry of paganism, nor to the much-belauded beauties of the Gallican Breviary hymns (vide Bacquez, Le Saint Office, notes vi. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to realise that there is something in history which we did not experience; and therefore probably ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... in. At York, under Paulinus, Christianity had triumphed; but eight years after that event Edwin, the Christian king of Deira, perished in battle, and northern England was forced back by king Penda into paganism. Southern England, with the exception of Canterbury and a considerable part of Kent, had also lost the Gospel, after possessing it for thirty years. Nearly at the same time East Anglia and Essex, at ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... known how profligate was the world in which she lived. About her she saw vice shamelessly displayed or cloaked in sacerdotal robes; she was conscious of the ambition and avarice which hesitated at no crime; she beheld a religion more pagan than paganism itself, and a church service in which the sacred actors,—with whose conduct behind the scenes she was perfectly familiar,—were the priests, the cardinals, her brother Caesar, and her own father. All this Lucretia beheld, but they ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... doctrines. That they preach atheism and tyrannicide I need not tell your Highness; but it is less generally known that they have made these infamous doctrines the cloak of private vices from which even paganism would have recoiled. The man now before me, among other open offences against society, is known to have seduced a young girl of noble family in Ratisbon and to have murdered her child. His own wife and children he long since abandoned and disowned; ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... loathing of life and mad desire to wash himself free of its stain; and it was this very hatred of natural flesh that precipitated a perilous worship of the deified flesh of the God. But mysticity saved him from plain paganism, and the art of the Gothic cathedral grew dear to him. It was nearer akin to him, and he assuaged his wounded soul in the ecstacies of incense and the great ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... others—Gluttony, Avarice, Ambition, Luxury. Then Hilarion appears and starts theological discussion, whence arises a new series of actual visions—the excesses of the heretics, the degradation of martyrdom itself, the Eastern theosophies, the monstrous cults of Paganism. After this, Hilarion tries a sort of Modernism, contrasting the contradictions and absurdities of actual religions with a more and more atheistic Pantheism. This failing, the Temptation reverts to the moral forms, Death and Vice contending for ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Its ferias are tremendously worldly; but they are none the less stupendous religious fetes. Its picturesque Easter processions, when colossal images of the Virgin are carried among bareheaded and kneeling crowds, smack of paganism; but we cannot question the genuineness of the religious fervor thus displayed. Its Cathedral touches the arena; and its Archbishop washes the feet of its old men. Its religion is still the living force which ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... bringing out the unity of type between natural ethnic religions, and that revealed Catholic religion which is their correction and fulfilment, that the studies of Mr. Lang and Mr. Jevons are of such service. The militant Protestant delights to dwell on the analogies between Romanism and Paganism; we too may dwell on them with delight, as evidence of that substantial unity of the human mind which underlies all surface diversities of mode and language, and binds together, as children of one family, all who believe in God the Rewarder of them that seek Him, who is no respecter of persons. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Constantinople, we are provoked to join in the complaints and invectives of the Byzantine historian. [94] We have seen how the rising city was adorned by the vanity and despotism of the Imperial founder: in the ruins of paganism, some gods and heroes were saved from the axe of superstition; and the forum and hippodrome were dignified with the relics of a better age. Several of these are described by Nicetas, [95] in a florid and affected style; and from his descriptions ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... stands, and should stand until its light shall have penetrated the gloom of Africa, and until the heathen shall gather to the brightness of its shining. May it stand through the ages as a Christian Republic, as a faithful light-house along the dark and trackless sea of African paganism! ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Maha-meru, elsewhere so well known as the seat of Indra and the dewas, sufficiently points out the mythology adopted in the country. I am not aware that at the present day there is any mountain in Sumatra called by that name; but it is reasonable to presume that appellations decidedly connected with Paganism may have been changed by the zealous propagators of the new faith, and I am much inclined to believe that by the Maha-meru of the Malays is to be understood the mountain of Sungei-pagu in the Menangkabau country, from whence issue rivers that flow to both sides of the island. ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... professors shall laugh at its absurdity. Destroy its monastic orders, and marry the priests, and the rest is a pretty puppet-show, with the idols, and the incense, and the polytheism, and the pomp of paganism. God bless you. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... it, that the noble and ardent discoverers who have tried to git friendly with them Great Forces and introduce 'em to the world have been called ignorant and pagan, when if these scoffers knowed it there is no paganism or ignorance to be compared to that of ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley |
