"Priestcraft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his Henriade (1725), perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England we have his Brutus (1730), an attack on kingcraft, and his Zaire ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... must have appeared the new art, which, by plebeianizing knowledge and enlightening the mass, deprived the law and the prophets of half their terrors, and disrobed priestcraft and kingcraft of their mystery. We can imagine that, as soon as a printed book ceased to be a great rarity, it became an object of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... shaft Cruelty; some Superstition; some Ignorance; some Priestcraft; maybe its poison is drawn from all four; be it how it may, it is the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of hell, so that the smile of God alone shall remain with their ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... effort, my dear Sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through. The barbarians really flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of Vandalism, when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards not forwards for improvement: the President himself declaring in one of his answers to addresses, that we were ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it possible that the woman question should be discussed and ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... insurgents are triumphant everywhere, the king left the capital at four o'clock, a provisional government was proclaimed this morning," and suchlike, what do we care for the sonorous periods in which official priestcraft chants the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... century. The reason having been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable assumptions. Indeed, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... bear no malice. This preface retorts a little of that contempt which the "philosophical world" has bestowed with heaped measure upon those who have believed their senses, and have drawn natural, even if hasty, inferences. There is philosophercraft as well as priestcraft, both from one source, both of one spirit. In English cities and towns, the minister of religion has been tamed: so many weapons are bared against him when he obtrudes his office in a dictatory manner, that, as a rule, there is no more quiet and modest member of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... MOTT said: It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. The Church and State have been united, and it is well for us to see it so. We have had to bear the denunciations of these reverend (irreverend) clergymen, as in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... better than the man who does not believe? How is it with nations? Look at Spain, the last slave-holder in the civilized world; she's christian, she believes in the trinity! And Italy, the beggar of the world. Under the rule of priestcraft money streamed in from every land and yet she did not advance. Today she is reduced to a hand-organ. Take poor Ireland, groaning under the heel of British oppression; could she cast off her priests she would soon be one with ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Secondly, it might hurt the Methodistic connection very much, which I for one would not like to injure. They have their faults, and are peculiarly liable to those of hypocrisy, and spiritual ambition, and priestcraft. On the other hand, they do infinite good, carrying religion into classes in society where it would scarce be found to penetrate, did it rely merely upon proof of its doctrines, upon calm reasoning, and upon rational argument. Methodists ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... love always be our flag-staff. Let us be jealous for the truth, but let it be a godly, that is to say, a loving jealousy. When we contend for purity of doctrine and for purity of worship, when we protest against popery and priestcraft, when we resist rationalism and infidelity, when we do battle now for national religion, as we call it, and now for the freedom of the church, let us do it all in love to all men, else we had better not do it at all. If we cannot do it with clean and all-men-loving hearts, let us leave all ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... Liberty. "My father," he said, "was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence." The taciturn father transmitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and priestcraft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker touched with humanitarian passion. The spirit of a boyhood in this homestead is veraciously told in "The Barefoot Boy," "School-Days," "Snow-Bound," "Ramoth Hill," and "Telling the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... shook his head. "My fawning dog," the sage satanic said, "Wags not his tail for me but for my bread. Brains rule to day as they have ruled for aye, And craft grown craftier in this modern day Still rides the fools, but in a craftier way; And priestcraft lingers and survives its use; What was a blessing once is now abuse: Grown fat and arrogant on power and pelf, The old-time shepherd has become a wolf And only feeds his flocks to feast himself. To clink of coin the pious juggler ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... high-priest, and explained to him how to understand and interpret this character from the dialogue (in recitative) between him and Haruspex. He told him that he must understand that the whole thing was based upon priestcraft and superstition. Pontifex must make it clear that he does not fear his antagonist at the head of the Roman army, because, should the worst come to the worst, he has his machines ready, which, if necessary, will miraculously rekindle the dead fire of Vesta. In this way, even though ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my winter-garden. I turn my horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle—a carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years. ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... advantage proposed by the abolishing of Christianity is, that it would very much enlarge and establish liberty of conscience, that great bulwark of our nation, and of the Protestant Religion, which is still too much limited by priestcraft, notwithstanding all the good intentions of the legislature, as we have lately found by a severe instance. For it is confidently reported, that two young gentlemen of real hopes, bright wit, and profound judgment, who ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... doubt the existence of at least two distinct accounts of creation in our book of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced to agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with each other. These scholars have further shown the two accounts to be not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but evidently fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies, accepted in good faith and brought together for the noblest of purposes by those who put in order the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... priests who officiated at oracular shrines, which would have awed the ignorant multitude; as in sacred groves a tree might have been made to speak by the simple contrivance of a man concealed within the hollow stem, which to outward appearance would have been considered solid. The devices of priestcraft to bring grist to their mill are not yet obsolete, as will be seen in many of the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... say how many This noble woman led, To break their bonds asunder, Who were to priestcraft wed? And as I close this ballad, Historically true, Learn, reader, that its heroes Toiled not in vain ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... happened very unfortunately for Reeves that he fell, when young, into the acquaintance of some sceptical persons who made a jest of all religion and treated both its precepts and its mysteries as inventions subservient to priestcraft. Such notions are too easily imbibed by those who are desirous to indulge their vicious inclinations, and Reeves being of this stamp, greedily listened to all ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... the Western point of view, is essentially a gentle life, a field in which moral feeling and intellectual effort have born abundance of goodly fruit. Yet if we look more closely we shall see that even these ritualists, besotted as they may seem to be with their orgies of priestcraft, are not wholly untouched by the better spirit of their race. Extremes of sanctity, whether it be ritualistic or anti-ritualistic sanctity, always tend in India—and in other countries as well—to produce supermen. And if our priesthood in the Brahmanas feel ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... singular papers among these fragments. One title of a work is "Priesthood without Priestcraft; or Superstition distinguished from Religion, Dominion from Order, and Bigotry from Reason, in the most principal Controversies about Church government, which at present divide and deform Christianity." He has composed "A Psalm before Sermon ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... to the oracles of Greece a marked and popular pre-eminence over those in Egypt. A country divided into several small, free, and warlike states, would be more frequently in want of the divine advice, than one united under a single monarchy, or submitted to the rigid austerity of castes and priestcraft; and in which the inhabitants felt for political affairs all the languid indifference habitual to the subjects of a despotic government. Half a century might pass in Egypt without any political event that would send anxious thousands to the oracle; but in the wonderful ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... filled their upward pathway to freedom with shapes of terror,—the spectres of God's wrath to the uttermost, the fiend, and that torment the smoke of which rises forever. Through fear of a Satan of the future,—a sort of ban-dog of priestcraft, held in its leash and ready to be let loose upon the disputers of its authority,—our toiling brothers of past ages have permitted their human taskmasters to convert God's beautiful world, so adorned and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... hope of the Kingdom of heaven into a doctrine of immortality and deification, prophecy into a learned exegesis and theological science, the bearers of the spirit into clerics, the brethren into laity held in tutelage, miracles and healings into nothing, or into priestcraft, the fervent prayers into a solemn ritual, renunciation of the world into a jealous dominion over the world, the "spirit" into ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... friends of the upholders of the Mohamedan religion, and then the good opinion of such a man as I, who am beloved by my people, will be of consequence to him. I had some thoughts, I confess, of relinquishing priestcraft, and becoming a merchant; but, all things considered, I shall continue to follow my original destiny. I have now an opportunity of setting up for a martyr, and that, now I recollect it, is worth more than the loss of my worldly ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... ignorant men can not for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression from the educated few, but will inevitably sink into acquiescence to the will of intelligence, whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our institutions. They are worth preserving, because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest proportion of the population of any ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Reflect that it was in nations where even the sovereign authority professed homage to the religion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as a grand national institution, that the popular mass was thus reduced to a material fit for all the bad uses to which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and bodies of its slaves. And then consider what should have been the condition of this great aggregate, wherever Christianity was acknowledged by all as the true religion. The people should have consisted of so many beings having ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... interest of revealed religion. It is commonly said that the light of nature helps us a very little way in the knowledge of God. "Look at the heathen," it is said; "see their religious ignorance, their awful superstitions, their degrading worship of idols, and their subjection to priestcraft. This is your boasted light of nature, and these are its results—the Fetichism of Africa, the devil-worship of the North American Indians, the cannibalism of the Feejee Islands, the human sacrifices of Mexico and of the ancient Phoenicia." ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... far as that, where is the religion whose confessors do not consider prayers, songs of praise, and various kinds of devotional exercise, at any rate, a partial substitute for moral conduct? Look at England, for instance, where the audacious priestcraft has mendaciously identified the Christian Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath, in spite of the fact that it was ordained by Constantine the Great in opposition to the Jewish Sabbath, and even took its name, so that Jehovah's ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... always a sailor, is an old saying; but it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated with the very drudgery of ship existence. They like their world, which is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world of priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill at the guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target practice, which beats any big-game shooting when guns compete with guns, with battle ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... The ibis cannot have been honored as the destroyer of the sacred serpent. Nothing divine can have been perceived in the beetle or the ape. The connection between the god and the beast was originally the offspring of a grotesque imagination, and priestcraft and the superstitious tendency of the people ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... promise given thoughtlessly and blindly could be broken, but what then? Yes, then came the fate which Hartmut had pictured so beautifully, yet so vividly. Will was fully determined to transfer the lesson which Arivana had taught him to Burgsdorf. Surely the punishment invoked by the furious priestcraft, would be no worse than the vial of Frau ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... religious element in woman—playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come—that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... intimated: first, in the olden times unwonted knowledge of any kind was a very dangerous possession, and the truths of science and philosophy, equally with religious ideas other than those in vogue among the multitude, had to seek the protection of obscurity. If this necessity gave designing priestcraft its opportunity, it nevertheless offered the security and silence needed by the thinker and seeker after truth in dark times. Hence there arose in the ancient world, wherever the human mind was alive and spiritual, systems of exoteric and ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... historic disclosures of the times and ways in which this plain command of our Lord has been violated! Hearing the Word preached, and the hearer not able to discern truth from falsehood, has given to priestcraft nearly all of its power; because priestcraft, unsupported by the common people, could never have risen into power. If the common people had been wise enough to take heed how they hear, they never would have suffered themselves to be imposed upon ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... Those maids of honour (who can read), Are taught to use them for their creed.[23] The rev'rend author's good intention Has been rewarded with a pension. He does an honour to his gown, By bravely running priestcraft down: He shows, as sure as God's in Gloucester, That Moses was a grand impostor; That all his miracles were cheats, Perform'd as jugglers do their feats: The church had never such a writer; A shame ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... me to tell of the evolution of idolatry from fetichism, priestcraft from sorcery, and of their overthrow by the doctrines that were uttered by that voice on the Mount. Religion, that was fetichism and ecstasism and sorcery, is now the yearning for something better, something purer, and the ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... into that appalling subtlety which is their ruling passion gone crooked. And then comes a new revelation and a great simplifying. They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft. They want to prune life of its foolish fringes and get back to the noble bareness of the desert. Remember, it is always the empty desert and the empty sky that cast their spell over them—these, and the hot, strong, antiseptic ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... they had been printed on their one duodecimo sheet of thin coarse paper. Religion, too, just emerging into glorious light from the darkness of popery, had still her superstitions; and the mantle that priestcraft had contrived to throw over her exquisite, radiant, and simple form, was not then wholly and finally withdrawn. Romanism still hovered in the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... bliss of Heaven be won; Then will Hell shrink away, As I have seen night's terrors shun The conquering steps of day. 'Tis my religion thus to love, My creed thus fixed to be; Not Death shall shake, nor Priestcraft break My rock-like constancy! ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... yourselves, call it Protestant; the living body calls itself Protestant; the living body abjures Catholicism, flings off the name and the thing, hates the Church of Rome, laughs at sacramental power, despises the Fathers, is jealous of priestcraft, is a Protestant reality, is a Catholic sham. This existing reality, which is alive and no mistake, you wish to top with a filagree-work of screens, dorsals, pastoral staffs, croziers, mitres, and the like. Now most excellent Bateman, will you hear ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Marney, the worthy vicar had once warmed up into some ebullition of very low church zeal; there was some talk of an evening lecture, the schools were to be remodelled, certain tracts were actually distributed. But Lord Marney soon stopped all this. "No priestcraft at Marney," said this gentle proprietor ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... endeavour Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,) Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Philip that he was nothing if not religious, for Nero even was not a more indefatigable murderer, nor a more diabolical specimen of cruelty and superstition. The very thought of the wretch tempts one to revolt at human piety, at any rate where priestcraft and its fabrications are at the bottom ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... feelings and do not consider that personal freedom and individual rights are articles for home use only. Since Frye wrote, the whole of Europe, excepting perhaps Russia, has reaped the benefits of the French Revolution, and reduced, if not suppressed, what the Major called "kingcraft and priestcraft." He did not attempt to divine the future, but the history of Europe in the nineteenth century has been largely in accordance with his desires and hopes. It is not a small merit for a writer, in the midst of one of the most rabid reactions that the world has known, to have ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... you in sympathy with the priestcraft that would keep people virtuous through ignorance?" said the minister, laughing. "Alf must learn to do right, knowing all the facts. I don't believe he will shy a stone at a bird this coming year ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... her round eyes at Mr. Charlton, smiled her deprecating smile, and replied: "I do think, Mr. Charlton, that in this day of lax views on one side and priestcraft on the other, I respect a man who thinks enough of ee-vangelical truth to make a stand against any enemy of ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, and others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it is a problem; and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of the incident of ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... England is incompetently endowed. This is to take nothing from her but the power of making herself odious. If she be secure herself, she can have no objection to the security of others. For I hope she is secure from lay-bigotry and anti-priestcraft, for certainly such things there are. I heartily wish to see the Church secure in such possessions as will not only enable her ministers to preach the Gospel with ease, but of such a kind as will enable them to preach ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a body of religious institutions staffed by a priestcraft, which has shared power with the economic overlords. During certain periods in the long history of Egyptian civilization the priestcraft held the balance of power. So great was its ascendancy that the spoils of war and the gains of peace ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... Moslem law and Moslem widows, he must have been well aware that the lady's error arose from her considering as common to all the natives of India, Hindustanis as well as Hindus, those customs and restrictions which are peculiar to the Hindus alone. Among the latter, as is well known, both the priestcraft of the Brahmins, and the impediments to the marriage of a widow,[20] exist in full force at this day; and it would have been more candid on the part of the Khan, even at the expense of a little of his Moslem pride, to have set his fair opponent right on these points, than to have triumphed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... indifferent person would judge from this conduct, that the Assembly of Massachusetts are oppressors and bigots, who make religion only an engine of destruction to the people. We pity the people who are compelled to submit to the tyranny of priestcraft and hypocrisy." Then followed a sarcastic postscript, over which the reader may smile: "P.S. By private letter from Boston, we are informed, that the bakers are under great apprehensions of being forbid baking ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... the value of his service. If this one brave man had not squarely and defiantly met the follies and madness, the priestcraft and fanaticism, of his day; if they had been allowed to continue to sway Courts and Juries; if the pulpit and the press had continued to throw combustibles through society, and, in every way, inflame the public imaginations and passions, what limit can ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... perfectly right, gentlemen. I myself noticed the discrepancy in our number some time ago—but I knew that you were all advanced thinkers, who had long since liberated yourselves from the trammels of superstitious observances, which are the result of priestcraft, and are now left solely to the vulgar. Therefore I said nothing. The silly notion of any misfortune attending the number thirteen arose, as you are aware, out of the story of the Last Supper, and children and women may possibly still ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... sometimes with a congregation of fifty thousand within reach of his voice, and never so much as a nodder, even, among them! And from what a Bible can he choose his text,—a Bible which needs no translation, and which no priestcraft can shut and clasp from the laity,—the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine or destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of God! Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal thereto, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... luxurious self-indulgence of modern Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion—and, loud in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad success as was given them, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... The Lama, or God of the Tartars, is composed of such frail materials as mere mortality; contrived, however, by the power of priestcraft, to appear immortal; the succession of Lamas ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... false witnesses of God.' For it has been common hitherto to believe in the loftiest capacities of man, as the child of God, and made in the divine image; and this belief has had the sanction of all ages. Cheered and strengthened by such a belief, men have struggled bravely and steadily against priestcraft and kingcraft, against the absolutism of power in every form. The magnificent ideal of a government which the masses of mankind should themselves establish and uphold, has been the quickening life of all republics ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... superstition. Their influence was to make men worse, not better; their tendency was to produce sensuality, cruelty, and universal degradation. They did not proceed, in any sense, from God; they were not even the work of good men, but rather of deliberate imposition and priestcraft. A supernatural religion had become necessary in order to counteract the fatal consequences of these debased and debasing superstitions. This is the view of the great natural religions of the world which was taken by such writers as Leland, Whitby, and Warburton in ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... another and a strange element: the roots are in the air; the boughs which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and independent growth, to clothe them in their helplessness with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical—the native product of that overwhelming superstition ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... associated with such haughty privileges for the rich and such contemptuous disdain for the poor. He had not even the consolation of having received an education. His nature revolted at the religious formalism of priestcraft; his mind turned in disgust from the scholastic husks of its superficial knowledge. What he had learned came from inborn capacity, from desultory reading, and from the untutored imaginings of his garden at Brienne, his cave at Ajaccio, or his barrack chambers. What more plausible ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... majority. They increase now only because Catholics come in from other countries. In a few years that supply will cease, and then the Catholic Church will grow weaker every day. The free secular school is the enemy of priestcraft and superstition, and the people of this country will never consent to the destruction of that institution. I want no man persecuted on ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... world stands in such dire need is not at all the confederacy of augurs which Mr. Froude, perhaps in recollection of his former profession, so glibly suggests, with an esoteric creed of their own, "crystallized into shape" for profession before the public. The day of priestcraft being now numbered with the things that were, the exploitation of those outside of the sacerdotal circle is no longer possible. Therefore the religion of mere talk, however metaphysical and profound; the ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... counts the stars, numbers the planets, measures the length of their years and computes the number of their days, unless his observatory is illuminated by the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. No Luther thunders against priestcraft, shakes the thrones of tyrants, and wakes the nations to a new life and a new progress, save that Luther that finds a Bible in his cell. No Franklin calls down electricity from the clouds to carry messages across a continent swift as the lightning flashes through the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... one day, "the great practical objection still remains unanswered—the clergy? Are we to throw ourselves into their hands after all? Are we, who have been declaiming all our lives against priestcraft, voluntarily to forge again the chains of our slavery to a class whom ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... orthodox in these matters, he was daring in speculation. There was nothing he was not bold enough to question. He waged war after his peculiar fashion with every form of superstition. He worked under the foundations of priestcraft. But while serving the Reformed cause, he had no sympathy with Reformers. If they would but remain quiet, but keep their peculiar notions to themselves, France would rest! That a man should go to the stake ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... World!" Gabriel finished. "And for this, and for what I know about its enemies, I stand here in this cell and may yet go to a living death. This is my crime, and nothing else—this battle for the freedom and the joy of the world—this struggle against the powers of ignorance and darkness, priestcraft and greed, lust, treachery and foulness, cruelty and hate and war! This, and this only. You have heard me. I ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... crucifix in one of the sanctuaries of the great teocalli. There Father Olmedo celebrated Mass, and the Te Deum was chanted by the soldiers, side by side with the sacrificial stone; the abominable war-god's image, and all the attendant machinery of its savage priestcraft. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... there was to be a period of virulent persecution of the apostles and the Church of which they would be in charge; then the destruction of Jerusalem, with all the horrors of merciless warfare was to follow; and this in turn was to be succeeded by a long period of priestcraft and apostasy with bitter sectarian dissension and cruel persecution of the righteous. The brief reference to the non-localized, universal phenomena, by which His advent is to be signalized, is a parenthetical demonstration ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... wonderful dignity and power. He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful lines, and met the old poet as one man meets another; and lo! there arose before him a new, untrodden and wholly human world, free from priestcraft and pedantry, near to nature and ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... Moliere ridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the landowner who is no longer ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... is revealed in our religious ceremonies. Within Christianity itself are systems of priestcraft where the individual believer has no glad, free access to his Father's presence, but where his approach must be mediated by a priestly ritual, his forgiveness assured by a priestly declaration, his salvation sealed by a priestly sacrament. This idea that God ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the Fair Circassian are several Poems addressed to Sylvia; Naked Truth, from the second Book of Ovid's Fastorum; Heathen Priestcraft, from the first Book of Ovid's Fastorum; A Midsummer's Wish; and an Ode on Florinda, seen while she was Bathing. He is also author of a curious work, in one Volume Octavo, entitled Scripture Politics: being a view of the original constitution, and subsequent revolutions in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... the fact. I don't believe she would do anything contrary to its teachings as she understands them. We men may think what we please, but we have confidence in a woman who looks as she does now. She is not in the least inclined to devotional rhapsodies or to subserviency to priestcraft, like so many women abroad. She merely appears to recognize a divine power as she accepts nature, only more reverently and consciously. I suppose I am an agnostic as much as anything, yet I should only be too glad to have Stella at my side with such an expression on her ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... Meanwhile it would seem, as a matter of fact, that the number of children under the teaching of the Christian Brothers has increased instead of diminishing: there are still some French people left who have not bowed the knee to Secularism, and Materialism, and Atheism: even those who tremble at Priestcraft can accept the ministration of the Christian Brothers, who cannot (as we have seen) be Priests, according to their fundamental rule: and so, although the secularist flood is just now frightfully high, there is a ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... day talking over the circumstances of Texas. Nor could the Bishop resist the enthusiasm. In fact, the condition of the Texans touched him on its religious side very keenly. For the fight was quite as much a fight for religious as for political freedom. Never in old Spain itself had priestcraft wielded a greater power than the Roman priesthood in Texas. They hated and feared an emigration of Americans, for they knew them to be men opposed to tyranny of all kinds, men who thought for themselves, and who would not be dictated to by monks and priests. It was, without ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... church, churchdom; ministry, apostleship[obs3], priesthood, prelacy, hierarch[obs3], church government, christendom, pale of the church. clericalism, sacerdotalism[obs3], episcopalianism, ultramontanism[obs3]; theocracy; ecclesiology[obs3], ecclesiologist[obs3]; priestcraft[obs3], odium theologicum[Lat]. monachism[obs3], monachy[obs3]; monasticism, monkhood[obs3]. [Ecclesiastical offices and dignities] pontificate, primacy, archbishopric[obs3], archiepiscopacy[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... not hesitated to assert that the tenets against which Lord John Russell protested in the Durham Letter were, in his judgment, of a kind which are 'destructive of all reasonable faith, and reduce worship to a mere belief in spells and priestcraft.' Cardinal Vaughan, it is needless to say, does not sympathise with such a view. He, however, has opinions on the subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address at Preston on September 10, 1894, on ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... Papistical religion of the Italian. Dr. Riccabocca was professedly a Roman Catholic. He so little obtruded that fact—and, indeed, had assented so readily to any animadversions upon the superstition and priestcraft which, according to Protestants, are the essential characteristics of Papistical communities—that it was not till the hymeneal torch, which brings all faults to light, was fairly illumined for the altar, that the remembrance of a faith so cast into the shade burst upon the conscience of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the Great Eastern Antichrist, sufficiently distinguished from the Western. The western combination against real Christianity never attained to power by successful conquest of the nations; but on the contrary by chicanery, insidious policy, flattery of princes and priestcraft. This enemy is described with sufficient accuracy and peculiar precision in the subsequent part of the Apocalypse. Prophecy has a determinate meaning; and we are not at liberty to give loose reins to our imagination: otherwise we shall bewilder, rather than ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... night as they were leaving a drinking-shop. Your grandsons both owe Max more than three thousand francs. The scoundrel told the lads to try and find out our intentions; he reminded them that you had once thought of getting round my uncle by priestcraft, and declared that nobody but you could guide me; for he thinks, fortunately, that I am nothing more than ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... devoid of theological prejudice, and never reviled Catholicism as Newman reviled it before his conversion. But he held that the reformers, alike in England, in France, and in Germany, were fighting for truth, honesty, and private judgment against priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny. The scepticism and cynicism of which he was often accused were on the surface. They were provoked by what he felt to be hypocrisy and sham. They were not his true self. He believed firmly unflinchingly, and always in "the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... energy which manifested itself in a multitude of ways—in literature, in commerce, in politics, in scientific thought. And all this had come into existence in a nation which had curbed the power of the monarchy, done away with priestcraft, established the liberty of the Press, set its face against every kind of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and, through the means of free institutions, taken up the task of governing itself. The inference was obvious: in France ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the arms of enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in vestments—vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their political truncheons—to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy and Cunning go to form a word. Deadmanship, I call it."—To quote my uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!—"Parsons and princes are happy with the homage of this huge passive fleshpot class. It is enough for them. Why not? ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thither but the old men; whom he called their Oowookakee, that is, as I made him explain it to me, their religious, or clergy; and that they went to say O! (so he called saying prayers,) and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said. By this I observed, that there is priestcraft even amongst the most blinded ignorant Pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... upon me. But do you count it no merit, no service to mankind, to deliver them from the frauds and fetters of priestcraft, from the deliriums of fanaticism, and from the terrors and follies of superstition? Consider how much mischief these have done to the world! Even in the last age what massacres, what civil wars, what ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... can get deeply into your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.' You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... priestcraft is this?" demanded La Tour, angrily; "is it not enough, that I am held in duresse by a villain's power, but must I be denied, even the poor privilege of bearing my confinement unmolested? What, silent yet!" he added, in a tone of sarcasm; "methinks, thou art a novice in thy ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... equal right to happiness? Nature made no other distinction than that of higher and lower degrees of power of mind and body. But what mysterious distribution of character has the craft of statesmen, more fatal than priestcraft, introduced? ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... under the name of the Animus Mundi, or any other whatsoever. The interference of the Deity in the affairs of mankind he entirely disowned, having proved to his own satisfaction that the idea originated entirely in priestcraft. In short, with the shadowy metaphysical exception aforesaid, Mr. Joshua Bletson of Darlington, member for Littlefaith, came as near the predicament of an atheist, as it is perhaps possible for a man to do. But we say this with the necessary salvo; for we have known many like Bletson, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... change. What is in the future, let the prophets say; any one can see that something not quite agreeable is in the present; something that takes the wrong side, as by instinct, in politics; something that mainly helps to prop up tottering priestcraft among us; something that one thinks of with dismay as destined to control so largely the civil and religious interests of the country. This, however, is only the aggregate aspect. Mrs. Clannahan's kitchen, as it may be seen by the desperate philosopher when he goes to engage her for ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the great divinity of the Algonkian tribes of the Great Lakes, Dr. D. G. Brinton says: "Michabo, giver of life and light, creator and preserver, is no apotheosis of a prudent chieftain, still less the fabrication of an idle fancy, or a designing priestcraft, but, in origin, deeds, and name, the not unworthy personification of the purest conceptions they possessed concerning the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... at 84 years of age, Herbert Spencer leaves behind him an enduring monument such as few men have been able to build for themselves. He helped to rid the world of superstition and to destroy priestcraft; he put the idea of a God-direction of the world, and its counterpart, the eternal subjection and the dependence of man, into the waste paper basket of history. He cleared the way for the feet of ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... priests," said the Khakan "Let them talk with my priests and then go their own way. I have little concern with priestcraft." ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... horrible tribunal of irresponsible power, combined with the most remorseless priestcraft, was the Inquisition; for it not merely punished men for obeying their own consciences, but tried them in defiance of every principle of enquiry. It not only made a law contradictory of every other law, but it established a tribunal subversive of every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... to conceal its nakedness. Till now you have studied man merely in books and philosophical treatises; or, in other words, you have been thrashing empty straw. But the film will soon fall from your eyes. We will shortly quit this dirty country of yours, where priestcraft, pedantry, and oppression reign unmolested and undisturbed. I will usher you upon a stage where the passions have a freer scope, and where great energies are employed ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... side. A living gospel incarnated in a living, loving man or woman is the "open sesame" to confidence first and conversion afterward. Make the foreigner feel that you are interested in him as a man, and the door is open beyond the power of priestcraft to shut it. The priest may for a time keep the Catholic immigrant away from the Protestant church but not from the Protestant cordiality and sympathy; and if these be shown it will not be long before the immigrant, learning rapidly to think for himself, will settle the church-going ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... But the products of its civilization are handed on to other nations. Another rises and, when about to enter an advanced state of progress, perishes on account of internal maladies. It is overshadowed with despotism, oppressed by priestcraft, or lacking industrial vitality to such a degree that it is forced to surrender the beginnings of civilization to ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... it fell, The pained on earth is pained in hell!" So priestcraft from its altars cursed The mournful doubts ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there no priestcraft in the Church of England? There is certainly, or rather there was, a modicum of priestcraft in the Church of England, but I have generally found that those who are most vehement against the Church of England are chiefly dissatisfied with her because there is only a modicum ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... which as governors we owe to the governed, and which, as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft? We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... brightened faintly. In his desolate position, Father Benwell was the one friend on whom he could rely. Penrose was far away; the Lorings had helped to keep him deceived; Major Hynd had openly pitied and despised him as a victim to priestcraft. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... But the old worn-out thunder of the Vatican, which lately made a feeble noise in America, has rolled through France with the same assertion, 'Discussion cannot be tolerated'; and what has been the result? Simply this,—that all the intellectual force of the country is arrayed against priestcraft;— and the spirit of an insolent, witty, domineering atheism and materialism rules us all. Even young children can be found by the score who laugh at the very idea of a God, and who fling a jeer at the story of the Crucifixion of Christ,—while ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a real wickedness of the priest that is different from other wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and strange perversions of instinct affect it. Let a former Archbishop of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... imposing presence, grave in his exterior, and much respected among the Catholics of Northumberland as a worthy and upright man. Yet Father Vaughan did not altogether lack those peculiarities which distinguish his order. There hung about him an air of mystery, which, in Protestant eyes, savoured of priestcraft. The natives (such they might be well termed) of Osbaldistone Hall looked up to him with much more fear, or at least more awe, than affection. His condemnation of their revels was evident, from their being discontinued in some measure when the priest was a ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Xenophon may be so called; and it was not till arts and sciences began to revive after the irruption of the barbarians into Europe, that anything of this kind appeared. But when the minds of men were debauched by the imposition of priestcraft to the most absurd pitch of credulity, the authors of romance arose, and losing sight of probability, filled their performances with the most monstrous hyperboles. If they could not equal the ancient poets in point of genius they were resolved to excel them in fiction, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... no more. O Gratitude, thou hast no home on earth! Twelve months did Juarez rule, and in twelve months Did what no man can do but God is with him! He healed contention's wounds, set up new schools, Released the land from priestcraft's ancient grip, Rebuilt our credit, destroyed by Miramon, The robber president, who bonded the land To France, then set the sword of Europe 'gainst us Because we could not pay the unjust debt From treasuries that his own hands had emptied. O, 'twas a crime too big ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan |
