"Ritual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... might marvel at the absorption in prayer of some of the devotees, among accessories bewildering to eyes accustomed to the plainer surroundings of other forms of ritual, but the worship of those in attendance seems sincere ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... meeting a literary lady in London, repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her house; and the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was a hymn of the fond yearning ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... manner, doubtless, other great principles also of religion and morals are rooted in the minds so deeply, that their denial by any religion would be a justification of our quitting or rejecting it. If a pagan found his ecclesiastical polity essentially founded on lying and cheating, or his ritual essentially impure, or his moral code essentially unjust or cruel, we conceive this would be a sufficient reason for his renouncing it for one which was free from these hateful characteristics. Such again is the kind of private judgment exercised, when maxims of principles, generally ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... religious belief, is an unsafe guardian of any woman's peace of mind. You who have been reared almost in the shadow of the altar, accustomed to hearing grace at your meals, to family prayers, to strict observance of our ritual, will feel isolated indeed, when transplanted to the home of a godless man, who rarely darkens the door of the sanctuary. 'Be ye not unequally yoked ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... right to go through a Ranger School and to satisfy the powers that be about your fitness, but that isn't really getting to the inside of the matter. It's when you feel that you've had the chance to come right in and take the regular prescribed ritual of a baked apple and a glass of milk in the house of the Chief Forester that you can feel you're the real thing ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... from the contemplative life which should be the ideal of the Cistercian. For the same reason they were forbidden to accept gifts of churches or tithes. The monastic buildings, including the chapel, were to be of the simplest description, without paintings, sculpture, or stained glass; and the ritual used at the services was in keeping with this bareness. The arrangements of the refectory and the dormitory were equally meagre. Hard manual work, strict silence, and one daily meal gave the inmates every opportunity of conquering ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... Athens sunk in bonds I first received; what time an annual feast Had summon'd all the genial country round, By sacrifice and pomp to bring to mind That first great spousal; while the enamour'd youths And virgins, with the priest before the shrine, Observe the same pure ritual, and invoke The same glad omens. There, among the crowd 510 Of strangers from those naval cities drawn Which deck, like gems, the island's northern shore, A merchant of AEgina I descried, My ancient host; but, forward as I sprung To ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... around the Course. He would stand behind them at the Tee and smile in a most calm and superior Manner while they sand-shuffled and shifted and jiggled and joggled and went through the whole calisthenic Ritual ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... mention of the subject with which his thoughts were constantly filled. Yet he had never loved Montanelli so deeply as now. The dim, persistent sense of dissatisfaction, of spiritual emptiness, which he had tried so hard to stifle under a load of theology and ritual, had vanished into nothing at the touch of Young Italy. All the unhealthy fancies born of loneliness and sick-room watching had passed away, and the doubts against which he used to pray had gone without the need of exorcism. With the awakening of a new enthusiasm, a clearer, fresher religious ideal ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... modes of life that have been laid down for Brahmanas, should, before everything else, be observed by every Brahmana. If a Brahmana acts otherwise, he should be punished like a Sudra. The duties of the four modes of life and the ritual prescribed in the Vedas, O king, should ever be followed by a Brahmana. Know that he has no other duties. For a Brahmana acting otherwise, a Kshatriya should not make any arrangement for sustenance. His religious merit grows in consequence of his acts. A Brahmana, indeed, is like Dharma's ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... among the earliest martyrs, who, as Pliny tells us, sang hymns in their secret worship. We can only trace it back to the oldest chant music, when it was doubtless sung by both the Eastern and Western Churches. In the rude liturgies of the 4th and 5th centuries it must have begun to assume ritual form; but it remained for the more modern school of composers hundreds of years later to illustrate the "Magnificat" with the melody of art and genius. Superseding the primitive unisonous plain-song, the old parallel concords, and the simple faburden (faux bourdon) ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... Hoddan went through a symbolic duel, which was plainly the way the thing would have happened in reality. Others came in and went through the same process. Two of them did not quite grasp that it was a ritual, and he had to shoot them in the knife arm. Then he hunted in the ship's supplies for ointment for the blisters that would appear from stun-pistol bolts at such short range. As he bandaged the places, he again tried to find out why the ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... little water from his hollowed hands on to the slab, because he had no oil, and having murmured fragments of a ritual as old as Rome, bidding the gods of earth and air and the unseen re-absorb into themselves what man no longer could perceive or cherish or destroy, turned to the ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... Those waiting in the church upstairs heard the call, which was like a cry of despair, for it came from the lips of the Duke of Sexto, the King's favorite companion. The duke then rose, saying, according to the ritual, His majesty does not answer. Then it is true, the King is dead." He locked the coffin, handed the keys to the prior, and, taking up his wand of office broke it in his hand and flung the pieces at the foot of the table. Then every one left the monastery, as the bells tolled, and the guns announced ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... between Pope Zachary and Boniface further reveals the existence of a Christian community in Germany, holding a faith more evangelical, and observing a ritual more scriptural, than that which Rome was seeking to impose; e.g., Zachary says in his tenth letter: "As for the priests, whom your fraternity report to have found (who are more numerous than the Catholics (sic) wandering ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... the trysting-place. Here Patricia waylaid her Knight on his way down from the library, taking her position on an upper step, which made their difference in height less apparent. The same ceremony was enacted each time in accord with the ritual she had taught him. After he passed her, she suddenly sprang up to her full stature, holding her arm high above her with the palm of ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... custom lasted into Graeco-Roman times, and was part of the ritual for laying the foundations of a temple. After the king had dug out the soil on the ground where the temple was to stand, he spread over the spot sand mixed with pebbles and precious stones, and upon this he laid the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... engaged in the work of incorporating all that might be retained of the vague divinations of that earlier visionary time, in definite and intelligible human image and human story. The vague belief, the mysterious custom and tradition, develope themselves into an elaborately ordered ritual— into personal gods, imaged in ivory and gold, sitting on beautiful thrones. Always, wherever a shrine or temple, great or small, is mentioned, there, we may conclude, was a visible idol, there was conceived ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... not always, it is wise and long-sighted policy to presume in nations higher qualities than they have, and developments beyond what really exist. But as to religion, there can be no doubt, and no debate at all. To exterminate their filthy and bloody abominations of creed and of ritual practice, is the first step to any serious improvement of the Kandyan people: it is the conditio sine qua non of all regeneration for this demoralized race. And what we ought to have promised, all that in mere civil equity we had the right to promise; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... knew that if he didn't now get rid of her Roscarna would become nothing more than a warren in which her innumerable relatives might swarm. He purged Roscarna of Joyces, Biddy included. He buried Jocelyn decently according to the ritual of the Church of Ireland, and proceeded to put his wife's estate in order as soon as her father's remains were ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... much weakens the impressiveness of the whole scene, the very point of which lies in the fact that it took place on familiar ground. Isaiah was a Jerusalemite, and the temple was the most familiar of all haunts to him. He had witnessed there a thousand times the external ritual of religion—the worshipping multitudes, the priests, and the paraphernalia of sacrifice. But now, on the same spot, he was to see a sight in whose glory all these things would disappear. This is what the critical moments of religious experience are always meant ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... leave her at ten o'clock every night, for she liked to go to bed early, and he was obliged to put in another couple of hours' work to make up for the lost evening. He generally brushed her hair for her before he went. He had made a ritual of the kisses he gave her when he bade her good-night; first he kissed the palms of her hands (how thin the fingers were, the nails were beautiful, for she spent much time in manicuring them,) then he kissed her closed ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... during the Middle Ages, take up Papebrock's treatise on the "Palatine Laws" of James II., King of Majorca, A.D. 1324, where he will see depicted—all the more minutely because from the size of his principality the king had no other outlet for his energy—the ritual of a mediaeval Court, illustrated, too, with pictures drawn from the original manuscript. In this document are laid down with painful minuteness, the duties of every official from the chancellor and the major-domo to the lowest scullions and grooms, including butlers, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... her an account of the impressive incidents of the interment—the stately procession, the grandiose ritual, the symbols of public grief. She displayed a strange, morbid ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... and rich variety of illustrations, always with reference to its divinely appointed type, the Levitical priesthood. This was especially needful to fortify the Hebrew Christians, who had been educated and lived under the constant impression of the splendid Mosaic ritual with its magnificent temple, against the danger of being turned from the simplicity of the gospel to reliance on the "carnal ordinances" of Judaism, which would have been virtual apostacy from ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... accomplished little, and a more legitimate attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for circumcision, and that these flint knives might have had this later origin. But the argument against the conclusions drawn from this view was triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone knives, but axes and other implements ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... could not exist. Their only productions consist in a small quantity of hemp and wax. If they were industrious, they might procure abundance of fish, which are very numerous in their river. They are Christians, according to the Greek ritual, to which they have added ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... chatelaines in their wide domains with castle and chase and delicate pleasaunce, liege-men bound to them by more than the feudal ties of service. All the varied honours of nobility, vitalized by significant ritual and symbolized by splendid and beautiful costumes. Courts of Love and troubadours and trouveres, kings who were kings indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their courts—Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King Charles—above all ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... mentally attributed it to something that had passed during the afternoon's ride. Mrs. Rossall did not look for confidences. Beatrice would gossip freely enough of trivial experiences, or of the details of faith and ritual, but the innermost veil of her heart was never raised; all her friends felt that, though they could not easily have explained in what way they became conscious of this reserve, she seemed so thoroughly open, not to say so shallow. She left The Firs to return to town, and thence ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... was this instinct which, in his visits to the cathedrals, prompted him to stand as far back as possible while the Mass was being said. To see in the dim distance the white, pontifical figures moving gravely through the ritual, to hear the low tones, enthralled and stirred him; but he shrank from entering the sacristy, with its loud-voiced priests describing perfunctorily the relics: that was a disillusionment ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... was the banner of my Cid, and my Cid was the first Christian Alcayde of Toledo. Of the terms granted unto the Moors, and how they were set aside for the honour of the Catholic faith, and of the cunning of the Jews who dwelt in the city, and how the Romish ritual was introduced therein, this is not the place to speak; all these things are written in the Chronicles of the Kings ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... But there is no doubt that, as her brother said to the fanatical Montmorency, she would always have been and always was of his religion, the religion of the State. The side of the Reformation which must have most appealed to her was neither its austere morals, nor its bare ritual, nor its doctrines, properly so called, but its spiritual pietism and its connection with profane learning and letters; for of literature Margaret was an ardent devotee and ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... feeling was that we were not entirely alone, and that it was a rather large order to fold in his arms a swearing parrot, a shivering, hairless dog, a robust Mexican orphan, a bride and a dope fiend, for he made not the first gesture of the above ritual. ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... The service was chanted by the Reader. It was a kind of chant quite new and strange to Francesca. Like many young persons brought up with no other religion than they can pick up for themselves, she was curious and somewhat learned in the matter of ecclesiastical music and ritual, which she approached, owing to her education, with unbiased mind. She knew masses and anthems and hymns and chants of all kinds; never had she heard anything of this kind before. It was not congregational, or Gregorian; nor was it repeated by the choir from side to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of these workers were limited, but their souls were commingled with other souls bound to them by the formalities; and every minute of their days, every atom of their forces, were moving round one light, the light upon the hearthstone. These men were carried ahead of Byng now, as though by the ritual of nature taking their rightful place in life's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... be a villain who was taken poaching on the Abbey estate, or a chapman who had given false measure from his biased scales. But now, when a man of noble birth was to be tried, the whole legal and ecclesiastical ceremony was carried out with every detail, grotesque or impressive, which the full ritual prescribed. The distant roll of church music and the slow tolling of the Abbey bell; the white-robed brethren, two and two, walked thrice round the hall singing the "Benedicite" and the "Veni, Creator" before they ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... even with a child,—no 'permit' existing anywhere to destroy the life of the soul by so much as one false or cruel word! It is with a deep sense of the exact balance of God's justice, that I stand before you to-day, my friends, and ask you without any accepted ritual or ceremonial to hear my vows of marriage. She to whom I pledge my word and life, is one who in the world's eyes is accounted great, because rich in this world's goods,—but her wealth has no attraction for me, and for my own self I would rather she had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... cocked hat, a gold-laced coat with a sword at his side, and he brings down his staff upon the church pavement with a thundering crack at those moments when the wool-gathering mind has to be hurried back and fixed upon the sacredness of the ritual. He is a well-knit, agile fellow, who knows every inch of his ground, and he has led the gendarmes who have surprised him such dances over rocks, and placed them in such unpleasant positions, that they ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Linda was scarcely ever in her own—her mother's lovely things, acting like a magnet, constantly drew her to their arrangement in the drawers. When the laundry came up, crisp and fragile webs heaped on the bed, Linda laid it away in a sort of ritual. Even with these publicly invisible garments a difference of choice existed between the two: Mrs. Condon's preference was for insertions, and Linda's for shadow embroidery and fine shell edges. Mrs. Condon, shaking into position a foam of ribbon and lace, would ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... entrance the curtain was up; and knowing that the ritual of Madame Ancelin required absolute silence at such a time, he waited quietly in the little room, separated by a step from the front of the box, where Madame Ancelin was seated in bliss between Madame Astier ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... learned from Littleton and Coke. The Great Charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the parliaments of the Commonwealth as in those of any earlier or of any later age. A new Confession of Faith and a new ritual had been introduced into the church. But the bulk of the ecclesiastical property still remained. The colleges still held their estates. The parson still received his tithes. The Lords had, at a crisis of great excitement, been excluded by military violence ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... diplomatic intrigues, and by manipulation of discords in the opposition. Though the Spanish fathers held with the French and German on the points of episcopal independence and conciliar authority, they disagreed whenever it became a question of compromise with Protestants upon details of dogma or ritual. The Papal Court persuaded the Catholic sovereigns of Spain and France, and the Emperor, that episcopal independence would be dangerous to their own prerogatives; and at every inconvenient turn in affairs, it was made clear that ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... beginning that the exigences of bodily life gave consciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or reproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness is a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the chief episodes in the body's fortunes. The organs, by their structure, select the impressions possible to them from the divers influences abroad in the world, all ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with the pardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) that the supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (for example) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual and popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that Dickens (wishing to have in The Christmas Carol a little ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual: "Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean—jus' got back from a funeral. Fifty cents ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... proportioned to some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonly happened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there was nothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank was innocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in the ritual was its supervision by the priests, who knew something of their parishioners' character. Military tenants, however, preferred their privilege of trial by battle. Now Henry began to teach men to rely upon their judgment; ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... of strength into a deed of love; they have set the woman, as woman, upon such adorable heights of worship, and by that act have so immeasurably uplifted the whole plane upon which society moves; they have given to all earnest men and strong lovers such a dear ritual and litany of chivalric devotion; they have sung us such a high mass of constancy for our love; they have enlightened us with such celestial revelation of the possible Eden which the modern Adam and Eve may win back for themselves by faithful and generous ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... own religious life we are ourselves often and notoriously wise in the penny and foolish in the pound. As, for instance, when we are so scrupulous and so conscientious about forms and ceremonies, about times and places, and so on. In short, the whole ritual that has risen up around spiritual religion in all our churches, from that of the Pope himself out to that of George Fox—it is all the penny rather than the pound. This rite and that ceremony; this ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... hurled That dull, punctilious god, whom they That call their tiny clan the world, Serve and obsequiously obey: Who con their ritual of Routine, With minds to one dead likeness blent, And never ev'n in dreams have seen The ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... with house building in Tusayan are quite meager, but the various steps in the ritual, described in their proper connection in the following paragraphs, are well defined and definitely assigned to those who participate in the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... which reads the heart, could not fail to discriminate between the living and the dead, and the gentle soul of the unfortunate girl was already far removed beyond the errors, or deceptions, of any human ritual. These simple rites, however, were not wholly wanting in suitable accompaniments. The tears of Judith and Hist were shed freely, and Deerslayer gazed upon the limpid water, that now flowed over one whose spirit was even purer than its own mountain springs, with glistening ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the word 'religion' for [Greek: Thraeskia] in St. James [4] ought now to be altered to ceremony or ritual. The whole version has by change of language become a dangerous mistranslation, and furnishes a favorite text to our moral preachers, Church Socinians and other christened pagans now so rife amongst us. What was the substance of the ceremonial law is but the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... an object of religion of course we could have nothing to do with it; the Roman Catholic creed, with its outward signs and symbols, was not ours; who even in our own Church mourned the almost lost beauty and simplicity of our ancient ritual; that substitution of the ceremonial for the spiritual, the creature for the Creator, which seems to threaten the downfall of the Establishment. Would it be right to purchase and possess this beautiful thing merely as an object of refined and wonderful art? I looked at H.C. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... Tregear, Polack, and many others. From them we flatter ourselves that we get—as from Grimm, Mannhardt, Islay, and the rest—mythology in situ. We compare it with the dry mythologic blossoms of the classical hortus siccus, and with Greek ritual and temple legend, and with Marchen in the scholiasts, and we think the comparisons very illuminating. They have thrown new light on Greek mythology, ritual, mysteries, and religion. This much we think we have already done, though ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... bundle of cloth. Fanny reached for it, took it out, and held it in her hands a moment. Then she unrolled it slowly, and the bundle revealed itself to be a faded, stained, voluminous gingham apron, blue and white. It was the kind of apron women don when they perform some very special household ritual—baking, preserving, house cleaning. It crossed over the shoulders with straps, and its generous fullness ran all the way around the waist. It was discolored in many places with the brown and reddish stains of fruit juices. It had been Molly Brandeis' canning apron. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... her forth then—Dura-ki, the chosen one. Shod in golden sandals, and wearing the crimson robe of the ritual, she moved out of Ra-sed's sight, behind the high altar. No acolyte was permitted ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown
... not without having spoken a couple of murmured words of correction to the flunkey near the sideboard, who had omitted, no doubt, some point in the mysterious ritual of which he was ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, illustrates the process of creating artificial and easily recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... books were roads open to adventures; he saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his excesses something ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... reception. Vessons waited patiently—more as a slave than a ruler—only uttering his plaintive 'Come o-on!' once, when the last cow dallied overlong with a tuft of lush grass in the hedge. This was the daily ritual. Every morning he appeared, neutral-tinted, from the house, and cried upon an apparently empty landscape; every morning they meandered through the seven gates from the secret leafy purlieus ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... last, the class rose to take the Oath of Allegiance, Hanlon found himself on his feet, rigidly at attention, repeating the impressive ritual aloud ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... loyalty. This was through the observation of certain ceremonial customs and especially the great annual feasts. Did most ancient peoples show their loyalty to the gods by their lives and deeds or by the ceremonies of the ritual and the offerings which they brought to the altars? The first great prophet Amos declared that Jehovah hated and despised feasts and ceremonies unless accompanied by deeds of justice ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... and what might be called the Scout ritual, to which the boys had been subjecting themselves for several years, was immediately apparent in the murmurs of approval which greeted Jack's suggestion. To those who have followed the career of the Boy Scouts ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... forget the wonderful thought, also mirrored in this piece of ancient ritual, that God delights in men's sacrifices and surrenders and services. 'If I were hungry, I would not tell thee,' said the Psalmist in God's name in regard to outward sacrifices; 'Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... worth keeping an eye on." "Many a man that keeps the fourth commandment is not so particular about the others." Such are the phrases one is perpetually hearing, and they go far to prove how inoperative are ritual, profession, and form, in the life of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and majestic sound of the organ filling the vast nave of the church, had succeeded, the preceding day, in redeeming for the spectators, and for me particularly, whatever was a little superannuated in the minute observance of a ritual that had come down from the Middle Ages. I felt myself, on the contrary, rather surprised than edified by the character, partly religious, partly worldly, but far more worldly than religious, that I witnessed on the morrow. Most ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Augustine, prior of the monastery on the Coelian Hill, was sent with forty monks to convert the heathen English. They landed in Thanet, in 597, with all the pomp of Roman civilisation and ecclesiastical symbolism. Gregory had rightly determined to try by ritual and show to impress the barbarian mind. AEthelberht, already predisposed to accept the Continental culture, and to assimilate his rude kingdom to the Roman model, met them in the open air at a solemn meeting; for he feared, says Baeda, to meet them within four walls, lest they should practice ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... for generations men have dwelt upon the dim tradition in their thoughts, and it has had time to grow into its fullest significance,—even finding an elaborate expression in sacred writings, in symbolic ritual, and monumental entablature? Osiris, who subjected men to his reign of peace, was also held to be the Preserver of their souls. Even Caesar, had he lived two thousand years before, might have been worshipped as Saviour. All extended power, measured by duration in time or vast areas of space, becomes ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... approach to her from any quarter without being promptly met. She was quite as much at home, and quite as graceful, in bandying badinage as in expatiating upon the loveliness of country life and the ritual of ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... miniature of the State, and every father in Al-Islam was made priest and pontiff in his own house, able unaided to marry himself, to circumcise (to baptise as it were) his children, to instruct them in the law and canonically to bury himself (vol. viii. 22). Ritual, properly so called, there was none; congregational prayers were merely those of the individual en masse, and the only admitted approach to a sacerdotal order were the Olema or scholars learned in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... wealth and elaborate ceremonial, exist and are kept up solely because, things of earth as we are, we cannot be depended upon to praise God lovingly within the white-washed walls of a conventicle, or according to the simple ritual of the Society of Friends. We would not, even if we could, pray habitually among such surroundings, where we could afford to better them. We have before us the principle of St. Thomas (1a 2a, q. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Kunti, Bharadwaja returned to his hermitage after performing the ritual duties of the day, and having collected the sacrificial fuel. And because his son had been slain, the sacrificial fires which used to welcome him everyday, did not on that day come forward to welcome him. And marking this change in the Agnihotra, the great sage asked the ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... wire handles and a lid. Used to boil water. If for tea, the leaves are added into the billy itself; the billy may be swung ('to make the leaves settle') or a eucalyptus twig place across the top, more ritual than pragmatic. These stories are supposedly told while the billy is suspended over the fire at night, at the end of a tramp. (Also used in want of other things, for cooking) blackfellow (also, blackman): condescending ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Synagogue at which he was cantor. Ah, such a voice he had—a voice of tears and thunder—when he prayed it was like a wounded soul beating at the gates of Heaven—but he sang even more beautifully in the ritual of home, and how we were looking forward to his hymns at the Passover table—— [He breaks down. The BARON has gradually turned round under the spell of DAVID'S story and now listens hypnotised.] I was playing my cracked little fiddle. Little ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... liberties under the noses of the garrisons of Napoleon, so Ben Cameron had met the leaders of his race in Nashville, Tennessee, within the picket lines of thirty-five thousand hostile troops, and in the ruins of an old homestead discussed and adopted the ritual of the Invisible Empire. ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... but this is the only one of which we have any account by an eye-witness. Of the famous Lupercalia in February, and some other festivals which neither died out altogether nor were converted into ludi, we only know the ritual, and cannot tell whether they were ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... only religion I know that can expose the mysteries of its ritual to the vulgar gaze and yet retain the devotion of its worshippers. There is nothing a British audience so loves as to be taken behind the scenes and shown how it is done—or not done; and then it will attend the next play and go on adoring with the blindest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... recognized the Winnebagos, clad in bathing suits and bathing caps, and covered with their ponchos, calmly having their Ceremonial Meeting in the pouring rain. The song over, they sat down in a circle and went through their ritual with the water streaming over their firelit faces. A play was enacted, which he made out to be a pantomime presentation of "Cinderella," and he recognized Nyoda in the guise of the fairy godmother. Hinpoha was the prince and Migwan Cinderella. In ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... so the congregation departeth."[167] Such are its few and simple directions for the ordinary form of public worship; and as if even these might fail to beget in the minds of some of the old priests a sense of their freedom from minute restrictions and a burdensome ritual, it is added: "It shall not be necessarie for the minister daylie to repeat all these things before mentioned; but, beginning with some maner of confession, to proceede to the sermon, which ended, he either useth the prayer for all estates before mentioned, ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... to die the death of a felon, he knew that the rites of sepulture, according to the forms of his denomination, would be denied to his remains. The aged sufferer, it is related, read his own funeral service while on the scaffold. Solemn, sublime, and affecting as are passages of this portion of the ritual of the Church, surely it was never performed under circumstances so well suited to impress with awe and tenderness as when uttered by the calumniated, oppressed, and dying old man. Baxter had been tried for sedition, on the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... get. This was the doctrine taught by Buddha Sakyanuni, a philosopher opposed to every form of religion, but who is the reputed founder of the most numerous sect now on the globe. He sought to free the minds of his day from the burden of the Brahmanic ritual, by cultivating a frame of mind beyond desire or admiration, and hence beyond the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... head. I am standing before the altar—the altar smothered in flowers. The old vicar who christened me is to marry me. I have declined the intervention of all strange bishops and curates whatsoever. He is a clergyman of the old school, and spares us not a word of the ritual. ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Hilda had definitely renounced being. And there stood Hilda, immature, graceless, harsh, inelegant, dowdy, holding the letter between her inky fingers, in the midst of all that hard masculine mess,—and a part of it, the blindly devoted subaltern, who could expect none of the ritual of homage given to women, who must sit and work and stand and strain and say 'yes,' and pretend stiffly that she was a sound, serviceable, thick-skinned imitation man among men! If Hilda had been a valkyrie or a saint she might have felt no envy and no pang. But ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... command, by which ancient life was reproduced, to a democracy of comradeship in which it is aimed to make each generation improve upon its predecessor. In the church, as it has moved from the family ritual at the domestic fireside to the self-chosen altar of each worshipper in the world's cathedrals, the reactionaries have held on to "the faith once delivered to the saints" and the progressive minds have moved to some new prophecy of the truth ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Paul refer to the ceremonial of the Jewish ritual as the law of Moses? It must be answered that Paul was a Jew. He was familiar with the Jewish scriptures. He had read the following passages and believed them, and was grounded in the truth which they declare, that "by the hand of Moses" they were ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... more so than they were accustomed to at Beaulieu. Ambrose had his book of devotions, supplied by the good monks who had brought him up, and old Mrs. Headley carried something of the same kind; but these did not necessarily follow the ritual, and neither quiet nor attention was regarded as requisite in "hearing mass." Dennet, unchecked, was exchanging flowers from her Sunday posy with another little girl, and with hooded fingers carrying on in all innocence the satirical pantomime of Father Francis and Sister Catharine; ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a secret order or fraternity, with a ritual similar to other fraternal orders, its membership is open to any one of good character, and the local granges frequently hold "open" meetings to which all the people of the community are invited. The strength of the Grange ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and her husband's tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under the denomination of 'barbarous,' to say of the invoking supplications of the service, that they were—she had been heard to state it more or less publicly and repeatedly—suitable to abject ministers and throngs at the court of an Indian rajah, that he did not hesitate ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... him. To the last he was the ruler of the lil-mes, "the ghosts" and "demons" who dwelt in the air and the waste places of the earth, as well as in the abode of death and darkness that lay beneath it. His priests preserved their old Shamanistic character; the ritual they celebrated was one of spells and incantations, of magical rites and ceremonies. Nippur was the source and centre of one of the two great streams of religious thought and culture which ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... time, poor creature, is short. I will not waste it. Your envoy and his party will be here presently. The consultation of the oracle is arranged for them, and will take place according to the prescribed ritual. You can wait here until they come [she turns ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... by some form of wireless was proclaimed to those who cared to listen, and on it all formed their own judgments. In the same way poems and even romances were repeated, as in Homer's day or in the time of the Norse sagas, by word of mouth. None of their secret knowledge was written down. Like the ritual of Freemasonry it was ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... previous preparation, as to which good men entertain different opinions, some holding that it is irreverent to partake of that ordinance without considerable premeditation; others, that whoever is a sincere Christian, and in a proper frame of mind to discharge any other ritual duty of our religion, may, without scruple, discharge this most solemn one. A middle notion I believe to be the just one, which is, that communicants need not think a long train of preparatory forms indispensibly necessary; but neither should they rashly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... solemn order and ritual was observed in such appeals, when the fight was to the death. The combatants confessed, and received, what to one was probably his last Communion; and thus avowing in the most solemn way their innocence before God and man, ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... religion. Lamaism. "A corrupted form of Buddhism prevailing in Tibet and Mongolia, which combines the ethical and metaphysical ideas of Buddhism with an organized hierarchy under two semi-political sovereign pontiffs, an elaborate ritual, and the worship of a host of ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... kept on saying that 'by-and-by' they would make an end of their wild ritual, and throw down their enclosures, and at the same time they thronged to talk to him at the Mission station, and built a shed to serve ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... incredible strength, and of views of a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were apt to find utterance after his attendance upon the ministrations of the Vicar, an estimable man with inclinations towards a picturesque ritual, which he gallantly kept down as far as he could out of deference to ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... are making progress, and wherever they spread, the necessity of some practical application of the precepts of Christ, in lieu of the mummeries of a worn-out ritual, cannot fail to be felt. The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of these subjects,—such as is animated by the hope of prevention. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... eclipse of the sun or moon?' (A.) 'Two one-bow prayers, without call to prayer or repetition thereof by the devotee, who shall make in each two standings up and two inclinations and two prostrations, then sit up and testify and salute.' (Q.) 'What is the ritual of prayer for rain?' (A.) 'Two one-bow prayers, without call to prayer or repetition; then shall the devotee make the profession and salute. Moreover [the Imam] shall deliver an exhortation and (in place of the magnification, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... pretty. But when Stroeve spoke of Chardin it was not without reason, and she reminded me curiously of that pleasant housewife in her mob-cap and apron whom the great painter has immortalised. I could imagine her sedately busy among her pots and pans, making a ritual of her household duties, so that they acquired a moral significance; I did not suppose that she was clever or could ever be amusing, but there was something in her grave intentness which excited my interest. Her ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... spits: this in 1903. In the ceremony of naming Roman children spittle had its part to play: it was customary for the nurse to touch the lips and forehead of the child with spittle. The Catholic priest's ritual, which prescribes that the ears and nostrils of the infant or neophyte, as the case may be, shall be touched with spittle, comes, in all probability from Mark, vii, 33, 34, viii, 23, and John, ix, 6, which, in turn are probably derived from a ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... early days of its organisation. It was during the feudal epoch the only power that made for civilised development. All education was ecclesiastical; all the arts were in the service of the Church. It had, during the Dark Ages, won the Barbarians to its fold by the gorgeous solemnity of its ritual; and, to protect itself against secular interference, it had declared the spiritual power to be independent of the temporal—the first great assertion, in the history of European civilisation, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... to be generally unable either to read or write the language of the country that gave them birth. They confine themselves to a bastard or vulgar Hebrew, which has little analogy to the original. They observe the particular ritual of the German Synagogue, and also include the Polish, Russian, and Turkish Jews established in London. With the exception of a few wealthy individuals, and as many families who are in trade on the Royal Exchange, they are in general a very indigent ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... creatures, and is the kingly dower of every human soul. She was not born with the Puritans, nor did she die with them. In no age or land, among no sect or people, has she been without her priesthood, her altar, her ritual, her heart worship. Nor is she to blame for the wrongs and atrocities committed in her name. The ideas and principles the Puritans were ordained to carry out and embody in a great political structure were of the noblest, rarest, most enduring and beneficent; the faults that marred ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was lost; it was thought a triumph when the yet older hieroglyphics of Egypt were compelled to give up their messages, and the world hoped that we should know the secrets of life. That hope was disappointed; there was nothing in the records but superstition and useless ritual. But here we go back to the beginning; the antiquity of Egypt is nothing to the age of these signs—they date from unfathomable time. In them the sun has written his commands, and the wind inscribed deep thought. They were before superstition ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... filtered its chastened way, a pensive organist, learned to draw grave litanies from the boughs and reverently voice the air of sanctity. The fresh familiar scent hung for a smokeless incense, breathing high ritual and redolent of pious mystery. No circumstance of worship was unobserved. With one consent birds, beasts and insects made not a sound. The precious pall of silence lay like a phantom cloud, unruffled. Nature was ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... held out in the pomp of Rome—the glory of her kingdom. I was taken to the churches on solemn occasions—days of fete and state; I was shown the Papal ritual and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... erection of barriers against wholesale and indiscriminate reproduction. Thus it came about that under the old dispensation, which is now for ever passing away, to have as many children as possible and to have them as often as possible—provided certain ritual prescriptions were fulfilled—seemed to be a religious, moral, natural, scientific, and ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... principally through the introduction of old fellow students, for during my last years at the university there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods. The third of these cases was that of the Musgrave Ritual, and it is to the interest which was aroused by that singular chain of events, and the large issues which proved to be at stake, that I trace my first stride towards the position ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... her burrows, each isolated from the rest. Her prey is an adult, medium-sized Acridian (Locust or Grasshopper.—Translator's Note.), such as the White-banded Sphex pursues. The captive of the one would not be despised by the other. Gripped by the antennae, according to the ritual of the Sphex, the victim is trailed along on foot and laid beside the nest, with the head pointing towards the opening. The pit, prepared in advance, is closed for the time being with a tiny flagstone and some bits of gravel, in order to avoid either the invasion of a passer-by ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... their tribe. Dionysus was, of all the various Kouroi, the one most widely connected with resurrection ideas, and the Satyrs are his attendant daemons, who dance magic dances at the Return to Life of Semele or Persephone. And Heracles himself, in certain of his ritual aspects, has similar functions. See J.E. Harrison, Themis, pp. 422 f. and 365 ff., or my Four Stages of Greek Religion, pp. 46 f. This tradition explains, to start with, what Heracles—and this particular sort of revelling Heracles—has to do ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... who can find his way Among the many altars? Who can call Out perfect peace from any ritual, Or shelter find ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... caprice, who sang through all those mouths of brass. Now that spirit seemed to have departed; the cathedral seemed gloomy, and gladly remained silent; festivals and funerals had the simple peal, dry and bare, demanded by the ritual, nothing more. Of the double noise which constitutes a church, the organ within, the bell without, the organ alone remained. One would have said that there was no longer a musician in the belfry. Quasimodo was always there, nevertheless; what, then, had ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... with surrounding nations; living in a separate quarter; marrying among themselves; strengthened and disciplined in the struggle of life by enormous difficulties and by the constant elimination through persecution of the weaker elements. The other is the very elaborate Jewish ritual extending to all departments of life, which has stamped upon them an intensely ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him, on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have been the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have done. He was going toward the ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... that of the Church. He baptizes all the children, and teaches them the Catechism. All, without exception, attend the Church service, and the chanting is creditably performed by them, in the opinion of their owner. Ninety of them are communicants, marriages are celebrated according to the Church ritual, and the state of morals is satisfactory. Twenty infants had been baptized by the bishop just before his departure from home, and he had left his whole estate, his keys, &c., in the sole charge of one of his slaves, without the slightest apprehension of loss or damage. In judging of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Mysteries had preserved the ritual and ceremonies that accorded with the simplicity of the earliest ages, and the manners of the first men. The rules of Pythagoras were followed there. Like the Egyptians, who held wool unclean, they buried no Initiate in woolen garments. They abstained from ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Meliassour. The country here indicated is obviously the Carnatic, or kingdom of Arcot of modern times, from the circumstance of containing the shrine of St Thomas. The idols mentioned by Oderic, as filling the church of St Thomas, were probably Nestorian images; not sanctioned by the Roman ritual.—E. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... loose his shoes from off his feet, for he was to mourn over the decline of the study of the Torah, (18) and bare feet are a sign of mourning. The angel reproached Joshua in particular with having allowed the preparations for war to interfere with the study of the Torah and with the ritual service. Neglect of the latter might be a venial sin, but neglect of the former is worthy of condign punishment. (19) At the same time the angel assured Joshua that he had come to aid him, and he entreated Joshua not to draw back from him, like Moses, who had refused the good offices ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Japanese Buddhism is strongly differentiated from the continental forms of that religion.[820] The seventeenth century Catholicism of the Jesuits, before it was hospitably received, had to be adapted to Japanese standards of duty and ritual. Modern Japanese converts to Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a national version of the new faith.[821] But all the while, Japanese religion has experienced no ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... rediscovered a home truth the American people have never forgotten: the government is too big and spends too much. And I call on Congress to adopt a measure that will help put an end to the annual ritual of filling the budget with pork-barrel appropriations. Every year, the press has a field day making fun of outrageous examples, a Lawrence Welk Museum, a research grant for Belgian Endive. We all know how these things get into the budget, and maybe you need someone to help you say no. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... just and perfect, to depart to his everlasting habitation in Osiris. Make it known that this god is dead, and that I rule alone in Egypt. Send hither the priest of Osiris, that he may repeat the Ritual of Departing, and you, ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... the hills, the trees, the rivers, the darting birds, the scuttering insects, the little soft populations of the grass—all these are playing with you. They move one to another in delicate responsive measures, now violent, now gentle, now in conflict, now in peace; yet ever weaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedient to the music of that invisible Choragus whom Boehme and Plotinus knew. What is that great wind which blows without, in continuous and ineffable harmonies? Part of you, practical man. There is but one music in the world: and to it you contribute perpetually, whether ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the religious instruction given in Elementary Schools. Of the two who worked around my immediate neighbourhood, one was a young priest of the Church of England, a medievalist with an ardent passion for ritual; the other a gentle Congregational minister, a mere holy and humble man of heart. They became great friends in the course of these expeditions, and they brought back this report—'It is positively wicked to let these children ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... taking Betty by the hand, led her directly to him. There was no need of book to prompt the silver-haired old pastor. He had joined too many lives in the course of his long ministry, not to know every word of the solemn ritual. ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... element is spirituality. In and around Copley Square in Boston, within the radius of one block, are several denominations whose order of worship varies, the one from another. The Baptist believes in immersion as the outer sign of the inner newness of life; the Episcopalian holds dear his ritual; the Unitarian and the Presbyterian, and perhaps a half-dozen other sects in close proximity (which express the various forms of what they call "new thought"), each and all exist and have their being by virtue of the one essential faith held in common by all,—the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... within, for the nave was lofty with noble pillars on each side. I stood during the whole of the service as did many others, for the congregation was so great that it was impossible to accommodate all with seats. The ritual was performed in a very satisfactory manner, and was followed by an excellent sermon. I am ashamed to say that have forgot the text, but I remember a good deal of the discourse. The preacher said amongst other thing that the Gospel was not preached in vain, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... a few kindly words, less a priest than a courteous host welcoming his guests. He seemed not to notice Jonah's deformity. But, as he read the service, he was the priest again, solemn and austere, standing at the gates of Life and Death. He followed the ritual with scrupulous detail, scorning to give short measure to the poor. In the vestry they signed their names with tremendous effort, holding the pen as if it were a prop. Mrs Yabsley, being no scholar, made a mark. The Canon left them with an apology, ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... in which the psalmist reached this pure faith in God and in His people. A factor in the process was distaste for the ugly rites of idolatry—"Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer." Idolatry always develops a loathsome ritual. Sometimes it is cruel and sometimes it is horribly unclean, but it always debases the worshiper's mind, confuses his conscience, and hampers his freedom and energy by the burdensome ceremonies it imposes upon them. ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... Now a solemn ritual began. Breaking off a bit of the putty, Mrs. Pawket welded it on the jar near the other protuberances; while the putty was soft she fixed in it the screw, arranging that implement by a method best calculated to display its screw characteristics. Then Mrs. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... able to do so, had knelt upon the seats, whilst the others joined their hands, or repeatedly made the sign of the cross; and when the murmured prayers were followed by the Litanies of the ritual, every voice rose, an ardent desire for the remission of the man's sins and for his physical and spiritual cure winging its flight heavenward with each successive Kyrie eleison. Might his whole life, of which they knew nought, be forgiven him; might ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... appointed ritual to the dessert. Came the wine and Snagsby placed the cigars and a little silver lamp ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... appropriate colour worn. In spring, summer, autumn, and winter there were the seasonal sacrifices at the appropriate altars. Taoism and Buddhism had their temples, monasteries, priests, sacrifices, and ritual; and there were village and wayside temples and shrines to ancestors, the gods of thunder, rain, wind, grain, agriculture, and many others. Now encouraged, now tolerated, now persecuted, the ecclesiastical personnel and structure ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... shave before early parade. Sometimes I was of that virtuous band, and sometimes I wasn't; but, either way, I hated the alarm-clock at 5.15,—though not so virulently as did those members of the hut who never by any chance dreamt of rising until five to six. These gentry had reduced the ritual of dressing, and of rolling up their bedding, to a speed at which it might almost be compared to expert juggling: the quickness of the hand deceived the eye. At five minutes to six you would see the juggler asleep on his pillow, ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... this Eteocles, it is resolved To lay him on his earth-bed, in this soil, Not without care and kindly sepulture. For why? he hated those who hated us, And, with all duties blamelessly performed Unto the sacred ritual of his sires, He met such end as gains our city's grace,— With auspices that do ennoble death. Such words I have in charge to speak of him: But of his brother Polynices, this— Be he cast out unburied, for the dogs To rend and ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... gentle inspiration, as if all this was part of some ritual that he was repeating by heart. Quiet, almost timid as he looked, Vera knew from past experience that no efforts of hers could turn him from his intention. That he would do anything for a Le Fenu she knew full well, and all this in return for some ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... and structure. To these I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of their divine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius in these kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted without sacrilege. But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, I suffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind about his style, which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the church to interfere unwarrantedly in what was not its affair. Religion had calmly usurped this, the most potent of the motives of humanity; or, rather, it had fastened to it the ludicrous train of ritual. That laughable idea that God had a separate scrutinizing eye, like the eye of a parrot, on ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Sotumpa wrote of the strength of the immaculate purity in tea which defied corruption as a truly virtuous man. Among the Buddhists, the southern Zen sect, which incorporated so much of Taoist doctrines, formulated an elaborate ritual of tea. The monks gathered before the image of Bodhi Dharma and drank tea out of a single bowl with the profound formality of a holy sacrament. It was this Zen ritual which finally developed into the Tea-ceremony of Japan in the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... processes has been sometimes attended by the result that the sound of the words has been carefully preserved and that the meaning of them has either perished wholly, or is only doubtfully recovered by the efforts of modern philology. The verses have been repeated as a chant or part of a ritual, but they have had no relation to ordinary life or speech. (2) The invention of writing again is commonly attributed to a particular epoch, and we are apt to think that such an inestimable gift would have immediately ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... cannot suppose that this elaborate ritual, with its use of public and audible prayer, of public exhortation or sermon, and other Caucasian features, was practiced before comparatively modern times, there is no doubt that it was conscientiously believed in by its members, and for a time regarded with reverence by the people. But at a later ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... notice the innuendo. "Yes, what is gone is gone. Graves are idolatry. Gravestones are ghostly. It is people without imagination who need these things, together with crape and black-edged paper. It is all barbaric ritual. I know you think I am callous, but I cannot help that. For myself, I wish the earth close about me, and level green grass above me, and no one knowing of the place; or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the other songs, proverbial rhymes, and "nominies" which find a place among the traditional poems in this collection. The mumming-songs, the boisterous "Ridin' t' stang" verses, and all the snatches of folk-song which are, associated with the festive ritual of the circling year either carry their own explanation with them or have been elucidated by those who have written on the subject of Yorkshire customs and folklore. I heartily commend to the reader's notice the three songs entitled "The Bridal Bands," "The ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... suns rose and suns set; and it was clear that the monks did not mean to let us leave their precincts in a hurry. Lady Meadowcroft, having recovered by this time from her first fright, began to grow bored. The Buddhists' ritual ceased to interest her. To vary the monotony, I hit upon an expedient for killing time till our too pressing hosts saw fit to let us depart. They were fond of religious processions of the most protracted sort—dances before the altar, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... of cooperation with dominance on the one hand, and exclusiveness on the other. The central fact is the community, which seeks some common end in ritual, or in beneficent activity. But at an early period leaders became invested, or invested themselves, with a sanctity which led to dominance. Not the power of force, but that of mystery and the invisible raised the priest above the level of the many. And, on another side, competition ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts
... was simply a carrying out of this way of life—and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one's self "divine," "blessed," "evangelical," a "child of God." Not by "repentance," ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Western or Southern ears. We can easily conceive of a peculiar style of music being produced from the bosom of the Greek Church. Those who have heard the melancholy and touching, half-barbaric music usually employed in its ritual, will not be surprised that out of it there should arise a quite new ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... intervention of a favorite or fashionable minister in all the exercises of religion, identifies too much the sacred subject itself with the individual who presides over it; while theatrical exhibitions of extemporaneous oratory and flights of fancy, make the ordinary ritual of public worship, or the quiet practice of private devotion, seem tame and trivial. The tendency of the evil is, that the direct access to a communion with above is barred against the deluded and dependent devotee, much in the same manner ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... persecuted Episcopalian remnant, quarrelling over details of ritual called "the Usages," James vainly recommended "forbearance in love." Lockhart, disgusted with the clergy, and siding with Clementina against her husband, believed that some of the wrangling churchmen betrayed the channel of his communications with ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... of the Spirit. We sometimes think of the disciples waiting for an indefinite period in that upper room for the fulfillment of the promise of the Father; but the time had been fixed not only with God in eternity, but in the calendar of the Hebrew ritual upon earth. They tarried in prayer for ten days, simply because after the forty days of the Lord's sojourn on earth subsequent to his resurrection, ten days remained of the ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... singing of the name of god as infinitely superior to barren system without faith." Chaitanya, however, as the Babu points out, was not the originator of this theory, but appears to have borrowed it from his neighbour Adwaita Acharjya, whose custom it was, after performing his daily ritual, to go to the banks of the Ganges and call aloud for the coming of the god who should substitute love and faith for mere rites and ceremonies. This custom is still adhered to by Vaish.navas. The Charitamrita veils the priority of Adwaita adroitly by stating that it ...
— Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal • John Beames
... placed over his forehead and face the blue veil prescribed by the ritual. He must have been completely famished not to have performed this indispensable formality sooner. There was nothing visible now but the eyes, watching us with a light that ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... desirous not to exaggerate; but I would like to state that I was well impressed by my experience of your ritual—if that is the correct term. I seemed to find what I had not found elsewhere. If I may speak quite openly, I would say it appeared to me there wasn't an ounce of humbug ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... they had yet to have first-hand experience with the plague. But now nothing seemed quite real to Doc, even when they locked him into the big Northport jail. The whole ritual of the Lobbies seemed like a fantasy after ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... priest, who was shivering with cold, and understood little of this dark talk, began to mumble his ritual, skipping those parts of it which he could not remember. So another grain was planted in the cornfields of death and immortality, though when and where it should grow and what it should bear he neither knew nor cared, who wished ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... despising preaching. They rely partly on what they call 'definite Catholic teaching,' including frequent exhortations to the practice of confession; and partly on appeals to the eye, by symbolic ritual and elaborate ceremonial. Their more ornate services are often admirably performed from a spectacular point of view, and are far superior to most Roman Catholic functions in reverence, beauty, and good taste. The extreme section of the party is contemptuously lawless, not only ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Jewish philosopher had gone to a neighboring town, where an important question of ritual was to be decided. Thanks to his learning, the question was settled sooner than he had expected, and instead of returning the next morning, as he had intended, he came back the same evening with a friend, who was no less learned than himself. He got out of the carriage at his friend's house, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant |
